but in the meantime I am a rational person who knows that a tactical vote for an imperfect party is better than letting jackbooted thugs and pedophiles run rampant.

I'm sorry but that's only "rational" if your analysis is very superficial.

Tactical voting is exactly what has been happening in the US for DECADES and the outcome was ever more rightwing policies, social mobility crashing from almost 90% in the 70s to just over 10% now, increased poverty and so on, and even putting aside all social and economic issues and focusing only on political strategy, with this system the Democrat Party has not once but TWICE fielded a candidate so bad that they lost to somebody like Trump.

Logically doing more of the same would yield more of the same outcome - ever more rightwing populists getting elected - and the next time a far-right POTUS is elected (a guaranteed event if desperate people keep getting created in the US by falling median real incomes and opportunities alongside a captured Press specialized in blaming foreigners for it, because both parties have neoliberal policies) that next Fascist POTUS might actually be intelligent and hence even more dangerous than Trump.

Even in a fucked-up, undemocratic, power-duopoly system like the one in America, each vote isn't simply an A/B choice that's closed once done - the way things work in the US a vote is a cyclic choice where parties put forward their choices for candidates and the voters say "yes" or "no", and then some years later the same happens again, so the response of voters to the candidates fielded in one cycle informs who the parties put forward in the subsequent cycle.

In other words, if people keep rejecting a certain style of candidate fielded by a party, that party is pushed to field a different style of candidate. This how the Republicans changed over the years fielding ever more far-right and populist candidates - voters responded badly to "serious conservatives" so the party fielded more and more "anti-immigrant loudmouths". It's funny that Republicans have been more responsive to their electorate than Democrats.

So each vote isn't just a choice of POTUS, it's also a message to the parties about the suitability of the candidate they have fielded and, last I checked, in Democracy it's the obligation of parties to responde to voters rather than the other way around.

Under this broader analysis, the Kamala vs Trump result yields two possible views:

• Millions of people were wrong in not voting for Kamala.
• A few thousand people in the Democrat Party leadership were wrong in fielding somebody with insufficient appeal to voters as their candidate.

As I see it, if one is trully not a party loyalist and genuinelly wants avoid another Trump in the future, the most logical choice is to go with #2 for three reasons:

• This is the SECOND time Trump won against the candidate chose by the Democrat Party leadership. Once might be chance, twice is not.
• Success is more likely in changing what a few thousand people (the Democrat Party leadership) do than in changing what millions of people (the voters) do, so it makes more sense in focusing on the 2nd group when approportioning blame.
• In Democracy it's the obligation of the people who are competing to be the elected REPRESENTATIVES of the electorate to appeal to the electorate, not for the electorate to simply comply with the choices of "leaders". The US isn't supposed to be like Russia were people are expected to not question the leader.

If one's objective trully is to avoid having another Trump in power in the US, then logically the most effective way to do so is to push the DNC leadership to change (or replace them) since those people are VASTLY more powerful than votes and are fewer in number so change there is not only way more effective but also more likely.

Sadly, there's a lot of people driven by party loyalism parroting "blame voters" self-serving propaganda from the DNC in order to avoid that those party leaders suffer repeatedly choosing candidates that don't appeal to voters.