> But the fact that they run on them without solving them shows that it's possible to run on a vaporware platform and never do what you said you would. So they would just find some new nonsense to run on.

People care about the things that are causing trouble for them. You can promise to fix their problem and then not fix it, but if there's nothing they need from you then there's nothing to promise them.

> Also to a non-negligible extent the "problems" they run on are already illusory or unrealistically exaggerated, like demonizing various groups, or capitalizing on people's lack of understanding of how regulations can amortize risk.

Nah, that's just confusing the problem with the rhetoric.

Republicans hype immigration because the Democrats have an immigration problem:

a) "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free".
b) Generous social safety net.

You can't have unlimited immigration of the world's poor and then give them all welfare; you have to pick one. But Democrats can't choose, so we end up with this nonsense where immigration which is formally illegal is still happening at scale and they're neither willing to formally legalize it nor enforce the law against it.

Which means Republicans get to beat them over the head with it because the Democrats have no response to it when they're legitimately caught in an inconsistent position. To stop that from happening they need to pick which one of the two incompatible things they want.

Likewise, the US really does have a lot of regulatory overhead, and many of the rules are needlessly complicated, inconsistent, blunt, poorly considered or obviously corrupt. The people who actually have to interact with them -- mostly small businesses -- are intimately familiar with it and find it infuriating. Now, some of the rules are net positive, but even those are often still needlessly complicated or in conflict with other, stupider rules. To fix it you would need large teams of smart people go through all the rules, throw out the bad ones (even if they're corrupt and someone wants them that way), simplify the needless complexity, do a cost/benefit analysis that includes the administrative cost of implementation and have the ability to actually modify them. Which requires fastidious people to do something expensive and boring at large scale. But until that happens -- which it hasn't -- there is still a problem.

And in the meantime the Republicans get to say "regulations bad! less regulations!" and have a bunch of people cheer because they know how much the status quo sucks.

> There is a very real movement that is based in getting a large mass of non-wealthy people to reject reality in order to capture their votes to support the goals of a small number of wealthy people.

Eh. That's kind of one of the things a cardinal voting system does fix.

You're defining the problem too narrowly. The general issue is, in a two party system, both of the parties are big tent parties. Which means that if your party wants both X and Y and you need a majority to get either, the people who want X can go drum up support from people who want Y so their party gets in and they get X, because by nature the other major party will support both not-X and not-Y, so more support for Y is more support for the party that wants X.

If you have a voting system that supports arbitrarily many parties and your party supports both X and Y but X is stupid or unpopular, you can't win by getting more people to support Y because then some other party would come in and support Y but not X and then win because you've convinced people to want Y but not X and now that's actually one of the options on the ballot.