So long as there is a good-sized portion of the electorate that doesn't know and doesn't care about policy substance, politics will be about marketing, narrative, and propaganda.
The typical answer to that is better education, but as an educator myself, I think that's a doomed answer. Mass participation in politics at the local level is more viable, simply because it has existed in the past, while a "well-educated" electorate that focuses on "issues and substance" has been the eternal pipe dream.
In complex systems you can fit data (high-information) to almost any model (courtesy of many variables, most of them hidden/assumed).
As long as the alignment between narrative and data is not grotesquely off, "high-information" is mostly useless and reinforces self-confirmation bias.
