People associate "democracy" with "fairness". With
"representation". They associate it with "everybody's
voice is heard".
Which is really a matter of perspective. The people claiming that "democracy is dead" would be crowing about the "power of the people" if they were in the 51% and not the 49%.
Fairness doesn't mean "I get my way". And unfortunately, it's binary. Your candidate wins or loses. A loss feels like being ignored, not representation of your 49%.
That's a feature of specific choices about the electoral system and system for government. One'such which are not universal among modern democracies and which empirically lead to lower satisfaction with government and less effectively representative government.
To which we have to look at ourselves. We continue to set ourselves up for these binary choices. Where are the moderates that appeal to 80% of the population, not 40% at each extreme?
Fairness doesn't mean "I get my way". And unfortunately, it's binary. Your candidate wins or loses. A loss feels like being ignored, not representation of your 49%.