Comment by specialist

#1 Per our Constitution, USA has minoritarian rule baked in.

There's many anti-democratic choke points: Electoral College for POTUS, Supreme Court, US Senate, gerrymandering effect on US House, long history of systemic disenfranchisement, etc. aka Vetocracy per Francis Fukuyama.

#2 ~6m Biden voters stayed home in 2024.

There's a sizeable cohort of infrequent voters and a huge cohort of non-voters who self disenfranchise. Due to nihilism (voting doesn't matter), both parties are the same, low motivation, whatever.

#3 Like most everywhere else, our information ecology is broken, fragmented.

The audience for "traditional" media's news is tiny, compared to social media. The Dems focus on "traditional" whereas GOP have successfully embraced "social". So for all the billions spent every presidential election (political advertising), most voters don't ever hear from Democrats.

Therefore, US voters are mostly unable to correlate policy positions with politic parties. So mass politics really comes down to marketing and vibes.

#4 Addressing these "legitamacy" issues (government by consent of the governed) is wicked hard when one of our two political parties has been utterly opposed to democracy and effective governance for decades.