I've been in online communities since shortly after my 10th birthday and this has never once been a problem.
Most of my friends when I was a teenager were people I met online. It was beyond a reasonable doubt good for me to be on the Internet during that time because it was the only place where I fit in, where I could be myself.
If I ever have kids, I hope they fit in better than I did offline, but if they don't, there is no way I am going to prevent them from socializing in online communities.
What were you doing from early 2017 to early 2021? I suggest you do approximately that, unless you've grown out of things you were doing at the time of course.
I'm a software developer and there are many times I have to wait for something (a program execution to finish, clarification about a task, etc.) and thus have time to open tabs for lemmy and other non-work-related websites.
I might not meet your criteria though because I don't usually create "several new posts daily" nor do I comment anywhere near on all threads I read (because I don't comment where I don't feel I have anything useful to add).
I think the US news sites are going to post their live updates to their websites too, that is at least how it was the last few presidential elections (I think I mostly used CNN). That is the same data they use for their news coverage, so you could use that; but watching live television will give you a clue when important updates have happened on them.
Of course you could just follow election-related hashtags on Mastodon to get a wide variety of people shouting all kinds of things about the election.
I wrote "at least".
I am older than OP, but not old enough to remember the 2000 election very much.