Pretty classic trolley problem here. One track has genocide. The other side has larger scale and more effective genocide, along with a pile of other issues. Nobody’s saying genocide is good, but they’re saying 50,000 dead in a year is better than millions dead in a year alongside widespread escalation of genocide elsewhere, higher international tensions with a more significant chance of a nuclear incident, and more crackdowns on dissent just like yours and mine.
Your ability to participate in political organization and not immediately be killed or thrown in jail depends on the people who are in power. The United States isn’t immune to regressing to that society, and it’s very clear the Republicans are doing what they can to move in that direction.
Voting for the Democrats and doing nothing else is far from ideal and won’t fix the institutional problems, but it will help prevent new major problems, like mass murder for criticizing the government, from popping up.
Voting for the Democrats so you can continue activism is step one, and is an important step. It’s also a trivially easy step with no downside. It’s just not the only step.
It pressures the system in those cities or states, which is actual pressure to the system, just not direct pressure on the federal government. History shows you can mount pressure through local and state changes until it gets overwhelming support on a federal level.
You can make the argument there might be more effective or quicker solutions, but this is unquestionably one path toward it.
Trump’s likely to win, so we might find out just how bad it gets. I’m betting it’s a literal completed genocide within his term - no Palestinian survivors in the now-official-Israeli-territories. I doubt that would change your mind though, since it’s easy to just say Harris would have done it too.