take a guess

Mean rich people, their deluded lapdogs, and maybe like a thousand honest-to-goodness psychopaths.

Money, Propaganda, Tribalism, an undemocratic voting system...

Further, the uneveness of Power is gigantic: billionaires have way much power than common people, who are only powerful if together in large numbers and that's incredibly hard to make happen in a structured way with everybody aligned in the same way compared with what a single billionaire can do if they feel like spending $100 million, and the entire system is set up against people organising in such a way - notice how the biggest demonstration ever in the US, the George Floyd protests, achieved pretty much nothing at all, and the police in the US is still a force of Injustice rather than Justice.

The vast majority of people are either played like fiddles or made to feel impotent and hence just turn of from politics and just live day to day.

The US is not a Democracy.

In one word: money.

Gerrymandering and other structural means of disproportionate representation in federal government are big parts of it

Because while a lot of Americans support a lot of left wing positions, there are no major left wing parties, and a very small number of politicians who run for national or statewide office who actually take action to further left wing policies. There's Bernie Sanders, who isn't a member of a large party. AOC, and a few others qualify, but being a small proportion of those running, they're a small proportion of those elected, and have relatively little actual influence.

Ideas neither major party supports are basically impossible to see happen.

As others pointed out, there's major structural issues. There's also issues with apathy and people buying into the anti-electoralism/accelerationism con with religious ferver.

Two words, voter disenfranchisement

They remove the right to vote from our poor, our people of color, our citizens who have made mistakes but paid their debts to society, they remove polling places, making people wait hours and hours standing in lines to vote, giving them water is illegal, they purge voter roles right before elections…. And so so many more things. So many Americans don’t vote because they can’t because our right wing government has put so many roadblocks in the way.

Others have commented valid points but I also wanted to bring up propaganda;

A lot of people are unwilling or even unable (i.e. there is only one tv in the house and you don’t get to control the remote most of the time) to get their news from sources that aren’t constantly telling them that Democrats are out to get them and 2SLGBTQIA+ are the enemy and that if they just vote for (wealthy conservative) then all their problems will be solved overnight. Couple that with an education system that has failed to give people the critical thinking skills to ask what trans folk have to do with the economy and you get the 2024 election.

Because most Americans have knee-jerk reactions to labels as opposed to policies. Like how everyone supports all the protections Obamacare provides, but how they all want to get rid of Obamacare.

That's what I thought but those are the "official" estimates, which do strangely focus on NYC.

I guess we're talking about a fascist-oligarch-owned MSM who profit from war and chaos so they had a vested interest to suppress the real opposition.