If only we lived in a democracy, then maybe voting for Democrats might be enough.
So we re-elected Obama and the stock market and corporate profits are at all time highs. The recession is over for them. Things are still bad for most people. Yet, instead of the Dems and GOP competing to propose better jobs programs, they're arguing over how many jobs to cut.
Both parties have moved far to the right over the course of my lifetime, but only recently has the GOP gone so far over the lunatic fringe that it is starting to hurt them electorally. But there's no reason for them to change, because they are getting 98% of what they want right now anyway (see opening sentence).
So the 2 parties play good cop, bad cop with the public, and most voters are choosing the good cop. Unfortunately, popular will is being thwarted in several ways:
1. The Senate has allowed infinite painless filibusters, and the GOP have used a record number of them to make it as dysfunctional as possible. So even with a majority voting sanely a lot of the time, very little gets done.
2. The House districts are so gerrymandered that even though the Dem House candidates got a total of a million more votes than the GOP House candidates, the GOP have a comfortable majority there, which allows them to essentially shut the house down, because the GOP would rather fight than govern.
3. Even the presidency is decided in ways that do not require winning the popular vote, and conservative rural low-population states have electoral influence much greater than the other states (way more EVs per capita).
4. Finally, the unelected Supreme Court has decided that corporations are people and money is speech, creating a media landscape dominated by large corporations. Karl Marx said that the dominant ideas are always the ideas of the ruling class, if I'm translating him accurately.
So we are several concrete steps away from a straightfaced democracy. How then does the public ever make gains? They fight for them beyond just the ballot box.
Poor People's Movements by Frances Fox Piven is the best book I've read on this subject. Recommended reading.