The thing that I require for food and shelter (money) is the same thing I'm expected to use to acquire entertainment media. If I can't illegally download movies, the alternative isn't automatically that I start spending more money to buy them. I wouldn't even consider buying them until I didn't have better things to spend on.
Both money and votes are heuristics for access to goods and services. Similarly to money, I'm not going to waste my vote on entities that imperil my access to basic needs by maintaining those provisions' dependence on "the market" or by threatening those provisions with long, climate-sensitive supply chains or geopolitical retaliation (including nuclear war lol)
But what I'm concerned about here, are largely still implicit and deferred costs. Unemployment (at any level), mass incarceration, and a percent of labor relegated to non-productive finance and the "defense" industry - even though the overall effect of these is harmful, the harm is only implicit and deferred for most of society. There's an extent to which the brain will act on such abstractions, but there's an even greater extent to which it won't act until the abstractions become more concrete.
Consider the recent Key bridge accident. It takes real labor hours not only to create and maintain a ship that is less prone to such disastrous technical errors and a bridge that can withstand such errors, but also to build a new bridge to replace the destroyed one and restart the movement of commerce. That labor's competition with wasteful incarceration, unemployment, war-profiterring, private insurance, the rentier and finance sectors, etc. is moved slightly from the abstract and into the concrete as motivation rises to prevent and recover from such accidents. If the construction is slower than hoped for, or if more infrastructure accidents imminently make headlines, then those labor-wasting, exchange-value oriented industries will be threatened.
Many "leftists" seem to be frustrating themselves by trying to convince others that their lives are concretely worse than they actually are. The way things improve, however, is by pointing out where the implicit and deferred costs become explicit and realized, as with the Key bridge accident.
Probably an extremely small amount of people who voted for Biden in 2020 will refuse to vote for him this year, especially since a ceasefire is likely to occur before November. The recent discourse around rosey economic data reveals that people do not like what the system looks like even when it looks relatively good, but the metrics are roughly accurate: Americans on the whole are doing alright. That's largely due to such bipartisan state intervention that, even if it could not prevent a million+ deaths in a pandemic, could at least ensure that the majority of survivors could buy food, shelter, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 movies. A status quo that leaves us with disposable income also leaves us with enough disposable political will to maintain its enshrinement. But every day, the abstract becomes quantitatively more explicit and realized on its path to qualitatively hit that concrete bridge.