Do you know how how many American citizens do not vote?
According to the Census Bureau, 65.3% of US citizens voted in the 2024 election, the third-highest turnout in the past 34 years. Turnout increased by 13.1 percentage points since the most recent mid-term elections in 2022, but decreased by 1.5 percentage points since the 2020 presidential election.
At least 1/3 of US citizens (and often far more!) never vote.
Second question. Do you know the demographics most likely to vote in every single election? Older people vote more than younger people, and conservatives vote more than liberals. Fascists keep winning in America not because a majority of Americans like fascism, but because the people who like fascism are far more likely to vote than the people who don't like fascism. If the 1.5% of people who voted in 2020 but did not vote in 2024 had voted, Trump would have lost.
Voting out fascists works, but we have to keep doing it. And we have to keep doing it in every election.
It sounds like a lot, and it sounds like a drag, but the thing is, politics is not like movies or novels.
In movies and novels where there is a villain, there is usually One Great Big Climactic Battle Against Evil at the end of the movie, where Our Hero does something really smart/brave/whatever and Defeats Evil And Wins The Day For Good. We've seen this so often that people have started to believe that this is how life works. And it isn't.
Real-life politics is a lot more like household chores than anything else. You don't do the dishes Once For All and then never have to do them again. Ditto laundry, scrubbing the toilet, etc. These things have to get done regularly or things are going to get gross, and the more gross you let things get, the longer it takes to fix them. If you keep doing the laundry, and the dishes, and wiping up spills when you make them, and cleaning the bathroom on a regular basis, and sweeping/vacuuming the floor on a regular basis, and putting away your stuff, then your house will be comfortable to live in. If you do these chores at least occasionally, it probably won't be too bad. If you never do them, things are going to get very bad (and possibly unsafe, with mold and stuff growing on the unwashed dishes).
In the same way, political stuff is just ongoing. Voting happens at least every two years in the US. Legislatures meet for months every year. The executive branches (Presidents, governors, mayors) work year round. There's always something important going on, and it may be boring stuff but it can have absolutely huge impacts on everyday life.
If we want to have a decent house/country to live in, the bare minimum action necessary to maintain it is voting in every election.
