Voters don’t go and actually look at the data themselves. They rely on pundits and the news to tell them the salient points.
The problem is that the media has essentially lost most of its usefulness as a bulwark against the most egregious excesses of crony capitalism and cozied up to it instead. It feels like the Gilded Age again, but the people are somehow more insufferable. Cramming the “light of human consciousness into the stars” apparently requires we create CSAM generating machines powered by nitrogen oxide belching gas turbines. Even the folks at non-profit news outlets like Pro Publica have leadership that refuses to understand that it is difficult to prevent AI errors at scale. Nobody reviews drafts with such detail, we make a lot of assumptions, we trust that the person/machine is not feeding us trash.
This is, of course, doesn’t even bring up the fact that a lot of people in the US now get their news—similar to folks in India via WhatsApp (that became such a problem that Meta was forced to curtail the number of forwards you could do in the app)—by passing trash, hate fueling articles around on social media.
In essence we took the grand market place of ideas, and then let it get completely owned by a few firms.
The media, where it isn’t outright compromised, is dying to survive on any revenue stream. local news outlets which are the backbone of solving actual Issues for citizen are not profitable and dying.
We have platforms, which instead incentivize for the largest viewer count, so local content is sacrificed at the altar of the zeitgeist.