There was a recent post that was essentially “Both Sides the Same”
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/z85ybo/can_we_please_agree_that_neither_democrats_or/
The conclusion was this:
Stop advertising support and false claims that they care. Start a new party or talk about the issue and not just that “well the democrats are the lesser of two evils”.
Now I'll refrain from saying that this is active anti-worker disinformation, but whether intentional or not, it's pretty damn close.
This is the exact thing that you don't want to do.
A lot of people believe that if they just don't vote, the parties will realize that you don't like them, and change so that you love them.
That's not what happens though, according to political science. What actually happens is that those parties ignore you.
The sad reality of the situation is that in a First Past the Post System, you are pretty much guaranteed mathematically to have two parties (so you should push your representatives to implement ranked choice or something else that allows for multiparty systems!). Votes against the party “closest” to you hurt you, mathematically, and thus two parties are unfortunately the most stable configuration in FPTP.
Given that context, your best strategic option is to vote overwhelmingly for the side that you want to support policies you want.
The reason for this is that the Overton window is established by parties trying to follow the votes. That's literally what the guy who coined the term said too – here's a quote:
“The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it.”
If you consistently voted Democratic, and the rest of the population did, to the point where Republicans could not win elections, then Republicans would shift left to get some of those votes. The Democrats would then shift further left, to differentiate themselves.
Sound impossible or wrong?
The exact same thing happened, but in the reverse in the 1980s and 1990s. The Democrats could not win the Presidency vs Reagan, the population did not want labor friendly policies (or was tricked to not support them, rather). What did the Democrats ultimately do after losing Presidential election after Presidential election? They shifted rightward.
Bill Clinton was essentially Reagan-lite, substantially more right-wing than his predecessors in terms of policy.
And then by 1994, what do you see from the Republicans? They shifted further right. Gingrich's “Contract with America” and the beginning of the modern Republican Party, acting like it does now started around this time.
So yeah no, while I understand it might sound cathartic to shit on voting for Democrats, strategically, it is the smartest choice if you want to shift the Overton window leftward. Politicians straight up do not care about populations that do not vote.