Congress extends controversial surveillance powers for 10 days

If he was not able to change policy in any way as a Senator, how would he be able to do so as a President?

He can veto a bill then get it overridden. He has already proven 100% he lets the more conservative parts of Congress walk all over him - he can have the best ideas in the world but that won't change a thing.

If you want someone to make people discuss ideas - great, you can be at a think tank. The point of electing someone to political office is to get bills passed, so that things actually change.

IMO voting tactically makes about as much sense as choosing lottery numbers tactically. Perhaps it makes less sense, because people do actually win the lottery. Unless you are a Supreme Court Justice, the odds that your vote will change the election outcome are practically nil.

It's a bit odd to believe that you can't change who the candidates are, but you can nonetheless change which candidate wins. In fact, you can't do either. Collectively, we determine both, but each voter is only a grain of sand in the collective heap.

And you aggressively prioritise primaries if you aren't in a non-swing state.

But I suppose others are downvoting for your combativeness.

When you look at the actual negotiations and implementation of policies that have happened, the Democrats now have a much smaller gap between themselves and the Republicans on the world stage. There are a handful of distinct issues that they are polar opposites on, but in terms of actual governance the leadership of the two parties don't stray too far from the same direction compared to Western Europe and South America. While in relative terms they were very divergent from eachother in the 1920s and the 1960s, they've once again moved closer together and we have not yet hit another divergence point. There is a stagnation and regression that appear very similar because public sentiment has rapidly changed and progressed since 2012. It's very visible in the way many of the same Democrats are around now as in 2008 (and some from even 1996) and still act like they're from that era where we were at "the end of history", while the Republicans have many newer members that have jumped in since 2016 that act like they're from the earlier era of the 1950s and 1960s when concepts like civil rights and second wave feminism were still widely contentious. Regular Americans just sort of view the period from 1968 to 2001 as a relatively uniform era politically because there weren't events that up-ended entire hemispheres in a U.S.-centric way the way World War II, The Cuban Missile Crisis, and 9/11 had. Yet between 2001 and 2012 there were several up-ending events such as the 9/11, the '08 financial crisis, and the rapid adoption of the smartphone and thus instant global communication starting in 2010. Since the normal public have that view what has happened since 2012 makes the stances the Democrats have retained from before that monumental shift appear not only outdated, but harmfully backwards, especially as more people who were not alive during that "end of history" era come to be of voting age. That means the two major parties can seem to be the same face wearing two masks right now because neither have kept up with left wing public sentiment.

Not the kind I do, personally. But most of our presidents have been war criminals. So she would have been a great one, yes.

And yet people still insist Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were "the worst candidates ever," and that there was simply no choice. They want to turn all of the chaos and stupidity of the current administration into some kind of referendum on how bad the other side is, and they'll even claim that there would be absolutely no difference regardless of who was in charge. Yet even if that were the case, somehow, Trump is still better. For reasons I guess. Other than not being a woman.

Trump literally made a meme of himself lounging at the resort he planned to build on the ruins of Gaza but we couldn't vote for Kamala because she was the Zionist.

People really do get the government they deserve.

I've voted in New York and Wyoming. In a general election, my Presidential vote does not practically count. As a result, I can typically throw it for a third party as a messaging vote. (If New York or Wyoming are turning out to be contested, the fight was won elesewhere.)

If you're in a swing state and you don't vote, you're about as important for the Presdiential general-election campaign you would not have voted for if you bothered to show up as an actual opposition voter. (Depressing turnout among unlikely voters who might vote for the other candidate is a real, precedented, cosultants-who-specialise-in-this-exclusively social-media-advertising turnout strategy.)

That's not the intent. But de facto, they either have no or that effect. Particularly in primaries.

There is also a huge messaging difference between casting a blank ballot and not showing up at all. The presumption is you can safely ignore someone who doesn't vote for several cycles because they tend to keep not voting for novel–but consistently exculpatory–excuses each time around. You have to still pay attention to intermittent voters if you don't want to get caught wrong-footed by a wave.