#and schoolboard elections probably effect your life more immediately than any other

[splodey-goat]

This is all correct but I'm always sick of seeing it so if I may add 2 caveats

1: Your vote for president only counts like like 6 states (and your vote for congresspersons in not significantly more) so on behalf of everyone in every solid red state ever if you condescend to me for writing in a joke vote one more time you deserve to have your kidneys fail.

2: If the democrats lose the easiest lay-up election in history and you waste one molecule of oxygen blaming moral abstainers instead of the apparatus that cares about getting to continue it's genocides more than beating fascists at home then you get no highground to preach from both retroactively and in all arguments in the future. People KNOW what a difference their political leaders make, and they're making that decision anyway, to imply otherwise is to treat the average person as too stupid to make their own ethical and political decisions.

Voting is only a tactic. Not voting and threatening to withhold your vote is also a tactic. To continually press voting as a civic duty and an all-important part of political life is to perpetuate the myth that American "democracy" is set up to actually empower the average person and/or in any way a meaningful driver of change both of which are demonstrably untrue. Take that next step on your journey, you're disillusioned with the government stop being taken in by the means that government perpetuates itself.