...
Have those people you spoke to registered to vote? I don't know how it is in your country, in my country you don't have to register, but in the USA you do. If you don't register in advance you can't vote on election day. Anyway, as you say, their vote doesn't seem to make any difference as they are not in a swing state, that's why I was wondering. I think in that same situation of doubt I probably wouldn't even register. Just as I think that in the main battleground states the register vote will be at an all-time high.
As far as I know, those people from the United States whom I have talked to were registered to vote and still they were not sure if they should get out their way to do it this year. In my country one needs to register to vote, still participation is huge when comes to revelant elections, in the case of the USA, it seems voter registration depends much on public figures and influencers to convince the young to register to vote, being the most recent example of it Taylor Swift.
Even though there are people who live in deep red or deep blue states, the metric of the popular vote in the USA has some symbolic meaning and news use it to measure how popular a candidate actually is when compared to others, I think when Trump won back in 2016 he actually lost the popular vote, which means had the electoral system of the USA been one of direct democracy, Hillary would have become the first woman to be elected president of the United States.