If “did not vote” was a candidate they would have won 23/24 presidential elections since 1932. How’s that working out for us?

It has a historical meaning (Harm Reduction: defiant acts of care and resistance) and a literal meaning (harm reduction: tactics to mitigate tangible damage from oppressive systems). You’re just arguing pedantics unless you’re pretending my meaning isn’t obvious from the context of the conversation.

You can believe that but that doesn’t change facts. Trump’s disastrous climate change policy alone will result in 1.3 million additional deaths. Feel free to explain your harm reduction theories to them. Seems silly to think we’d be in the same level of climate catastrophe if Gore had more votes in 2000.

Also nowhere in my comment did I say voting is the only or even best method of harm reduction, let alone a surefire strategy to fix our fucked up situation. My point is that complaining about what neolib ghoul the DNC leadership will trot out is a pointless exercise. If you think voting strategy is worth a conversation then approach it realistically.

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Britain’s next election…

The UK electoral system may as well be from Mars when compared to the USA.

• For one, they have 650 MPs representing a population of 67 million. The US has 535 total reps split across a bicameral legislature. Combining Texas + California, you have 90 house seats and 4 senators representing 70 million people! It’s incredibly important for all of those people to be on the same page when such high leverage seats are on the line.
• The byzantine system of the Senate and the Electoral College similarly fuck with election strategy. It doesn’t mean jack shit if your progressive candidates draw 30 million extra votes if those votes come from California and NY.
• A motion can dissolve the UK government and trigger a new vote at any time, the US can’t do shit until the next election cycle.

Keep running down the list and it becomes more and more obvious that US elections have extremely high stakes, keeping the establishment parties nice and comfy.

Remember, the Republican Party started as a third party…

It emerged at a time when both major parties were losing ground with their voter base, not spontaneously from one side of the political spectrum. In 1854, 5 new parties were vying for seats which gave them lots of room to maneuver. [They had even more room than today when you compare 1800s representation against the 435 rep cap we have now.]

Today there’s no MAGA splinter party; the GOP is in a firm lockstep and polls indicate that their core base will never waiver. Unless you can totally supplant the Dems on the left in one fell swoop, you’re still stuck at their negotiating table. You might get a new party logo on your name tag but you’re as much at the whims of fascist collaborators as before.

[MAGA did] not fundamentally challenging the core beliefs of the party

This is incredibly ironic because decades of grooming went into supplanting the old 20th century GOP platform. It feels like nothing changed but that’s due to how persistent and focused the campaign was. Look at John McCain. One of the last true, piece of shit, old school Republicans and he ended his long established career blocking MAGA.

reforming the Dems would require fundamentally uprooting their core values and power structure

The lack of core values has been a criticism for decades, they’re a blank slate in that department. Would it be a more drastic heel turn than shifting the “party of small government and tax cuts” into “record breaking debt, spending and raising taxes”?

Donors and DNC power structures only matter as tools of suppression. If you can break the seal and get the votes in spite of those roadblocks, you can keep the votes without them.

old financial backers and supporters of centrist policies will walk away

If the campaign money shifts away from a newly progressive Democrat party, where will it go to? A new center right party courting R votes? They’ve shown that strategy doesn’t work. A new spineless, controlled “leftist” opposition party? Well then they’re stuck building against all the two party roadblocks they put up themselves!

Reread the OP. There was no mention of presidential elections anywhere, just “liberal candidate” generally in “elections”. You made the same assumption, which just goes to show how the media landscape has conditioned us to think like that.

lay that groundwork for the next election

The fact that “next election” to you means the presidential election is very telling. There are more progressive candidates penciled on the midterm ballots (let alone the active primaries) than there have been in living memory. And that’s not counting local progressive candidates that are already in office from this election cycle.

But to hear everyone talk, anything short of a leftist presidency is a failure in the same way that anything short of a spontaneous revolution isn’t worth doing. A milquetoast neolib president shackled by a progressive Congress by far the best option in the realm of possibility.

This is what drives left infighting, a complete disconnect on what’s desired and what’s possible. Some limitations are just so obvious that I don’t know how people ignore them.

• All media is controlled by billionaire corporate interests who have a ton to lose from the left gaining power. The revolution will not be televised and your left political wave will not come through social media. This will not change and you don’t have the wallet to fight it.
• Related, there will never be a viable third party no matter how much wishcasting you project. FPTP firmly entrenched the two party system and it would take a herculean reform effort to uproot it. There’s a reason that the Republican and Democratic platforms have shifted all over the map since the 1800s, you can’t splinter and keep any power.
• Following that, the road map for usurping the DNC has already been shown to us. Power is displaced from the bottom up and a presidency is the last thing captured. Unfortunately, as they act as party of controlled opposition, the fight to disrupt that will be harder than it ever was.
• Finally, the floodgates have been opened to a fascist takeover of the USA. To a certain extent, there’s no closing Pandora’s box and expectations and plans need to be adjusted for the new world.

So look at those facts and ask simple questions. Can reform by electoralism be attempted in this environment? What is the best chance for harm reduction here? Do the old rules apply in the same way (eg. is not voting blue even an option now)? Can this regime even be removed from office by normal means? What battles will you pick?

If you’ve really thought through all of that and landed on complaining about Harris and Newsome then I don’t know what to say. That is so far down the branch of things we can’t change (media narrative control, DNC establishment power, nascent progressive bloc still solidifying) that it’s not worth discussing.

Yep, there are two things that can trigger regime change: precarious drops in material conditions and concerted foreign intervention. The Ancien régime’s food and debt crisis, Czar Nicholas’ economic collapse, post-WWI German austerity and economic struggles, Cold War coups and power plays all over the world, etc… It’s the same story over and over.

The core value of sedentary civilization is stability and predictability. No population has ever, or will ever, flip their lives upside down and plunge into an uncertain power vacuum out of the goodness of their hearts. And yet ideologues on the internet insist that they can will revolutions into existence with memes.