I used to find it baffling when friends my age said they were not going to vote for anyone, ever, full stop. The position seemed lazy to me, or affected, the kind of thing people say to look unbothered. I am not sure when exactly I stopped thinking that, but I have stopped. The longer I pay attention to American politics, the more I think the nihilists, and by extension, the broader young adult electorate, are the ones who are onto something.
Charlie Kirk, before he was killed at UVU last September, was the most visible practitioner of a format that has not gone away just because he has. The format goes like this. You tour college campuses. You set up a folding table, you hang a sign that says something like "Prove Me Wrong," and you wait for an undergraduate to walk up to a microphone. The undergraduate says something about climate policy or universal healthcare or gun violence, and you respond with a wall of statistics, half of them contested or selectively framed, all of them logical fallacy upon logical fallacy, and a series of leading questions designed to get the student to commit to a position they then have to defend off the cuff. The student stumbles, or gets angry, or says something they have not thought through, and the clip ends up on TikTok with a caption like "Kirk DESTROYS Liberal Student."
What I think people miss about this format is that Kirk did not win those debates the way you win a chess game. He won the way you win at three-card monte. The setup is rigged. He had done the reps. The student had not. He had a producer. The student had a backpack. He picked the question. The student picked the line they happened to be standing in. By the rules of any actual academic debate this would not count. By the rules of the camera it counts every time.
The genius of the format, and I mean genius in the most contemptuous sense, is that you do not need to win the argument with the kid at the microphone. You need to win the argument with everyone watching at home who has no context and no time. You need the line to look long. You need the kid to look frustrated. You need the snippet to load fast enough on a phone in a Lyft. The optics do the political work, and the policy content is almost incidental.
This is what I mean by implicit voter suppression. Nobody is putting fewer polling places in college towns, at least not in this particular vector. What is happening is more efficient.
Young people are progressive on basically every issue you can poll. Climate, healthcare, housing, labor, the works. A movement that wanted to actually persuade those young people away from those positions would have to do hard intellectual work, but that takes time and resources, when instead a movement that just wants those young people to stay home on election day does not have to do any of that. They just have to make politics feel humiliating, exhausting, and rigged. They have to make the act of caring out loud feel like the most embarrassing thing you can do in public.
And it works. I have had this exact conversation with three or four friends in the last month leading up to the June 2nd California Primary Election. They tell me, with what I can only describe as a kind of practiced flatness, that the world is on fire and nothing they do will put it out, so they are going to focus on their relationships and their hobbies and not think about it. And if you think about it, put yourself in a college student's shoes, they are not stupid for feeling this way. Most of them are sharper about politics than I am, as evidenced by their participation in my Political Theory class. They have done the math on what their vote is worth in a state that has been called by 8pm Eastern for as long as they have been alive, and they have decided the math is not in their favor.
So here is what changed my mind about whether to judge them.
The Democratic party, as it stands in 2026, does not represent the median person who votes Democratic. Polling on individual policies has been telling us this for years. Majorities of Democratic voters, sometimes large majorities, support things the party will not even pretend to be for. Medicare for all. A wealth tax. A ceasefire. Codifying Roe. Public housing at scale. A November 2025 Data for Progress survey found 65% of likely voters support Medicare for All, including 78% of Democrats, 71% of independents, and 49% of Republicans, and the party's leadership still treats it like a fringe position. The party position on every one of these is some version of "we hear you, that sounds expensive, please donate." There is this huge disconnect, and it is that the leadership disagrees and runs against its own base in coded language while asking that base for money. Further, when Democrats hold the Senate and House, and for 2 short years a trifecta, they had some of the worst favorability ratings among their own party.
The Republican party, or rather the GOP, is doing something else entirely, and while I want to be careful, I do not think the two are equivalent in any capacity (except maybe the amount of money they take from AIPAC *wink). The current GOP has more or less stopped pretending to govern in the interest of Americans who did not vote for it. Federal aid gets withheld from states whose governors are Democrats. Disaster relief becomes conditional on political loyalty. The same federal government that has appropriated $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel in the two years since October 2023, on top of another $14.8 billion in related regional operations, had to scramble $300 million in reallocated funds to keep WIC running for a few extra weeks during the 2025 shutdown, with no plan for what happened after. Labor regulations rolled back, environmental rules rolled back, consumer protections rolled back, all of it visible in the Federal Register if anyone cares to look.
And if any good-sensing member of congress has the wherewithal to go against the Administration, they are primaried, ousted from Congress, or forced to resign or retire. Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict Trump after January 6, just lost his primary to a Trump-endorsed challenger. Thomas Massie just lost his. Massie is a libertarian-conservative Republican who has held Kentucky's 4th district since 2012 and, by his own count, votes with Trump around 90% of the time. He is not a moderate. He is not a Democrat in disguise. What he did wrong, in the eyes of the administration, was vote against the One Big Beautiful Bill on fiscal grounds, oppose the June 2025 strike on Iran on constitutional grounds, criticize US military aid to Israel, and back the push to release the Epstein files. For that, he was primaried by a Trump-endorsed former Navy SEAL named Ed Gallrein in the most expensive House primary in American history. The AIPAC super PAC, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and a Trump-aligned pro-Israel super PAC together spent at least $15.8 million to remove him, with total ad spending of more than $32 million in a single House race. Gallrein won 54 to 46 on a platform of "Trump endorsed me" and not much else.
