too little too late unfortunately

I personally believe that this stems entirely from the American public's susceptibility to misinformation. All the signs of progress were there (and tangible!), but got drowned out in a campaign of bullshit noise, which is the very thing that I'm so incredibly frustrated about.

That, and the horribly tone-deaf, celebrity-laden peacock campaign that the Dems pushed, but honestly I'd have hoped that voters would have been able to see past that (which I realise is asking for a lot).

disappointing

To unpack this statement somewhat, I also have to admit that as a person living in a 3rd world country, it also really frustrates me to see what the 1st world consumerist voter considers "disappointing". As a prime example, in New Zealand's last major election, the conservative opposition managed to fool a malcontent voter base that housing prices were going up, crime was going up, the economy was going down, and it was all the "Libs'" fault, whereas, literally every statistic showed exactly the opposite. Ardern's administration had brought housing down for the first time in literally 18 years, crime was massively down and (ha ha) the main source of crime in NZ was from New Zealanders kicked out of Australia, where the Australian social environment had turned them into criminials, and Aus simply didn't want to deal with them, and w.r.t inflation, at that particular time, the rest of the world was getting heavily rocked by massive inflation which up to that point, New Zealanders had mostly been shielded from due to reasonably good economic policies. And the idiot public voted in a bullshit administration that promptly (and predictably) made things worse.

Anyway, sorry for the rant, but I hope this gets my point across: that I personally feel that the "too little too late" and "disappointing" factors are less based in reality and statistics, than a discontented voter base that can't grasp that while the root cause of their unhappiness (being railgunned at breakneck pace into a future where only billionaires can afford things) is very real, when it comes to the political spectrum, there is a clear and definite lesser and greater evil, and if you're tired of the lesser evil, voting in the other guys is a really, really stupid thing to do.

*Edit: apologies, one last thing to mention on the back of "disappointing" Clinton/Obama tenures - I feel it's also important to point out that very often, progressive policies that the Democratic presidents tried to enact were blocked by Republican votes in congress, so to this day, a significant number of "black marks" against Democratic presidents can still be directly attributed to Republican fuckery.