Why one of my people refused to vote:

[Jim Lane]

42. The corporate elite that your millennial so despises would be delighted at this exchange.

By the way, it's not all that surprising that the nonvoting millennial has a "good, upper middle class income" and is therefore presumably not on Medicaid. Medicaid was one of the issues I highlighted in a post elsewhere, answering this "no difference between the parties" argument. If I may quote myself:

By coincidence, I read (the Green Party booster's) email soon after reading this piece -- http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/10/30/1340367/-Think-the-Midterms-Don-t-Matter-Tell-That-to-157-000-Poor-Uninsured-People-in-Maine-and-nbsp-Wisco -- about the refusal of some states to accept the expansion of Medicaid that's available under Obamacare. In Maine and Wisconsin, a total of 157,000 people who could be eligible for Medicaid aren't getting it. If they lived in New York, they'd have health coverage. Living in states with Republican governors, they don't.

This isn't a strictly partisan thing. The map at http://medicaidexpansion.com/medicaid-expansion-state-decisions/ shows that some Republican governors, like Christie, have gone along with expansion, however grudgingly. In general, though, Medicaid has been expanded in states with Democratic leadership and has not been expanded in states with Republican leadership.

Well, what do I care, I don't live in Maine or Wisconsin, or in any of the other states that have gone that route. But there are millions of people who ARE affected. Some of them will die as a result.

I'm not speaking metaphorically. Some of them will literally die. Physicians for a National Health Program did a piece at http://www.pnhp.org/news/2014/january/more-than-7100-deaths-likely-from-states-rejection-of-medicaid-expansion-%C2%A0health-a reporting on research on the subject:

The decision by 25 states to reject the expansion of Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act will result in between 7,115 and 17,104 more deaths than had all states opted in, according to researchers at Harvard Medical School and the City University of New York.
. . . .
In addition to the thousands of excess deaths associated with that lack of coverage, the rejection of the Medicaid expansion will have the following likely impacts:

* 712,037 more persons diagnosed with depression
* 240,700 more persons suffering catastrophic medical expenses
* 422,533 fewer diabetics receiving medication
* 195,492 fewer women receiving mammograms and
* 443,677 fewer women receiving pap smears

Thousands of people dying and hundreds of thousands of people suffering is either a preventable human catastrophe or "certain details separating the two major parties," depending on your perspective.

So, while I agree with you that centrist, third-way policies are a disaster, there is already enough evidence, even with the Democrats being far too conservative, that there are major differences between the parties. You call your friend intelligent, but it's hard for me to find anything in those posts except willful blindness.

I particularly note this sentence: "Instead of voting, we need to be figuring out how to remove that class from power, and you can't do that while participating in their fictional elections." Uh, because if you walk down to the local school and cast a vote, that disempowers you from the arduous plotting of revolution? Not that I think your friend is actually doing anything toward removing that class from power anyway -- but to the extent s/he is, one ought to be able to think about how to upend the system while walking to the polls and waiting on line. This whole thing is just a copout.