I have read on this board some very persuasive argumentation that dismisses the current election as irrelevant. I agree whole heartedly with this assessment. Here is Caitlin Johnstone weighing in this same idea:

Democrats Don’t Care If You Vote For Them And Don’t Care If They Lose
By Caitlin Johnstone on September 10, 2024

Now that the election is closer and the Democrats have switched out Biden for Harris, I feel like I should reiterate my position that you’re not actually punishing the Democrats if you refuse to vote for them in November. I often see people talking about making the Democratic Party pay a price for Gaza and for ignoring calls from progressives to end the genocide, but it doesn’t actually work that way. They don’t care.

They don’t care if you don’t vote for them. They don’t care if they lose. Their political careers will be fine either way.

It’s entirely okay and legitimate to not vote for Democrats, but don’t let that act dupe you into thinking your vote matters. It doesn’t matter how you vote, and it doesn’t matter how you don’t vote. The US power structure is set up to be completely unaffected by voters. Acting like you could teach the Democrats a lesson by refusing to vote for them only feeds into the illusion that voting matters inside a power structure that has been deemed too important to be left to the hands of the voters.

There’s a viral tweet from Glenn Greenwald going around that says “The US has no functional president and has not had one for months, and it’s barely noticeable and barely matters because there’s a permanent unelected machine that runs the government.”

Greenwald is correct. Nobody with any real power cares all that much who the president is. The president doesn’t even need to have a functioning brain. This whole show is being run by people who don’t ultimately care all that much whether Democrats or Republicans are in office, including the party leadership of the Democrats and the Republicans.

You think Democrats have enjoyed playing the face of the evil empire these last few years? You think they’ve enjoyed having their political rallies interrupted by anti-genocide protesters and having their feel-good progressive image completely discredited in front of everyone? They’d all be having a lot more fun if the terrible things being perpetrated by the Biden administration were being done by Trump instead, so they could go back to playing the good guys.

They’re happy to lose, which is why they’re acting like they’re happy to lose. They’re doing absolutely nothing to appeal to progressives or energize their base. They’re not articulating any real policies besides more of the same. They’re not changing anything about any of the stuff that makes normal people hate Democrats in the year 2024, and if they lose again in November they will continue to not change anything.

Americans don’t live in the kind of country where votes matter. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is. Vote or don’t vote however you want, but don’t make the mistake of believing you’ll be teaching the Democrats any kind of lesson that they will actually learn by doing so.

If real change comes to the United States, it won’t be because of how any Americans chose to vote or not vote in any of their fake elections. There are no solutions to these problems in electoral politics. Other solutions are needed.

The far more pertinent question it seems to me is what if any American Election was ever important?

In 1972, Richard Nixon trounced peace candidate George McGovern. And in 1984, Ronald Reagan won a very similar landslide over Walter Mondale. The dems got almost skunked in the Electoral College both times as the GOP incumbents each won close to 60% of the popular vote. Although Mondale was a bit of a mealy mouth, both midwestern Dem candidates were regarded as "liberals" -- and their disastrous failures at the ballot box cemented the conventional wisdom of the era -- that Americans were overwhelmingly "conservative."

Since then, nobody calling themself "liberal" has gotten the Dem nomination, although the GOP and Fox news call them all liberals. The national election success of the Dems after Bush has coincided with a dramatic revision in the rhetoric of political leaders that has not included a rehabilitation of the word, liberal.

We can say the voters were tricked and manipulated into voting against their own economic interest, but the bottom line was that our citizenry voted in 1972 overwhelmingly in favor of Empire -- the only time the question was posed in the post WWII era. Twelve years later, Reagan's re-election ratified the decision.

So here we are with two parties competing to be more like Nixon and Reagan. As a people, we asked for this.