People aren't voting for what benefits them which means we are now in post policy politics. That means that what matters is the messaging and not the actual things done or the impact of those things on people. This leads to doing things that you have the ability to message the way you want and not doing things that help people. The MAGA crowd figured this out and figured out that angry yelling is the easiest message out there.

This is why democrats lost. They kept trying to have policy discussions about how to run the country along with ways to implement policy tied to impact on people, but that is hard to message. The MAGA crowd just finds things they can yell about. By the time impact happens they just yell about something else, louder and the people being hurt are just ignored.

The discussion about how much money is being saved/spent/etc is basically meaningless in post policy politics. The average person can have a massive drop in life expectancy and quality of life and it won't impact their voting so why does it matter how and where government spending happens? The sound bite is all that people are looking at and because of that DOGE is a huge success for those using it to get what they want.