Opinion matters because it is what gets you elected.
Over the last few years, we have seen that elections don’t really matter. Judges keep overturning voter-approved laws and even inventing new laws that have never before existed (e.g. gay “marriage”). I seem to recall that a few years ago, a Republican won the governor’s race in Washington, which was overturned by repeated vote counting which turned up a few “new” votes each round until the Democrat finally won. Not to mention that election fraud is blatant and the left does not even try to hide the fact that it will not tolerate any efforts (like voter ID) to make election fraud more difficult.
In brief, the opinion of the people has not mattered in a long time.