The party is no longer running on a theory of how to make life better in this country. It is running on a theory of how to punish the people who already do not vote for it, and that theory polls fine with its cult-like base, which is the point after all.
So, if you are 22 years old and you look at that, what exactly is the productive response? You can vote for the party that gestures at your values and then negotiates them away for nothing. You can vote for the party that openly does not want you to exist as a political subject. Or you can not vote, and at least be honest about the fact that the menu is bad.
I think nihilism is what people do when they have correctly identified that the formal channels are broken and have not yet found anything to replace them with. A disengaged electorate is the cheapest electorate to run against. You do not have to deliver anything to people who have stopped expecting anything.
The system was not built to take this kind of strain. Single-member districts with first past the post produce two parties, and only two, because every third party becomes a spoiler the moment it gets traction. We have known this since Duverger wrote it down in 1951. Other countries figured out how to fix it. Germany runs a mixed-member proportional system and ends up with six or seven parties in the Bundestag depending on the cycle. The Netherlands has so many parties they need spreadsheets to track coalitions, and voter turnout in both countries runs well above the US baseline at every age. Ranked choice is the law in Maine for federal elections, in Alaska for both federal and state, and DC just voted to adopt it with 73% approval in 2024. STAR voting has been seriously proposed and tested in Oregon but has not yet been adopted by any public jurisdiction, though the Oregon Democratic Party uses it internally for delegate selection. The technology is not the problem, but political will is, and the political will is missing because the two parties who would have to vote for the reform are the two parties who would lose power under it.
Here is what I think reform actually looks like, in the order I would want it to happen, with the understanding that the federal version is essentially impossible and the state version is the only realistic path.
The first change is single-member districts. The reason the House is gerrymandered to death and the reason every general election in a non-swing state is a foregone conclusion is that we have decided to draw boxes around 435 patches of geography and let each one send one person to Congress. The Fair Representation Act, which Don Beyer has introduced in some form every Congress for years and which has gone nowhere because the parties hate it, would replace that with multi-member districts of three to five seats elected by ranked choice. A district that currently votes 60-40 sends two of one party and zero of the other. Under multi-member proportional rules that same district would send three and two. The 40% would have representation. A 20% libertarian or green minority would have a real shot at a seat. There would no longer be such a thing as a safe district, because the marginal seat in every district would be contestable by definition. Once you have that, you have something like a multi-party system without needing a constitutional amendment.
The second change is how money works. Public financing of campaigns with small-dollar matching, on the model New York City has run for decades, costs the public a rounding error and dilutes the influence of the kind of money that just spent $32 million trying to remove one libertarian from Kentucky's 4th. The Massie race is the load-bearing example for every argument about why a $200 contribution from a constituent should count more than a $200,000 SuperPAC ad. Until the underlying incentive structure changes, every congressional office will continue to operate as a fundraising shop with a legislative side hustle.
The third change is the boring administrative layer that nobody really finds interesting and that explains at least a chunk of the turnout gap with peer countries on its own. Automatic voter registration when you get a driver's license, same-day registration if you missed that, election day moved to a weekend or made a federal holiday, no-excuse mail-in ballots, pre-registration at 16. None of this is exotic. Germany does most of it. The Netherlands does all of it. The reason the United States does not do it is that one of the two parties has correctly calculated that lower turnout helps them win, and the other party has incorrectly calculated that running symbolic legislation about it is enough.
Ranked choice and STAR are the most-discussed reforms in this space, mostly as ways to get to multi-party representation, not as ends in themselves. The 2024 ballot measures for RCV mostly lost in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon, which is a setback worth acknowledging. The reforms have to be paired with organizing or they will keep losing 58 to 42 in states where the median voter has never heard of Duverger. Alaska kept its RCV system by a margin that depended on a recount. Maine has held the line since 2018. DC voted yes by a 30-point margin. These are the success cases, and they are all places with active local infrastructure pushing for reform over a period of years. Nothing about this is fast.
The federal version of any of this is effectively impossible in any near-term sense, because passing it requires the consent of the people who would lose under it. The state version is the only real path. Maine, Alaska, and DC adopted RCV through ballot initiative or the equivalent. The 26 states that allow citizen initiatives are the experimental cases. The other 24 are stuck with whatever their legislatures decide to give them, which is usually nothing. If you want to do something useful with the energy that nihilism would otherwise absorb, the work is at the state level, in states with initiative processes, and it is patient. It is going to take a decade. It probably already has.
So here is where I land, after thinking about it for longer than I expected to.
Nihilism is not a failure of civic education, but maybe a rational response to a system that has stopped offering anything to most of the people inside it, and the people defending the system have no real answer to the people who notice. When a friend tells me they are not voting because nothing will change, my reply will no longer be "your vote matters" or "this is the most important election of our lifetime." My new reply is that they are basically right under the current rules, and the question is whether the rules can be changed before the people who notice this give up entirely.
I am not going to tell anyone what to do with that. I am, for what it is worth, still going to vote. I don't think it changes much in a given cycle, but down-ballot stuff does occasionally move, and also because I have not yet talked myself out of the habit. I understand why other people have. I no longer think they are wrong.
If the alternative is a generation that has quietly opted out, then the alternative is worse than the reform. That is the part I finally understand.