Perhaps they should have left Western style Manifest Destiny in the past.

The Heritage Foundation is wild, and one of the most significant public policy groups with deep ties to American conservatism. Basically, any crazy policy that the Republican party has taken on as a major party plank in the past 50 years has a distressing high chance of having its roots in Heritage’s recommendations.

For example, in 1981:

Among the 2,000 Heritage policy recommendations, approximately 60% of them were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan’s first year in office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation

If you vote with the hope that it will fixes problem by itself, you won’t get very far. Voting is sort of the end of a political process, the other end starting in people building political movements. For your vote to mean something, you have to be voting with a political project. So, focus on the political projects: start building the structures that protect people first, without relying on the government’s approval. Support your communities of care and build your mutual aid networks. Don’t wait for it to be delivered from on high, get with people who also care about the things you care about and start using what you have to build what you can.