Not doing it.
That entire narrative needs to change.
The refrain essentially is that you must vote for the candidate we say is most likely to win and if you don't, then you're helping the next runner up.
I believe that if we no longer reported polling results and had election results reported at the same time, then the problem I describe above would be significantly reduced.
The fact that primaries are not held at the same time leads the results of earlier primaries influencing the results of later ones. The fact that election results from the eastern part of the country are reported while the western part is still voting influences the results.
We desperately need a voting system that allows you to express your preferences honestly, and ideally across all candidates, without hurting the outcome. By far, score voting systems are the best at that. Of those, I recommend STAR voting (Score Then Automatic Runoff), because it has some actual momentum[1] (it also has some theoretical advantages, but both it and vanilla score voting, and even Ranked Choice with a Borda count, are such a massive improvement over the status quo that it doesn't matter which we pick).
[1]: https://www.starvoting.us/ -- no affiliation, just convinced by the research (edit: which you can mostly find linked from https://www.equal.vote/)
It's also unlikely to ever happen, because the only ones with the power to do it are the ones that would be displaced.
How do you see any sort of path forward for proportional representation being adopted as an amendment to the constitution? I see no path towards 2/3 majority voting for that.
However, there is only one president, so for this to really matter it needs to happen in Congress, which would require an amendment. The rationale that it could happen is simply that it has happened before: women’s suffrage, the direct election of senators, and the conversion from multi-member districts to single member districts, are all examples of major reform in the US process that were all “impossible” until they happened.
Yeah, I assumed we were talking about the Senate - which would require huge, fundamental changes in order to be made proportional.
With the exception of suffrage, I would argue that that is a bigger change than any of the others you mentioned. It would require precisely the people most hurt by the change (small states) to vote for substantially decreasing their voter power.
I'm not claiming it's impossible, but I think it is silly to dismiss calls for more radical action in favor of a constitutional amendment with no path to get there.
Because the system is broken, people are angry and want to tear down the system and replace it with something else. Unfortunately, history says that authoritarianism is a popular response to broken systems, and that it doesn’t end well. If we don’t want to go down that path we need to quit blaming individuals and get very serious about fixing the system: we need proportional representative multi-party democracy, like almost every other western democracy.
For citations and a deep discussion on this, see: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44244963-breaking-the...