You're both right to some extent. Both sides are guilty in this. As MLK said, the biggest threat to equality is not the white supremacist but the white liberal who cares more about a negative peace than true justice. If the 50% of voters who never vote did something, we could not only have kept Trump out of office, but we could vote out the corporate Dems who prevent any actual change from occurring.

At the same time, those corporate Dems keep pushing the right farther and farther into extremism with their strategy of "vote for me because I'm not the other guy" and take for granted that people will vote for them anyway. It's the oldest campaign strategy out there, because it works, but when you fund the most extremist of your opponents and appeal to the middle, you just end up pushing the entire political spectrum to one side. And that's exactly what the Dems do. They even go so far as to fund the most extremist candidate in their race to set up an easy win. A lady wrote a book on how she did that, and then she lost to that same extremist in the very next election.

Protest votes are ineffectual, and so is not voting because at the end of the day, the leaders of the Dems think that they're safe and the status quo won't change, and it doesn't matter whether they got less votes than last time, so long as they're in office. We need a sweep of radical leftist candidates to shake the very foundations of the party if we expect to see any change.

Yes because letting something worse happen to you is... Good?

What a dumb argument.