They don't seem to understand that the Israel/Palestine situation is not on the ballot this November; does anyone actually think Trump would oppose Israel? Even if he personally wanted to, his supporters are all nominal Christians who would turn on him in an instant if he suddenly stopped supporting God's Chosen People.

The even bigger picture is the trend of things getting progressivelly worse even when Democrats are at the helm.

For example, it was Clinton that reppealed the Glass-Steagal Act which in turn led to hyperfinancialization and the 2008 Crash and it was Obama who chose to then save Asset owners in general (i.e. the Wealthy), unconditionally and on the backs of everybody else, leading to the slowest recovery from a Crash ever and all the imballances of the US Economy at the moment which as manifesting themselves as a complete total collapse in Social Mobility and rise of Inequality and Poverty.

Clearly electing Democrats doesn't improve things either.

The problem is of course that the US is not a Democracy (hence how there are only 2 carefully selected real options, which in this election are so bad that they're both hard Genocide supporters) so merelly voting for a President won't solve anything, and the only solution probably involves levels of political activism Americans aren't used to (one might even say they've been conditioned against it) such as General Strikes.

It's always going to be this way. Every election will be an emergency. Every election in my lifetime has been. We're in an abusive relationship and we need to get out of it. We need to break the duopoly. We need sane polling methods. But, no. Just like they keep us divided they're keeping us distracted.

If you want to understand, I can explain fairly simply.

Consider this thought experiment. We are getting $100 to split, but only if they can agree on how to split it: I get to make an offer, then you choose whether to accept. If you announce that you'll accept whatever deal so long as accepting is better than the alternative - that is, that you'll act "rationally" - then the rational thing for me to do is to offer you only $1, while I get $99. Researchers have actually tested this game in real life, however, and it generally doesn't play out that way. Why? Because the numbers don't tell the whole story of what you're giving up by accepting a bad deal. Once you've demonstrated that you'll accept a deal like that, then you're communicating something about your behavior for all future deals. It may be rational in the context of a closed experiment, but for the general case, our minds know better than what may appear "rational" at first glance. If you tell me, "I will refuse anything less than $30," then you are openly declaring that you intend to behave "irrationally" and trying to convince me that you will - and it would most likely produce better results than behaving "rationally."

The moment that you say, "My only condition for voting for the democrats is that they be better than the republicans, who are unimaginably horrible," you have sacrificed every ounce of bargaining power that you could've wielded. So the real calculation is not "Who's better between Trump and Biden," but rather, is the difference between Trump and Biden worth sacrificing all my bargaining power?" And for me, the fact that Biden is supporting genocide makes that decision very easy and straightforward. I'd rather at least try to leverage what power I have against genocide altogether, rather than supporting the "lesser genocide." If I cannot set even something like genocide as a red line, then I am very clearly communicating to politicians that they can count on my vote no matter what they do, and they have no reason to ever consider my political priorities.

So, say you were in a swing state, right? Then it might make sense to vote for biden. Or, a state where your votes are tallied earlier in the process, since a larger victory earlier in the process has an effect on those votes later on. Or, a state where your votes are disproportionately of more weight, maybe so long as you also live in a swing state. Those are the contexts in which it might actually make sense to vote for biden, because those are the contexts more broadly in which voting actually matters.

But, say you don't conform to those criteria, say you live in a highly populous state, like, say, california, new york, maybe texas. These are states where they've already pre-committed themselves to one candidate over the other, and regardless of like, screeching about like, "oh well all votes count everything has an impact", nothing's realistically gonna change in those states unless some major cultural shifts and maybe even demographic shifts took place. You'd pretty much be an idiot to believe otherwise, right, to believe, oh, well, this time, this time california's gonna vote red. Especially with a candidate like trump. Maybe if somebody like bernie suddenly became a republican or something, that might cause a decent amount of upset, but without a larger shift taking place there basically beyond your control, not much is gonna happen. The race has already been called for you, and been called for those states ahead of time. Maybe egg will be on my face if california votes red this election, but somehow I just don't think that's gonna happen.

In those cases, in those particular contexts, where your vote matters doesn't really matter, it actually makes more sense, in my mind, to vote for the candidate you actually believe in. Even if that ends up being no candidate at all, which, admittedly, I do find pretty unlikely. Like, you have nothing to lose or gain really either way, so the best thing you can do in my mind is just clearly signal what your actual priorities are, and then hopefully someone looks at the poles and changes tactics because of it. To either appeal to your bloc more, or say, the DSA gets more funding because of increased voter turnout, or whatever.

I have never heard anyone really provide a legitimate counterargument to this set of tactics, because I don't think you really can. It's just an elaboration on strategic voting with more specifics than "vote blue no matter who" as sort of a blanket, contextually devoid statement that doesn't make sense for a bunch of different scenarios. And strategic voting is what people are already doing when they're trying to do a compromise vote for one of the two main parties in a FPTP two party system. That's already a form of strategic voting, I'm just elaborating on it, instead of making a generalized party line heuristic that doesn't make sense inm frankly, most cases, for most people that you're gonna be talking to.