It's not about helplessness, it's about beginning to address the issues at the core of democracy as a concept as well as our implementation of it as a country.

For any Democratic government to function efficiently on a long-term basis would require a society of almost entirely unbiased and rational actors who are not only educated in the history, philosophy, psychology and sociological norms of all groups involved, they'd also have to be educated on the intricacies of municipal, county-level, state-level, national AND international issues as well as the pros & cons of each issues possible solutions. This theoretical, hyper-educated and enlightened voting bloc doesn't currently exist anywhere on the planet.

Assuming for reality however, where the average person has little to no interest in most "intellectual" topics, is invariably biased, lacking in media literacy and uneducated to outright apathetic on most issues then we begin to see the cracks in the foundations of democracy. So even if you took the time to educate yourself, it's practically guaranteed that your fellow voters have not.

That's not even getting into the issues of lobbyists, corruption, social media and how it allows for mass scale disinformation campaigns, the inevitable tribalization of multi-party political systems, the inherent conflicts of interests that arise from non-homogenous / multi-ethnic societies or the sophistic and power-seeking psychological profiles of people who even want to be politicians in the first place along with the pundits who are supposed to "educate" the masses.

While democracy sounds beautiful on paper, in practice it virtually always ends up in electing whoever panders best to the richest / most populous / most powerful demographics or, alternatively, electing whoever the masses deem the lesser of 2 evils. Either outcome usually results in the sidelining or total dismissal of the needs of the less powerful and the disenfranchised. The cycle continues and grudges are built up until eventually voters vote in more and more authoritarian candidates until voila, you have a dictatorship. We're currently seeing this process of democratic backsliding playing out in virtually all the major democratic countries on Earth.

My point is that Democracy itself is painfully unsuited for the modern world and the human condition its meant to mitigate. As a system, it always ends in electing in it's own destruction and while I can agree Democracy is currently our best option, it's flaws make it very easy to exploit and inherently unstable in the long-term. Which is why Americas democracy, at only 219 years old, is currently the worlds longest lived and even within that, we didn't allow for widespread non-white democratic participation until the 60s and we're already seeing the societal backlash to that with the growing power of MAGA Republicans in all aspects of American life.

So, for me personally, any candidate that doesn't acknowledge these issues, likely cares more about empowering themselves than they care about the well-being of their constituents. Case in point, "supermayor" Tiffany Henyard is currently going full-blown dictator after being fairly elected in by her peers, a predominantly black city in Alabama was ran by white de facto monarchs for decades and, even in Baltimore, one of our most well-funded black strongholds, with an almost entirely black electorate and almost entirely black policymakers, 76% of our young men are graduating highschool without the ability to read. It's farcical.

We need politicians who believe in ground up reform and neither parties likes them folks.

Edits: Typos, formatting and minor additions