Wrong - sorry. The reason is that politically the US public is very skillfully managed from above via divide and conquer strategies and beaureaucratic techniques (i.e. identity politics, gerrymandering voting districts). The public polling is very clear about US citizen preferences, but US Govt policy is rarely aligned that way.
No, it's not clear at all: it's been tested in actual referenda and failed. What's actually happening is people don't intuitively grok the distinction between opinion polling, where questions are asked in the abstract (and often in the best light preferred by the org sponsoring the poll) versus actual voting, where the questions are very specific and include details like "your taxes will increase by X%" or "you will lose access to your current insurance plan".
