I'm not sure I agree with this read.

I think the Dems agonising over Trump have missed the point of this election and are over complicating things. If we look at the numbers, at the moment (95% of votes counted) the Reps got 74m votes (same as 2020) and the dems got 70m - thats an incredible 11m down on 2020 when 81m voted Dem.

Trump has not made some great breakthrough; he'll probably be up 1-2m in the end but that's a few percent only; up 2-3%. The dems may end down a little less than 11m but that ball park is right and still a HUGE number; thats 13-14% of their votes lost! The real story of this election is not Trump breaking through but the Dems: they failed to get voters to vote for them and fell back.

So all this agonising over how to beat Trump, and Trump being the story, and Trump having all the attention is wrong. The Dems lost this election because they keep making the same mistakes. The electorate decides what the issues of the campaign are, not the political parties. For the voters it was clear the number 1 issue was the economy, and immigration was as up there too as a priority. Trump spoke to his supporters about the economy & immigration, and despite his rambling speeches his campaign team packaged that into bite-size chunks for their friendly media and for social media; his message got through to his voters and his vote held up.

The Dems decided the most important issues were around women's rights and protecting democracy. They seemingly decided the electorate was wrong on the economy because in their minds Biden created so many jobs, and Biden put in the inflation reduction act and so on. It didn't matter to the Dems how voters felt about that; the Dems seemingly felt like because the stats said they'd done well they didn't need to address that issue. And the Dems seemingly decided that immigration was not an issue to tackle; instead the topic was treated as a sign of how backwards and hateful the republicans for focusing on it. So instead of actually addressing the concerns of voters as a whole, they focused on the issues that rile up the core voters in the democrat party.

The 50:50 split in the polls was a nonsense; that was always "% of likely voters". The real underlying numbers actually show a 1:3 split: 1/3 Dem, 1/3 Rep and 1/3 unlikely to vote. In 2020 the Dems won because they got some of that other 1/3 on side. In this election they did not; they fell back to their own voters. Bizarrely if the Dems did target anyone, it was the 1/3 of Reps who they hoped would be disgusted at Trump. They seemed to forget that regardless of Trump, Reps is a broad coalition who disagree with the Dems on various other issues - that might be social issues, or the size of the state, or welfare or immigration. Those voters would hold their nose and vote Trump and were not in play. Meanwhile the Reps got their vote out, and a slither of that 1/3 and that was more than enough to beat the Dems.

The Dems could have won this election, but they ran a terrible campaign. And I don't mean Harris herself; she was given an impossible task taking over last minute with someone elses election machine - I mean a terrible campaign over the past 2 years. The DNC prevented an open primary against Biden, despite serious concerns last year around his fitness. The DNC supported Biden in his intransigence in leaving the race and lied about his fitness, and then when he finally left when it was clear he was unfit they were complicit in a rushed coronation for Harris. Harris then had the impossible task of trying to campaign as a change candidate while being unable to criticise Biden as her Vice president, and also inheriting a campaign structure that was tied to Biden and run by Biden loyalists.

Trump did not blot out the sun. The Democrats decided to talk to themselves and not the electorate.