I cant do it anymore without yelling at people, and thats not who I want to be.
Joined a few "antifascist" circles on my socials, and fuck, its...rough. Just spent 10 minutes going back and forth with a 
defender who refused to google anything. Tons of anticommunism. Lots of "vote blue no matter who." Their idea seems to be that fascism begins and ends with Trump/Maga and is not the natural state of Amerikkka.
Every now and then I'll come across someone who has done the reading, learned the history, and is trying to teach - but 9/10 times its a meme page and not an individual person, which us...surprising for some reason.
Anyways ive hit the point where "social media has sent me a silly notification, i shall neither read nor respond to it." Fuck it is slept like shit and am grumpy so im napping.
National elections in the US are fundamentally scuffed. However, like you note - local referendums and protests are still valuable for actual harm reduction (versus Kamala vs. Trump style choices).
I think that most electoralism as change dies right now at the national level (i.e. house of rep/senate elections). Until either a proletarian party emerges or the dems do purges, no amount of left candidates can actually achieve anything since they'll just be rotating villain'd.
However, I do think that a succdem prez could potentially be interesting if they were willing to wield authority to punish ICE, etc. Doubtful, but who knows, maybe dems will put up a candidate worth voting for just for revenge against fascists.