It’s sad that people rather don’t vote, and accept the fact that the states drift towards an autocratic system, than just vote for the lesser evil (or engage themselves politically).
Maybe it’s sad, sure, but it’s far from unusual. In the US, average eligible voter turnout fluctuates between 50-65%. In 2020 it was 65.3% (the highest ever recorded), and in 2024 it was 63.5%, the second-highest. Eligible voters end up not voting for a bunch of reasons, but the biggest reason is usually because they (rightly) feel like the choice has little actual impact on their day-to-day life. Even if you’re relying on the ‘most important election of our lifetime’ motivation (the same rhetoric that’s been used for the last 5-6 elections at least), many of those people are white middle-lower-class adults - those people don’t believe they’d be the ones targeted by mass deportations or political imprisonment anyway. Granted, that’s a short-sided reason not to vote, but let’s not act surprised by low-income americans having a bit of an optimism bias (since they are consistently the largest pool of eligible voters).
You simply cannot expect every eligible voter to turnout for you if you aren’t giving them compelling reasons to do so. But even in relative terms, the 2024 election was still only 1.7% behind the highest-ever turnout for a presidential election in our lifetime - american voters certainly did turn out, and many who abstained from voting were engaged. The problem is that they no longer believe the democrats actually represent their interests, and so went shopping elsewhere or didn’t vote at all (or split their ticket). Blaming those voters without asking yourself why there were more of them this election is nothing more than political masturbation.
And just a reminder that the democratic party does actually have members in its caucus that have a higher than 60% approval rating nationwide, but for some reason they chose not to run those candidates
You must not be old enough to remember the 2008 election, then. People were accusing Obama of being the literal antichrist, and was among the first to prominently feature conservative conspiracy theorists on national news (Don was calling in to talk shows to accuse Obama of being a Kenyan Muslim and demanding his birth certificate, then his long-form).
Maybe in hindsight it’s hard to make a comparisons, but every election since then has represented the same choice between ‘sane’ democrats and ‘crazy’ conservatives. You can only have so many of those before they start to feel like the norm.