Having peeked behind the political shroud on occasion (and still by no means an expert), I think people overestimate the complexity of the US political system.

Most politicians are not imposing some personal beliefs, they are just representing whichever voice their staffers/office hears most often. And, even for a senator, there aren't that many people who actually call to talk to a staffer.

The ones that do usually have a strong interest, so the staffers generally hear a skewed version of reality (and while these folks are often bright, deep domain experts they generally are not).

Sooo... Calling/writing does quite a bit more than you might think, if you can get even a reasonable number of people to do it who the staffers believe actually have expertise and are within the district/state.

The staffers will probably give a mostly generic response, but these are all tallied up internally and definitely drive policy.

Small business owners banded together to lobby WA state offices, regional offices, etc in the form of letters, calls, emails, and social media, and what that amounted to was having the 2nd most harsh lockdowns / business closures with zero financial compensation from the state.

Gov. Inslee and the Democrats below him had absolutely zero desire to engage in discussing concepts about how to safely keep small businesses open, even when we noted everything Gov. Polis (D-CO) was doing to try and balance things out.

All Inslee cared about was driving one number (COVID cases) down as much as possible to the exclusion of everything else. No amount of lobbying mattered.

If it drove any sort of policy... it had a backwards effect at best. All while huge corporations in our state like Microsoft and Amazon generated record revenues and drove their stock prices up.