If the population is fairly happy with you but you don’t get many votes because of a low turnout, that’s probably because you haven’t gotten people to come to your party or to just leave the opposition party. Your party membership is what gets you a good turnout. And you get party members by really makes groups like you so much that they become political activists. You gotta focus on pleasing your largest demographics. You can see the number of socialists, patriots, liberals, conservatives, environmentalist, and so on, and you can try to get the largest ones to be happy.
The stuff you seem to be doing isn’t targeting a particular group, but rather seems to be mostly about helping you balance the budget. And most is dealing with stuff that takes a lot of political capital to do. Lowering the military budget takes a lot of political capital and really angers the patriots, and you’ll really be screwed if a terrorist attack turns a lot of people into patriots. Altering labor laws makes trade unions unhappy, while there’s not much that pleases them other than low unemployment levels. It only makes the small population of capitalists a bit happy, and probably not as much as pollution controls make them angry.
You’ll get a lot more done if you focus on things that use very little political capital and cost relatively little. And otherwise focus just on the major problems. Do things that have multiple positive effects. And try to do things that don’t anger certain groups because you may disappoint your advisers and as a result have less capital generated per turn. You can do a lot of little technology, incentive, and environmentally related initiatives for very little capital and cost, which make people happy and have many long term benefits. You could introduce child care provisions to make people happy and boost productivity. You can lower petrol taxes out of necessity, introduce a carbon tax for the revenue, plus it’s long term effect in raising GDP (by lowering carbon emissions, which improve international relations, which improve trade). You can save political capital by just lowering corporate taxes instead of both corporate and income taxes to relieve tax evasion. You can save pollution controls for last, after you exhaust all the more favorable pollution reducing efforts like telecommuting initiative, clean energy subsidies, etc. Combat crime with the basic options first, like more funding for prisons, community policing, police force, and intelligence. Doing the many things that reduce car usage leads to less pollution (and the associated health effects), lower oil demand which lowers oil price which increases GDP. The result of that is commuters and environmentalist get happy, capitalists get happy (GDP), trade union gets happy (employment), and health issues like asthma and life expectancy improve, making parents happy and increasing productivity.
If a group is particularly unhappy and threatening attacks, there’s usually some policies available to please them that doesn’t have much of any unfavorable side effects. For example, veterans benefits is pretty cheap and patriots love it. Lowering military spending can cause a lot of negative events such as losing an island to a foreign invasion, plus it makes angry patriots, so I usually leave it or even increase it later on. Terrorism risk can be lowered by increasing foreign aid, plus it benefits international relations and the chain effects from that.