It’s pretty obvious that if you keep playing the character others have determined for you in that charade and cast a vote for the evil candidate whilst telling yourself it’s the “lesser evil”, it’s not going to get better, only worse.

The reason it’s obvious is because that’s exactly what’s been happenning for decades now, possibly all the way since Eisenhower - you get alternance of ever less representive and increasingly evil politicians, with at best “one step forward, three steps back” kind of change (even within the mandate period of the same President as the early hope quickly turns into the usual shit).

The only way that fake democracy will change is if the electorate starts doing the unexpected (3rd party voting, voting for independents, refuse to participate and vocally deride the whole process and so on) rather than predictably bending over: politicians don’t care why you vote for them, they only care you vote for them, hence why almost all of their campaigning nowadays is not about “here’s what I’ve done for you and here’s what I will do” but instead it’s “the other guys are worse”.

Sure, Tactically it’s always “we have to take that hill over there” but Strategically you should’ve figured out by now they’re always taking you in the direction they want, never towards the heights you need to conquer to actually end up in a better place: notice how almost all discourse in present day US politics, from both faces of the political duopoly, is about morality, not about - say - quality of life or more evenly shared prosperity.