This is precisely why democracy was never seen as a tenable system for millennia. Thinkers of the past always assumed that the people would be incapable of picking the most skilled leaders, and would instead end up picking the most charismatic leaders. This is precisely what Plato's endlessly cited allegory of the Ship of State [1] is about.
Winning representatives are still supposed to represent the people who didn't vote for them in fact.
Democracy isn't about picking the "best" leader because that's not necessary. "The best" is almost never necessary, and you are much better off building a system that handles regularly not getting the best, because no system reliably picks the best, especially since "The best" is a criteria that cannot be rigorously defined.
The problem with democracy is that we don't get anywhere even remotely near the best. It tends to promote people that are highly charismatic and highly corrupt. The latter trait is not a coincidence, but a part of getting ahead in democracy. Give corporations what they want and your election coffers will be full, refuse and they'll instead fund your opponent and their media will frame you as unelectable, a threat to democracy, or whatever new FUD phrase focus tests best at the time. And that corruption tends to correlate strongly with a complete vacancy of morals or ethics - see: how our entire political class, globally, flocked to pedo island like flies to shit.
Electing fascists is not an exercise in democracy.