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aelephant comments on Does My Vote Matter? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I imagine most people feel relieved when one candidate wins rather than another because they think there is going to be a difference in practice between what one & the other would do. Convincing people that you're going to do X, Y, & Z is the purpose of a political campaign. In reality, the elected official has no obligation to actually do X, Y, & Z.
No obligation, sure, but in practice most officials do things that are basically predictable from their campaign predictions (once you apply an appropriate filter of cynicism). If one candidate promises to do X, and the other promises not to, you can reasonably conclude that the chance of X actually being done is substantially higher if the first candidate is elected.
(One reason for this is that even politicians find it difficult to lie convincingly and directly. They much prefer to be evasive or subtle on questions where their beliefs are inconvenient. Thus a bold promise is usually reasonably informative.)
According to this site Obama has not kept more than 50% of the promises he made during his campaign. To me that is evidence that what a politician promises to do is not a reliable indicator of what a politician will do.
I said that one should apply a filter of cynicism first.
Obama's actions on several fronts have certainly dismayed his supporters, but that's a far cry from them being indistinguishable from the policies that McCain or Romney would have enacted. (In particular, if you really think that stimulus and health care expansion were likely to have happened in the same way under McCain, I have to question your grip on reality.) In order to make voting worthwhile, you don't have to take politicians' statements at face value, you just have to be able to estimate some significant differences in their likely actions.
Stimulus possibly, but health care probably not.
I suppose a big chunk depends on what it is exactly you want or expect a politician to do. If the only things that matter to you are that power is decentralized, freedom increased, & less violence is done at the decree of government officials, then it really does not matter who you vote for. The differences between politicians are largely in what way power be further centralized, freedom decreased, & more violence be done. Those differences are not significant to me so long as one politician is not much more likely than another to launch a nuclear bomb or declare martial law.