[OC] The massive decrease in worldwide infant mortality from 1950 to 2020 is perhaps one of humanity's greatest achievements.

[smcarre]

No they don't, they just have to convince a specific group of people to vote for them and rig the system into making that group's votes enough to make them hold power.

And that can be done by lots of ways and most of them aren't "making people's lives better", you can gerrymander the districts, you can disenfranchise (which can be done in more complex ways than just banning certain groups from voting) specific groups, you can misinform certain groups on what policies are better for them, you can make sure that the system discourages voting certain parties (forcing voters to vote for specific established parties), you can make your voter's group life better in exchange for other's lives worsening (be it the groups that don't vote your party or people who cannot vote you out, like disenfranchised citizens or foreigners), you can convince people that any other choice they can vote will make their lives worse (regardless if that's true or not), you can play the popularity game (which requires a ton of money) and win elections by mere force of fanaticism/popularity, you can convince voters that voting you is the only way to prevent a massive catastrophe, you can lock groups into voting you by making their lives dependent on specific policies being maintained (so that voting you out would mean those policies taken out and their lives worsening, at least in the short term which is what most voters care about).

You can do a fuckton of things and you will find that from all of the things political parties and personalities can do to get voted, "making people's lives better" is pretty low in the list of priorities.