Having spent some time to consider the question, heres my thoughts. I think one of the biggest issues is that the DNC and the left leaning social+idealogical groups which support it are openly antagonizing a majority. Which to be clear is white, hetero, male voters.

Theres a vocal large part of the DNC supporters that are angry and want to hurt straight white males systemically while proping their own prefered groups up.

So, theres an unaddressed self righteous hatred towards the majority burning in the hearts of many of the left. Only the left refuses to adknowledge it openly because it advertises itself as the morally superior party above things like sexism or xenophobia.

The dems need publically excuse or masquerade their instinctual hatreds and biases. Wanting certain groups of race, sex, and gender to have more privilege and oppertunity than others need to be carefully twisted into false-positive language like restorative justice.

The right are honest about their biases and hatreds. They know what theye’re about and dont need to morally justify it beyond God and Country.

A lot of people backing the DNC feel wronged by the majority and seek either vengeance and or for the system to be rigged in their favor instead of true equality. This attitude creeps up in advertised policy. If you want to actually win, stop attacking the majority and put some incentives for them in your policy too. Simple as.

If youre offering economic incentives, dont have it be just for people of a certain race. Have it be for all people of a financial class. “B-but the statistics show its X minority class that suffers the most from economic unfairness so don’t they deserve special focus/treatment?” No. No they dont. Give everyone poor and suffering under the system the same opportunities/handouts regardless of their skin color or your just trying to rig systemic privilege towards your prefered kinds of people and excuse it as a “necessary handicap”.

I’m a poor working class joe. I like weed. I would like to be a weed shop owner. Kamala is supporting weed and promises incentives for those trying to start up a business? Great! Where can I sign u- its only for black people because historically they were most effected by weed discrimination -oh, nevermind. See it’s shit like that that looses you voters.

Its hypocritical to want equality and opportunity, but only for certain groups of people and not others. Thats not equality nor is it solving the problem.

If you want to advertise your party as the one for equality, real honest to god equality, your economic and social policies needs to benefit everyone equally. Every person, every race, every gender, every personality type. Anything else is just hypocritical vengeance or trying to use systemic inequality in your favor wearing the skin of restorative justice. If your policies impliment selective privilege based on race and gender it hasn’t solved anything.

No, there is a crisis in democracy. Policy is locked up, meaningful change is nigh impossible, or at least much too slow. We’ve seen similar issues everywhere. We’re in a poly crisis world and difficult, complex and very costly decisions need to be made. We can no longer compromise ourselves out of this. Current laws and structures are not able to achieve this. People see this and are fed up. Extremism can feel like the only way out. I’m severely disappointed but I can understand where these voters are coming from. I don’t blame them, I’m not angry, I don’t think they (the vast majority) are bad people, I don’t even believe they necessarily made the wrong decision. I just had hoped we could make much better decisions.

The US is, apparently, not ready for a woman president. Especially a non-white woman president.

Y’all weren’t entirely ready for Obama either, given how he was treated.

I feel like a superstitious loon for saying this, but what I think should have happened differently is the universe should have worked like we rationally understand it instead like a glitched-up Matrix.

Trump’s offensive, obnoxious, criminal behavior is too extensive to even list without being tedious. He had almost zero platform except that immigrants are bad. Somehow more than half the voters in America picked him over a scandal-free, criminal-conviction-free opponent pushing optimism and making strongly positive proposals. The universe shouldn’t work that way. I really feel like this supports the theory that we are living in a simulation. It feels like somebody put their thumb on the scale to see what will happen.

Not surprised. The Harris campaign ran on the status quo, which many people are dissatisfied with, and pivoted to the right on various policy, when the people who like right-wing policies already have a party catering just to them - and that can come at the cost of alienating their own base or fracturing the coalition. For instance, many Latinos trend conservative in their values, but they voted Dem in the past because of all the “Build the wall” stuff. But then the Democrats said, “Trump’s just using it to posture, we’re the ones who are actually going to build the wall,” and they lost a bunch of Latinos and didn’t win over Republicans.

Promoting the Dick Cheney endorsement was an obvious unforced error, not even Republicans like him. Honestly a lot of their attempts to “reach across the aisle” seem more like patting themselves on the back for being “reasonable” than genuine attempts to understand and appeal to actual human beings. Like, generally, I think it’s a better strategy to accept that most of them are unreachable and focus on mobilizing your base, but if you are going to commit to that approach and make it the whole backbone of your campaign, then you actually have to understand who you’re trying to reach and how they think and why they do the things they do. Like, there are genuine ideological rifts on the right that are exploitable, like nationalism vs libertarianism, but Cheney and Bush tried to do something that both sides of that hate and it was a colossal failure, so bringing him on board just papers over those disagreements and makes it easier for them to consolidate around Trump.

A major problem that liberals have is that they’re attached to this idea of “reasonableness” where the best ideas will just naturally win out in the marketplace of ideas, and when the world doesn’t actually work like that they just can’t accept it. The right isn’t reasonable, they are (at least sometimes) proud of not being reasonable, because reason is the tool of the educated elite. And that actually almost makes a weird kind of sense, it’s like, imagine arguing that the earth is flat against a five year old - you could probably “win,” right? You have way more information in your repertoire and more experience with debate than they do, so you could selectively pick-and-choose things to support your point. So imagine being that five year old, having the sense that the adult is taking you for a ride, but knowing that you can’t debate or reason well enough to win on their terms. That’s the kind of psychology that we’re dealing with.

There are three ways you can respond to that situation. Either you say, “OK, these people are crazy and unreachable, let’s focus on mobilizing our own base,” or you say, “OK, we can work with that, we just have to go beyond reason and try to build trust or reach them on an emotional level,” (good luck with that, since that emotional level includes absolutely despising establishment career politicians, along with a substantial number of people who make up the dem coalition), or, lastly, you can keep trying to reason with them, and you will lose. Like, you could legitimate run a candidate who policy-wise is to the right of the Republican candidate on every issue and right-wingers still wouldn’t vote for them if they looked and sounded like a typical Democrat. You just have to wrap your head around that concept.