I can’t see how anyone with a brain would not vote against #2.

I love reading all of the replies to your comment that illustrate this sentence so clearly.

I can’t see how anyone with a brain would not vote against #2.

Because you’ve been around long enough to have been in this situation before. Voting #1 is at best a stop-gap measure. Option #1 doesn’t do anything to fix the underlying problem, and in fact, the next time around, #2 is way worse. (As is #1.) And this pattern keeps repeating. It doesn’t matter which you choose, you’ll end up with #2, just a bit later. (We’ve reached the stage at which genocide support is the lesser evil, fer chrissakes.)

As an analogy, the situation we have with the two parties is like a choice faced by person with Type 2 diabetes: Fall into a hypoglycemic coma right now and maybe die, or consume sugar by the spoonful. The second option is the correct choice, obviously. But next time around, it’s the same choice, and again after that. This person can choose the lesser evil every time, but it still leads to death.

So, painful and unlikely at it may be, some voters are thinking beyond the immediate moment and want to at least try to avoid the death of democracy.

And fewer people would be brutalized by ICE

This is cope. The current dem leadership is totally on board with the war in Iran, and if the current administration hadn’t started it, Israel would almost certainly have dragged a hypothetical Harris administration into one anyway.

The several decade of American sanctions are killing more then the bombs during this war. Iran is going to get stronger once the evil american empire surrender

Civil rights legislation was passed because of riots in the streets, not voting. Black people had a maximum of 25% voter turnout and in most states it was 10% or less. And civil rights were advanced under both a Democrat and Republican administration. And when the Nixon administration came up with the idea of disenfranchising black people by criminalizing drug use and making it a felony, the Democrats are the ones who wrote and passed the laws. And they never stopped over criminalizing black folks. They were doing it right up to the Clinton administration. Overtly racist policing and incarceration. Because voting in Ds isn’t actually what changed anything - forcing the issue in the streets is what changed it.

The Obama administration crafting the JCPOA was the equivalent of a stalling tactic. Obama had to focus on the drone wars, on Libya, and on the pivot to Asia. While the bipartisan consensus was to destroy Iran after Libya (as set in the strategy under Bush2), there wasn’t an opportunity because China’s rise created a pacing challenge that the US needed to meet and Obama had to send almost 70% of our naval assets into the Pacific.

No, liberal justices didn’t pave the way for same-sex marriage. Rioters did. Nothing happened until Stonewall. Democrats were happy to throw queer folk under the bus, same as they do today, and watch them get murdered in the street. But when they actually fought back in NYC, that’s when the pressure built and the establishment needed to react.

It’s always been this way. Improvements happen when the oppressed fight back, outside the ballot box. The labor movement had to do it, women’s Suffrage had to do it, civil rights had to do it, gay rights had to do it, Haiti had to do it, Russia had to do it, China had to do it, Cuba had to do it. It’s the only thing the power structure responds to.

And that’s been proven by research from Princeton by the way. Popular opinion has literally no statistical influence on legislation across 30 years of study, which spans both parties in multiple configurations.