but they have absolutely no mechanism or plan for how they’d do that, as they decry anything more radical than a quiet, candle-lit procession lead by cops after getting a license for protesting three weeks in advance from the town hall

When we're talking to libs about how useless this is, we need to:

1. Be careful to talk in terms of "the limits of voting," not in terms like "well of course voting is useless in a bourgeois democracy." They're going to be more receptive to a small step left than a giant leap, they'll have time to take further steps later, and the pro-voting propaganda in this country is so pervasive that it makes little sense to open by challenging it head-on.
2. Have a plan for what specific acts of non-electoral politics to do, and what they can accomplish. No one is going to listen to "voting isn't all you can do, you know" if you never mention non-electoral strategies that seem workable.