America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era

I think some of this is down to the inability of some folk (that to be clear, I think is stoked by the parties for marketing purposes) to differentiate between the beliefs of their party and their own personal beliefs. In this way, parties are not a matter of beliefs really as much as they're a matter of identity. I've witnessed this with my own family: my parents are and have always been Republican, and even though they hate Trump and virtually every policy he stands for, they still voted for him. When questioned why, you get various somewhat incoherent notions of hating Democrats. And... fair, as a Leftist, I also hate Democrats, haha. But I still voted Harris because as distasteful as I find the Dem establishment, they're closer to anything I want to see in the world than anything on offer on the other side.

This is basically it. When you define your identity by what you're against rather than what you're for then your own principles and beliefs are easily compromised. Partisans are blinded to inconsistency and corruption in their own party because the focus is always on "the other side", who are always considered worse, and thus anything is justified to fight the other side.

Take a step back and look at the information flows of democracy. One or two ballots per year, with a handful of questions on them. For the national races, that is maybe 3 bits/year on average? Compare with the constant stream of ads, speeches, news articles, etc. Then at the higher level it's not like adding repeated answers to the same question preserves much information (cf Central Limit Theorem). So really the information flows to the voters are the more significant part of this setup, with the act of choosing serving as a commitment to make you think you wanted everything you voted for.