People stayed home and didn’t vote for Hillary in 2016 because they wanted to send a message.
I don’t know about “send a message” nearly so much as “felt disillusioned and betrayed”. She gave them nothing to show up for. Hell, Hillary’s primary demographic was supposed to be upwardly mobile white women, and the majority of them ended up voting for Trump.
What we got was 4 years of a narcissist running the country
After Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and then Obama, this was par for the course.
If you lived through the 2002 GOP landslide, Trump wasn’t anything new. The xenophobia and the white nationalism, the naked demagoguery and far-right religious fervor, the shameless pandering to a handful of insider business leaders, the bailouts and bankruptcies… It was just a repeat of the Bush Administration.
To see Democrats in leadership sucking up to the prior dipshit fascist really drove home to us old-heads what GenZ had to learn the hard way - liberals weren’t going to lift a finger to this guy if they could help it.
I didn’t like Hillary, but I voted for her. I don’t like Biden but I’ll vote for him
This has been the story of American politics since at least Kennedy. The long line of “I didn’t like him but I voted for him” candidates have only produced more of the same shitty guys. And the country has rotted out from the inside, as liberals continued to contend “the only thing we can do is VOTE!” while conservatives took to the streets and reshaped the country with their own bare hands.