You say "it's the electoral college" but what does that functionally mean?
Here in the UK the election is done by regional representatives. IE, you vote and the winner in your district is an MP and the party with the most MPs gets their leader as the Prime Minister.
What's the difference? If I vote for a party that isn't one of the 2 main parties, my vote does not achieve anything in terms of affecting who gets power. It's a protest vote.
I don't see how there is a difference here. The only difference I see is cultural. Americans see it as utterly pointless and therefore don't bother at all, Brits on the other hand are stubborn fuckers and will go out and protest vote and those protest votes actually do achieve political consequences when they're big enough, such as UKIP's success in forcing the Tories to give a Brexit referendum "or else we'll make sure you lose".
There are fundamentally enough non-voters in this election to achieve huge things with if Americans adopted the stubbornness to actually go third party, but they're successfully convinced to not bother.
It goes back to my main point of the Democrats only losing out on the popular vote 2 times since 1992, once in 2004 with Bush Jr vs Kerry and once in 2024 with Trump vs Kamala. After all, Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote, but there wasn't this push towards getting rid of the electoral college, which is the conclusion any normal person would arrive at. Gamers routinely cry at devs whenever they get owned by an OP build or item, but I've rarely seen people, even people here, attribute Clinton's loss to the electoral college, which is the real reason why she lost. They say it's due to Bernie bros or how she's an unlikable ghoul or how she's a woman or any other reason tangential to the real reason, which is that she lost because she played under an undemocratic system. And this is not even going over the 2000 election where the Republicans stole the election. The Democrats got cheated out of a win in 2000 and 2016, but there was no real desire by the DNC to scrap the electoral college.
I think most electoral-minded progressives go through this phase where they come up with all sorts of reforms aimed at making the presidential election less terrible (getting rid of the electoral college, turning DC into a state, making political debates available for third party candidates, getting rid of FPTP) only to get hit with the realization that despite these reforms almost exclusively benefiting the Democrats at the expense of the Republicans, the Democrats haven't done anything to advance what should be their own party interests. And it's not like they're trying but get continuously cockblocked by Republicans. They literally haven't done shit. Every progressive gets hit with this contradiction sooner or later. Why has the Democratic Party continuously fail to act in its own self-interest?
Some people might arrive at the conclusion that the Democrats are hilariously incompetent, but hilariously incompetent parties don't last for 2 centuries. The Democratic Party is probably one of the oldest bourgeois party in existence. If they could make it out of the losing side of a civil war because they upheld chattel slavery, they're probably not as dumb as you think. I think on some level, most USians who thought this through understand that this whole electoral process is just kabuki theater. And I don't mean it in the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie sense. I mean that's it's complete theater even by liberal democracy standards. They may not have the theory and dialectical materialist framework behind them to actually craft a coherent answer, but the suspicion is there. Now add in the MLs and anarchists who eschew electoral politics due to ideology and it's not a surprise that most people wouldn't bother with protest votes.
Essentially, people who protest vote are people who are disillusioned with the status quo but aren't so disillusioned that they don't see the electoral process for what it is. People either take the blue pill and vote for one of the two parties or they take the red pill and don't bother with the electoral process.
You say "it's the electoral college" but what does that functionally mean?
Here in the UK the election is done by regional representatives. IE, you vote and the winner in your district is an MP and the party with the most MPs gets their leader as the Prime Minister.
What's the difference? If I vote for a party that isn't one of the 2 main parties, my vote does not achieve anything in terms of affecting who gets power. It's a protest vote.
I don't see how there is a difference here. The only difference I see is cultural. Americans see it as utterly pointless and therefore don't bother at all, Brits on the other hand are stubborn fuckers and will go out and protest vote and those protest votes actually do achieve political consequences when they're big enough, such as UKIP's success in forcing the Tories to give a Brexit referendum "or else we'll make sure you lose".
There are fundamentally enough non-voters in this election to achieve huge things with if Americans adopted the stubbornness to actually go third party, but they're successfully convinced to not bother.
It goes back to my main point of the Democrats only losing out on the popular vote 2 times since 1992, once in 2004 with Bush Jr vs Kerry and once in 2024 with Trump vs Kamala. After all, Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote, but there wasn't this push towards getting rid of the electoral college, which is the conclusion any normal person would arrive at. Gamers routinely cry at devs whenever they get owned by an OP build or item, but I've rarely seen people, even people here, attribute Clinton's loss to the electoral college, which is the real reason why she lost. They say it's due to Bernie bros or how she's an unlikable ghoul or how she's a woman or any other reason tangential to the real reason, which is that she lost because she played under an undemocratic system. And this is not even going over the 2000 election where the Republicans stole the election. The Democrats got cheated out of a win in 2000 and 2016, but there was no real desire by the DNC to scrap the electoral college.
I think most electoral-minded progressives go through this phase where they come up with all sorts of reforms aimed at making the presidential election less terrible (getting rid of the electoral college, turning DC into a state, making political debates available for third party candidates, getting rid of FPTP) only to get hit with the realization that despite these reforms almost exclusively benefiting the Democrats at the expense of the Republicans, the Democrats haven't done anything to advance what should be their own party interests. And it's not like they're trying but get continuously cockblocked by Republicans. They literally haven't done shit. Every progressive gets hit with this contradiction sooner or later. Why has the Democratic Party continuously fail to act in its own self-interest?
Some people might arrive at the conclusion that the Democrats are hilariously incompetent, but hilariously incompetent parties don't last for 2 centuries. The Democratic Party is probably one of the oldest bourgeois party in existence. If they could make it out of the losing side of a civil war because they upheld chattel slavery, they're probably not as dumb as you think. I think on some level, most USians who thought this through understand that this whole electoral process is just kabuki theater. And I don't mean it in the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie sense. I mean that's it's complete theater even by liberal democracy standards. They may not have the theory and dialectical materialist framework behind them to actually craft a coherent answer, but the suspicion is there. Now add in the MLs and anarchists who eschew electoral politics due to ideology and it's not a surprise that most people wouldn't bother with protest votes.
Essentially, people who protest vote are people who are disillusioned with the status quo but aren't so disillusioned that they don't see the electoral process for what it is. People either take the blue pill and vote for one of the two parties or they take the red pill and don't bother with the electoral process.