The way to push them left is to actually push them left—protesting, calling your representatives, donating to campaigns you support, voting for candidates in local primaries where your vote is exponentially more influential, et cetera.

But voting in a presidential election doesn’t push anyone anywhere. For one thing, pushing is a continuous, incremental process, while the outcome of a presidential election is a discrete binary one—there’s no map between the two. But more significantly, this buys into a narrative that the media has constructed over the past few generations, in which voting is a semiotic process with the people signaling their desires with their votes and politicians responding by signaling their intentions with their policies. This leaves the media itself in full control of the political process by interpreting for each party what the other “means”, whereas votes and bills are actually devoid of meaning beyond their real effects.