anon who asked me to post a poll, I'm not going to do that because I don't agree with the framing of the question. I will share some thoughts on the topic though
even before trump was elected for this term, the US was rife with institutional racism; bans on gender affirming care and other anti trans laws had been enacted in a bunch of states; and abortion rights had just been stripped under a democratic president, rather than codified into law. kamala intended to leave gender affirming care up to states to decide, declared an intention to be harsher on immigration than trump, and there's no reason to believe that her administration would have codified abortion where her predecessors didn't, after they promised to. using the efforts of oppressed groups in expanding democratic participation as a cudgel in your question, to try and shame people into choosing one answer, seems like a cheap ploy given all that, whether you intended it or not
that aside, I think all people are entitled to complain about the state of the US. more people voting isn't a panacea that would have made the US a wonderful place to live for most people. regardless of whether the dems were elected or not, you'd still have crappy labour laws rn, mass incarceration, institutional racism, a lack of affordable healthcare for millions of people, a crackdown on immigration, and the list goes on
y'all don't actually have a popular democracy to protect either. like in all capitalist countries, your multi party democracy is a sham because you only get to select between candidates and policies that are pre approved by the big donors, ie the capitalist class. there's a study from Princeton [2] that demonstrated just how little US voters wishes impact policy:
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.
voting alone isn't likely to improve the state of the US for its working masses, as no party that represents ordinary working and marginalized people is going to get elected en mass and build a new system that benefits our class. aside from the liberal democratic system being stacked against that, the US has a big history of suppressing communist, ie workers movements. likewise, there's no mass workers' movement threatening the system itself, which could force whatever concessions it can from the dying empire
refusing to vote for a party that was actively participating in a genocide is the bare minimum you'd expect from people who respect the lives of ordinary people worldwide. personally I think voting for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) where possible would have been the best option, not because they stood any chance of winning but because it was a chance for the proletariat (those who must work for others for a wage in order to live) to publicly measure its strength and bring attention to our aims. but sitting this one out wasn't a terrible option by any means
