If you lived in Florida, I would say that your *individual* vote was *very* *very* substantial.
I find it kind of interesting that you are denying the possibility of collective action--that *your* decisions are in a very real sense also the decisions of the millions of Americans who think like you do. I sense a profound anomie: a sense that you are completely cut off from the rest of society, and so that your decisions are yours alone, and not part of our collective decision-making process.
Perhaps this marks the Gramscian hegemony of Hobbesian liberal individualism. But it's not a healthy state of mind to get in. It produces a lot of people who do nothing because, individually, they can't make a difference. Collectively, however, the people are very strong.
The strength of collective power is a very old point--the bundles of rods carried by the Roman lictors were there to remind people of it more than two millennia ago.
Why do people still have to be reminded of it today?
Brad DeLong -- J. Bradford DeLong Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley 601 Evans Hall, #3880 Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 (510) 643-4027 voice (510) 642-6615 fax http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/ delong at econ.berkeley.edu