It used to be that 'get out the vote' was the key to winning elections because people mostly didn't care about politics and, if they got to the poll, they would vote based on an impression gained over a long period where the only details that held constant were facts. Politicians said a lot of nasty and dishonest stuff about each other but, their reach was limited and the messages were neither very consistent or sophisticated.
Lies were background noise. People made simple decisions based on impressions that were substantially based on reality and self-interest.
Today, elections are in a communication milieu based on pervasive communication technology and sophisticated product marketing techniques. Advertising has been proven to work (people routinely buy things that are unhealthy, overpriced or useless based on advertising) and, with the addition of unlimited money, provides a constant propaganda stream where the fiction overwhelms the facts.
Both parties have access to this technology but the Democrats are missing one other thing. They are unwilling to say things that completely contradict reality. Republicans are. So, we have been subject to eight years of assertions that Barack Obama is an extreme, liberal socialist even though that is literally the opposite of the truth that he is a left leaning conservative.
We are told that Obama and the Democrats have ruined the economy and that is literally the opposite of the truth. We have been told for years that Obama "wants to take away your guns" another assertion that is completely untrue. The list goes on and on.
It turns out that humans are largely powerless in the context of sophisticated and pervasive advertising. As a consequence, we have grocery stores filled with unhealthy food that people buy with joy, a Christmas holiday season that bankrupts people, and the rejection of the Democratic party.
Back in the day, the political class had a certain loyalty to the idea of our political system. Their self-image required them to pretend to be honest, to pretend to value the give and take of a system with competing interests, to pretend that they respect America and its people, including their fellow politicians. That is, there was, if not honor among thieves, there was a quaint expectation that being able to get a lot of votes entitled one to some deference, even if only as a matter of respect to their voters.
This is no longer the case. Arguably going back to McCarthy in the fifties, we have moved away from the idea of governing as an honorable profession of serving America's interests and toward one where the pursuit of power is paramount. It is justified with the notion that one cannot do any good if one is not elected, but it comes down to the use of any means possible to gain and keep power, even means counterproductive, even traitorously so, to the interests of the country.
So, we elected a political party who refuses to implement ideas that are known to work (and it used to love) such as 'cap and trade' for CO2 reduction even though our military lists climate change as a major security threat. They pretend concern about the deficit even though it's been proven time and again that deficits are the only way to keep the economy moving in a recession. They say that health care workers exposed to ebola should be quarantined even though the experts say clearly that that would be counterproductive.
It all adds up to a vicious imbalance. On the one had we have people
There was an idea called 'laissez faire capitalism'. It said that, for capitalism to work, it must be pure. Capitalists should be allowed to do anything that made sense to them in the pursuit of profit, that there should be no regulations or impediments on market processes.
This was a very bad idea that lead to another thing called 'social darwinism'. Adherents to this idea rejected calls for them to make factories safe for workers, arguing that the workers would never adapt to industrial life if those unfit for factory life were protected and thereby allowed to breed unfit children.
It became obvious that these were completely dysfunctional ideas and, today, there are no purely capitalist societies left. Every place has regulations, some form of economic redistribution and, among other things, lots of workplace safety rules.