By choosing the less shit option, politicians will see they need to be less shit to get elected, eventually to the point of maybe even having good candidates.

This is demonstrably false. After Obama was elected twice we got Trump. Clinton was picked in 2016 and was so terrible that she couldn’t beat the orange turd. After her loss they gave us a “status quo” clone of her who barely managed to defeat the orange turd. Now we’re faced with the exact same choice and polling shows that it’s likely to end up like it did in 2016. Both parties continue to move further and further right regardless of who’s getting elected and we’re being forced to choose from the same tiny pool of candidates every election even though there are hundreds of millions of people in this country.

Continuing to vote against the other candidate rather than voting for who you want allows them to keep doing worse and worse because that other party is always going to be there and always considered worse and supporters of that party will look at the other side and do the same. There is zero accountability for either side to the point where both candidates now openly support genocide and you have people arguing that “you’re a piece of shit for not supporting them.”

By continuing to vocally support eating shit, you’re ensuring that in a few elections we’ll be supporting eating shit and lighting ourselves on fire because the other side will be eating shit, lighting ourselves on fire, and giving a rim job to a horse. To support our current system is to support a race to the bottom.

What are you helping to stop when both candidates are terrible? You’re helping in the same way that “thoughts and prayers” helps people. You’re simply participating in a rigged game and thinking that your participation is some sort of moral choice and “doing the right thing” when in reality that feeling is just self-gratification.

If you think you’re helping, why does the political landscape continue to devolve and slide further to the right regardless of who wins? Why are more and more people becoming poor and homeless while a handful of companies and individuals are reaping all the rewards? That’s the trajectory you’re arguing to help maintain here.