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Some things to consider:

• Local elections and proposals...
  • ...make a huge impact to people's lives
  • ...tend have quicker impacts
  • ...are far more heavily influenced by a single vote
  • ...can jump-start a leftist politician (or a policy position), getting them ready for state or national campaigns down the road
• Judges really friggin matter, and they aren't categorized by party, so they're a prime section for a well-informed voter to make a difference
• All elections cost money to win
  • Even in deeply red or deeply blue states
  • If the GOP lead shrinks from 20% to 15%, that will translate to more money the GOP has to spend next time around or else risk further slipping into single digits and making a new battleground state
  • Momentum really helps keep costs low. It doesn't seem like slipping from 20% to 15% should make the GOP panic, but it would
  • Voter turnout is lower in more deeply red/blue states, meaning your vote actually counts more in closing the gap
• Getting your preferred candidate in office is not the only measure of electoral success
  • Even candidates that get absolutely destroyed on election day can still shift the local or national conversation
  • Candidates that perform better than pollsters expected can influence future candidates to pay more attention to the issues that brought out those extra voters
• There aren't just voters staying home until there's a candidate worth voting for -- there are also good candidates who are staying home until there are enough voters to support them
• Milton Friedman, bastard that he was, was right about this:

  Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.

  • We want leftist ideas to already be lying around at the moment they are needed. We can't wait until after the crisis has already occurred to start organizing and showing up. It'll be too late.
  • The Patriot Act was 131 pages, signed into law 45 days after 9/11. That wasn't a reaction to 9/11, starting from scratch. Someone had a wishlist already, and they had a PowerPoint deck ready to go on September 12th full of proposals that Congress had already seen 100 times but was never ready to vote on before.

You’re right, your one vote won’t change anything, but you could organize around a shared need in your community, and make a significant impact there. That’s the thing, politics isn’t just voting. It’s all the little things that make up the political aspects of our lives.

I don’t think it’s healthy to expect everyone to be tuned in and turned on all the time. Nor do I think that watching the news regularly is a way to stay up to date. Rather, it’s just a way of inundating oneself with the perspectives of the elite. The best politics are in real life, in our every day situations.

What helps me is to build my frameworks and models of the system. As I gain understanding of the structures underlying our society, I can more easily identify and understand the intentions and desires of various groups around me. When I see something on the news, when I watch the news, I don’t just read what is written and accept or deny it as fact. I think, “Who’s material interests are served by this?”. I think, “has the conclusion been appropriately interrogated, and if not, what needs to be done to reach a meaningful understanding?” I will research the author of the article and the owners of the media in question, to determine where their biases will lie, because all of us are inherently biased in one way or another.

With a strong framework, traversing the media landscape is significantly less overwhelming, and making political change becomes a possibility when we stop expecting to elect or vote someone in who will change it, and create alternative structures that change it without reliance upon the paternalism of the state to save us. Create the structures that can create the change you need first, use them to make the changes, and let the government play catch up to you, instead of always begging for scraps from them.