« [T]he albatross was not just Joe Biden; it was the longer-term perception that liberals constituted the country’s ruling class. This is something the otherwise inchoate conservative moment has emphasized consistently and effectively in recent years: that the Democrats were now the party of power and the establishment, and that the right was the natural home for anti-establishment resentment of all kinds — of which, it’s now clear to see, there is an awful lot. Most on the left haven’t seen it this way, frustrated by legislative stalemates and judicial setbacks and too-close-for-comfort elections seemingly every cycle, with a feeling all along that liberals were always swimming upstream. But in profound ways that the party’s voters rarely recognize, the Democrats have been the country’s incumbent political force now for a full generation. »
— David Wallace-Wells at the New York Times. (archived)
It was actually more than just an incumbency thing. In the eyes of much of the population, Democtats had become The Establishment. And whipping up popular grievances is always going to hurt The Establishment.
A problem is that Liberals are still not great at messaging – though there have been some minor improvements. Warning about Project 2025 and climate catastrophe had a little effect, though it wasn't that visceral.
Donald Trump's incompetence in the early months of the pandemic led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of additional American deaths and unleashed 2½ years of recession, unemployment, and inflation. Yet we hardly heard anything about this in the campaign.
Joy is nice. But if you really want to win over an unsettled electorate, you need to make them fear in their bones what the other guy would do if elected. Donald Trump personally created a real life dystopia in 2020. Reminding people of that in a visually graphic way would have offset Trump's unsupported claims about migrants on the prowl for your family pets for dinner.
If you are seen as The Establishment then you have to get voters to view the previous Establishment with greater trepidation. For five consecutive presidential elections, starting in 1932, Democrats successfully pinned the blame for the Great Depression on Herbert Hoover. Trump's pandemic disaster should have been good for at least two such cycles.
