Need citizens willing to read and attend meetings to learn about candidates rather than requiring dumbed down million dollar tv ads during Dancing With the Stars.
If candidates could get elected without spending hundreds of millions of dollars we would have candidates that voted their beliefs rather than the wishes of their donors.
The only way we can
really change things is to make third-parties viable.
The entire election system in this country is not only hopelessly antiquated, but it is based on unfair notions that how much your vote counts depends on where you live. The Electoral College system is, if you are honest, based on prejudice. Our founders were, perhaps rightly for their time and place, afraid of the great unwashed masses in the cities. They intentionally designed a system to insulate the choices from the general public (which we have subsequently haphazardly half-way dismantled) and one that places an inordinate amount of power in the hands of rural citizens over urban citizens.
We are left with a crazy system where my vote counts more than a New Yorker's, where a conservative in California has no national voice at all, and where a massive amount of power falls in the hands of a few "battleground" states based on nothing other than quirks of population and geography. And both parties game the system to the 9s (and collude to exclude any threat to their duopoly on power).
We need to abolish the electoral college and switch to straight popular vote with either run-off elections or a vote preference system. We also need to take the power to gerrymander districts out of the hands of the politicians, and make districting decisions based on simple grids, real population data (not the absurd, antiquated census system), and simple geography.
Until we do that, both locally and nationally, we won't be able to fix anything long-term.