Miles, I am afraid that what we are getting is democracy in its purest form - the mob rule. As HL Mencken aptly observed in 1920:
"when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost."
While Mencken's comment may sound too acerbic or even misanthropic to some, I think they hit the nail right on the head. People do not think rationally, in the sense of rationality being used in philosophy, logic or science.
There are many reasons for that - but the main one in my view is the transaction cost needed to acquire necessary information to make a fully informed decision. It takes a lot of time, effort and research skill to obtain information needed to make a political decision. Yet, the payoff of that decision to an individual voter is minuscule. The election of this or that candidate has little impact on most people's everyday life - probably the most noticeable one is being pissed or happy that "their" man lost or won.
Of course, this situation is not unique to this country or to politics. People have to make choices every day, and they have to make them quick, but usually they do not have enough information on hand to weigh their options or even to comprehend what options they have. So they face another, much more fundamental choice - either do something based on the information they can obtain quickly or be paralyzed by inability to make any choice at all.
To overcome that dilemma, most people employ what some sociologists call "stock knowledge" or ready made beliefs, perceptions, prejudices, stereotypes, and rules of judgment that are taken for granted in a particular culture of community - without any questioning of their validity. Because using stock knowledge is an integral part of everyday life - people do it routinely and do not even try to use different modes of rationality, such as those used by scientists. The only thing that can change that is where "stock knowledge" does not work anymore and is producing results that are clearly and unambiguously false or against all expectations.
So the bottom line is that people will not make rational political decisions, not because they are incapable of making them, but because of the way human mind works to overcome the imperfect information problem. This is why democracy almost certainly degenerates into a mob rule unless some mechanisms are put in place that (i) limit the choices people can make based on the "stock knowledge" AND (ii) implement an effective alternative to "stock knowledge" to provide adequate information.
Wojtek