The American political system is this way by design. Change was meant to be slow and happen over decades. Fifty-eight percent of Americans might be for legalization of recreational marijuana use, but you also have to take into account how those people are geographically distributed and the political makeup of the rest of the country.
Unless something completely unexpected happens, marijuana legalization will happen on a state-by-state basis and might take twenty more years to happen in places like Alabama.
Edit: To further illustrate this, if fifty-eight percent of Americans are for legalizing marijuana, that means that 185,600,000 Americans are pro-legalization versus 134,400,000 who are against it.
And yet the Republican Party, which controls most of the government, has economic policies written into its platform that the majority of both registered Republicans and Democrats don't support in all areas.
Speaking directly to the marijuana legalization issue, I'm not seeing anything in the poposals to legalize marijuana at the federal level that would prevent Alabama from passing laws against marijuana should it choose to do so at the state level. Hell, we still have "dry" counties in some areas almost a century after prohibition was repealed.
Reagan pushed the country to the right for at least a century.
I refuse to accept that.
Edit: fixing issues caused by posting from device with touch screen input.