Thanks for the level headed and quantifiable reasoning. I agree the argument you're putting forth is the most compelling one and the one that most makes me question my own line of reasoning as well. Of course, like you say: it's always possible that something way down the line is going to turn out to make it all worth it, but because we can't see perfectly into the future and the world is really chaotic and hard to predict. I think that is basically the strongest argument out there for just picking the immediate best option.

On the other hand, I'm not exactly saying that we need to look all the way down the tree, maybe just like three or four steps ahead, instead of literally just one. Of course, the predictability goes down with each successive step. But I think we can at least think two election cycles ahead without losing too much precision. Especially in cases where the person running is really reprehensible to us, that helps even out the trade-off too, because in the same way that we have assured benefits from their victory, we have assured drawbacks. In that sense your argument cuts both ways a little. (But mostly against me, I won't deny) I think a lot of the disagreements on strategy here come down to people's personal values for these variables: the predictability, the confirmed costs/payoffs, the potential costs/payoffs. Which are pretty hard to be objective about.

I think the complexity of it that I just talked about would put things in your favor too, if not for the evidence (in my opinion) that the greedy strategy is exactly what has produced our poor historical results. So this is my biggest question for you because you said history isn't on my side. But to me, it seems like we have plenty of record of the same sort of "wait til the next election to be picky, this time we have to win, the stakes are too high!" rhetoric going back decades. And things are undeniably getting worse. So from my perspective, we have already been trying the greedy algorithm strategy for the last 40 years. For me that makes me feel like I have not only a theoretical explanation for why that would make things worse, but also historical evidence of it actually doing so. History seems super on my side to me.

I gel with your reasoning style so I'm interested to hear what you think I'm getting wrong about that perspective.

Decades of this mindless thinking has taught Democrats that they can do anything they want without consequence because voters will keep coming back. If you allow a little evil the next evil can be slightly larger. Compounded over 50 years we have our current political climate