In fairness, 6 years ago plenty of Gen Z were not of voting age yet. The oldest portion of that generation is 26 this year. Also, back then there was a level of apathy to politics that really allowed plenty of shenanigans. Until COVID, that was the general consensus that politics were for their parents or for their grandparents. The last 6 years have shown otherwise, and recent voting turn outs in red states show a swing of younger activism.
I do think dragging millennials into this conversation does weaken that argument though as that generation has been majority voting age for over a decade. They’ve been shown to have an intense outrage culture but the lack of commitment to do anything about it, which thankfully the activism and general “fuck the establishment” attitude the tide pod kids have might actually make a difference this time around.
Also, Bernie dropped off the ballet before anyone could vote for him when the Democratic party didn’t consider him their primary pick. I like the guy and did write him in myself (and most likely he would’ve won had he remained on the ballet), but the removal of him as a “default” candidate in our system is why so few voted for him, thinking their votes would either ultimately not make a difference, or that they would allow the opposition (whichever side) to win by not voting within the lines.
Oh do I have some good news for you then. The end of the summer a few platforms are slated to launch an iMessage on Android app.
Sunbird is the big one that is getting a large amount of coverage and sells itself as E2E for iMessage (we’ll see at launch as it’s in beta right now).
Beeper is another one that’s an aggregation messenger similar to what signal originally was, but is also supposed to allow iMessage instead of its own alternative, as well as still being usable for text/RCS messaging.
I’m not working for either of these companies, I just have a significant other with an iPhone who always complains about my messages being green, and so I did some research into ways to fix it a few months ago and found both of these to be the promising fixes that don’t require self hosting a server (funny seeing as this is lemmy, kinda the theme here). I’ve kept it under wraps from them to be a huge surprise when it launchs and all of a sudden they can’t complain/talk about the platform superiority anymore.