John Quincy Adams won the presidency with 31% of the vote. It’s a remarkably bad system! (Especially when there are multiple parties.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1824_United_States_presidential_election

And yes, protests are generally a sign that governments are doing a poor job serving everyone’s interests, particularly the large numbers of people who wind up not voting for the winning party in a given election. In an alternative timeline, a candidate like Trump could have become a uniter after a surprise victory, but that’s obviously not in his nature (or his strategy!). More deeply, Mitch McConnell has stonewalled major legislation while continuing to appoint conservative judges to the bench — it’s an attempt to move policymaking to the judiciary because he doesn’t want to adopt more popular policy positions.