I’ll be honest in saying that the fundamental problem is that democrats don’t understand power. They have this idea that you come up with policies and that people will thus hand them power. Republicans understand that power is the first order of business. If you don’t take power, your policies don’t matter. You want to help people? Cute. You aren’t even trying to take power, and when you do, you don’t use it to consolidate your power, you pretty much give it away. Case in point was RBG. She knew it wasn’t a given that there would be a democrat in power when she retired, she didn’t quit when there was one. And thus Trump got a free SCOTUS pick. When it’s the GOP, they only resign when their party will pick their successor.
The problem is not their understanding of power, the problem is their source of power. Politicians derive power from consensus - if the party agrees with you, you get to do what you want. Democrats/liberals require that your values align with their values, your policy positions align with their policy positions, your morals align with their morals. Democrats have a long and laborious purity test that every politician must pass whenever the polity feels like testing, and the democratic polity will test whenever anything happens. Republicans/conservatives, on the other hand, assign their values, policy positions and morals to whoever is leading the party. This worked for the Democrats when they were the party of labor. It's fucked 'em pretty hard since becoming the party of globalist investment treaties. The Republicans are in disarray whenever they can't find a charismatic leader - it's gonna be interesting if Trump has a stroke and they become the party of JD Vance.
I think that's definitely a problem- another example: they won't even consider packing the courts. Its so frustrating rooting for a party who's platform is built on not being willing to get things done. For this election though, I think the bigger problem was that they ran two pathetic candidates with a pathetic message and a pathetic campaign
Looking back at it? I think their only hope would have been going "ohhhh shit inflation is in Carter territory" instead of "fuck yeah our inflation is lower than Germany's" and then come up with a way to bring prices down. I don't think they had a prayer of that. The Biden administration was manipulating the strategic petroleum reserve like crazy and that sorta worked but without price controls there was nothing they could have done. Carter ate shit because Nixon killed Bretton Woods and inflation went bugshit. Volcker dealt with it by jacking the shit out of interest rates which was the objectively right thing to do but also heinously unpopular and what we got was a smarmy, fatuous oaf most famous for shilling GE, starring opposite a chimp and ratting out his friends to McCarthy. That wasn't much fun either, nostalgia be damned.
I still think a democrat without strong ties to the Biden admin and running on a somewhat econimically leftish platform like Obama did would have worked out. Kamala was republican-lite. There's no reason to vote for her instead of the real one. Anyone who was upset at the state of thing and wanted change was offended by her ties to the Biden admin and her "plan" being essentially nothing, her base was offended by her hard shift right, no republican would touch her with a 50 foot pole. I genuinely don't know who they were possibly trying to appeal to.