Seems the problem may be a lack of competition.
There's usually a ton of competition, but most people simply don't care. Ask people who they voted for in the last primary for state legislator, and the reasons they voted for them over their opponents. In my experience, people often have a hard time remembering who they voted for the next day, and it's extremely rare for someone to have a good reason why they voted for them.
I've seen a lot of reformist candidates run against corrupt incumbents and lose. It's depressing, but even more so when you see that almost no one bothered paying attention to the race. And then you see the same people complain later - "Why's the government so bad? How come there's no choice and all candidates are the same?"
Voting third party in our system just means that the opposing side has a better chance of gaining office
If you're staunchly Democrat, and you vote that way in an overwhelmingly red state, is that also a wasted vote?
Well yeah. That's why we need proportional representation. People should vote, not land.
The problem is that people feel so helpless in politics that getting them to care about their mostly invisible state legislature, never mind the Federal, is a Sisyphian task.
It really, really, really doesn't. If you can gerrymander Congressional districts and split North Dakota from South to get the electoral results you want, then "land matters" is just a way of saying, "I want power and I'm willing to rig elections to get it."
>We've lost sight of the fact that each state should be its own experiment in democracy
Rubbish: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-kennedy-single-paye... . Democracy is the principle that people affected by decisions should, by degrees, get a voice in those decisions. Electoral rituals are not democracy, and in fact, when an election in Louisiana or Texas can determine that people in Massachusetts and California don't get to make our own public policy choices, that's undemocratic.
It's not even remotely close, and that's why the system is so broken.
As a matter of fact, in the last case where a state legislator's seat was contested in the primary at all, I believe I voted for Pat Jehlen, who has a progressive record on economic issues I care about (health-care, wages) and helped pass a bill labeling transgender people (I know some) as a protected class for antidiscrimination purposes. Plus there was pizza at the phone-banks for that bill, and I can always appreciate that.
Who was a theocrat?
But perhaps if there was a parliamentary system where one party wins leadership, then they would have to take the blame for bad results.