unless there’s some fundamental misunderstanding about how our elections work.

Yeah, this is pretty much the core of it, I think. There were very minor attempts to gain nuance on the issue, say, there were people in the swing states that were committing to a vote towards kamala which would be contingent on an equivalent one or two protest votes for a given DSA or PSL or whatever other kind of candidate in a non-swing state, so as to be a protest vote.

I think the underlying logic kind of remains the same though. You can't leverage votes, because democrats don't give a shit if they lose, realistically. That's jack shit, to them, they don't really care one way or the other, I think. Cynical part of my brain says that trump probably didn't even really want to run a second time, and also didn't really want to win, and is just coasting on the momentum that he had previously which has sort of locked him into the track he's currently on, which would at the very least comically make this election a comical contest between candidates who are almost actively trying to lose.