Political science corroborating observed evidence; The polls barely moved at all during the entire 2012 cycle, including internal very-expansive-and-ultimately-accurate polls. I very much doubt this is a cultural-belief based thing - if anything, political operatives tended to believe they had more ability to influence results than reality would suggest.
Political organizations have algorithms to predict how an individual will vote, how likely they are to vote, and how likely they are to volunteer to work for a candidate. These algorithms are actually pretty simple, with a ton of accuracy coming from not-very-much data (and severely diminishing returns on increased accuracy as you pour in massive amounts of marginally-useful data). They run experiments (testing different methods of GOTV, different email subject lines) using control groups and decently-large sample sizes to see if any discernible change is induced by any of these approaches. Spoiler: After thousands of experiments, nothing earth-shaking was discovered. The biggest discovery of the last cycle was "using short, casual subject lines in email raises somewhat more money which can be used to very-slightly-marginally increase voter turnout among less-motivated voters".
A lot of this has been publicly discussed, especially in post-election articles about the campaign - you can look it up. None of those accounts are entirely accurate, and the specific data is confidential, but the gist is there. You can get an idea of what's probably possible by what people got excited about.
Disclaimer: All of this is about change at the margin of the current climate/system. A drastic overhaul (with something totally mind-bogglingly sane like anything-but-first-past-the-goalpost-voting) probably would enable some actually-effective approaches (at least for a while until a new equilibrium was found).
I agree with you, but I do wonder how much of that is just because they're just looking at short-term effects ("how many votes can I swing over the next 6 months"). Major changes to a person's belief system (or to a borderline tribal identity like political parties can be) can happen, but they usually happen over years or decades, not weeks or months.
Edit: Although I should mention that a person's parents political view tend to be a fairly good predictor of your political party affiliation, so perhaps even the long-term effects are moderate at best.
See this Newsroom clip.
Basically, their news network is trying to change the way political debates work by having the moderator force the candidates to answer the questions that are asked of them, not interrupt each other, justify arguments that are based on obvious falsehoods etc.
How big of a positive impact do you guys think that this would have on society?
My initial thoughts are that it would be huge. It would lead to better politicians, which would be a high level of action. The positive effects would trickle down into many aspects of our society.
The question then becomes, "can we make this happen?". I don't see a way right now, but the idea has enough upside to me that I keep it in the back of my mind in case I come up with a plausible way of implementing the change.
Thoughts?