so to answer my own question
I agree with a lot of what has been said so far and that it's not strictly one thing. Some of it is America's predisposition for right-wing bullshit, which is by design, as our education system is relatively poor and (right-wing) propaganda/disinformation has always been a part of the U.S. I don't think that this particular loss can be solely attributed to that though since that's been a factor in basically every American election ever.
Some of it is the economy. Stuff like "he's a convicted criminal!" and "he's a fascist who's going to destroy democracy!" tends to be less motivating than it should be when immediate basic survival needs are under threat. Every other media company has for the past two years been like "Bidenomics is great! The U.S. economy hasn't been this good in ages!", but the thing with the economy is that many of the metrics used to measure its health is more specifically how it's doing for the wealthy and not so much everyone else. Regardless of whether it is good or not, if people don't
feel like it is, you need to speak to that instead of just telling them they're wrong. Not that anyone should've ever thought that a guy who, for example, bankrupted multiple of his own casinos is or ever was good at business and economics, but when you're repeatedly told that you
must pick one of these two options and that voting for anything else (3rd party votes didn't change the outcome of the presidential race anyway) and/or not voting at all makes you a terrible person and you're not happy with how the one of those two choices is running things currently, guess what people tend to do.
A bit of it was what Zeo said. Not that the Dems should've never mentioned how horrible Trump is and always has been, but perhaps making it a primary point of their campaign wasn't completely necessary. Trump's not an unknown at this point, everyone's had at least 8 years to see what he's like, it's kind of preaching to the choir while simultaneously fueling the persecution complex these people have had for eons. Time and energy could've been spent on other things maybe.
I think what gets to the heart of the matter more though is that both Biden and Harris were particularly bad picks for 2024 and was a repetition of a mistake made apparent over the last 16-20 years of American elections. You go back to 2008 and there was a lot of enthusiasm for Obama's candidacy. People were (probably) tired of 8 years of Bush Jr.'s presidency and his time in the Oval Office capped off with that big '08 recession. The idea of a Black person finally having a real and likely shot of getting one of the highest government positions in the country filled people with hope that the U.S. was about to greatly change, and for the better. Obama's presidency however ended being business as usual, so when you get to 2016 there was very much the sentiment that people were fed up with years of an establishment that didn't feel like it was helping the American people and most politicians were too busy playing political games with each other. And of all people to get for the Democratic candidate we got....Hillary Clinton. Obviously Trump only got his 1st term because of the electoral college and it'd be best if we finally got rid of that inherently anti-democratic system, but to win the electoral college you still have to, y'know, win the popular vote in enough states. 4 years ago we saw Trump lose re-election because he became the new status quo and people had enough of his presidency for the time being plus were not happy with how covid-19 was going, so people were willing to ditch him, even for someone as also hyper-establishment as Clinton is in Joe Biden. Over the past 4 years though it's not exactly been a secret that Biden hasn't been super-well liked as President, his approval ratings haven't been great in quite some time. Then you had that terrible debate performance that, after much pushing, finally got him to step down. But then we got Harris as his replacement, who made it clear that she was basically just going to be Biden minus the dementia. Now would've been a good time for Biden to pick Sanders or just literally anyone who is not one of the gazillion establishment Dem carbon copies to be the nominee, especially because the DNC was forced to go with whoever he picked, there was not enough time to re-do the whole primary process. On a state level scale, this is a similar sort of mistake the Republicans made with the governorship here in New Jersey years ago. When Chris Christie left office, he was not well-liked and his approval rating was really low, like, one of the worst in state history kind of low. The GOP selected his Lt. Governor as their candidate, who then proceeded to lose badly, as she could not distance herself from her former boss enough--people really didn't want Christie 2.0. And while Murphy won easily that time, his re-election was not so much.
Another mistake the Harris campaign made was trying to run to the right in hopes that she could court "moderate" Republicans that weren't going to vote for her anyway. This is something Clinton tried in 2016 and it didn't work out for her either.
Basically, if your party is currently in power but people are expressing dissatisfaction with it, don't run with more of the same, have someone different be your nominee instead. I think that on some level, Americans have collectively for a long time been unhappy with the status quo in the USA, and
you kind of see this in the odd case of how a lot of people who voted for AOC also voted for Donald Trump. Two very different sorts of people, but what was the common thread in the responses AOC got when she asked why was basically "you're both outsider/not establishment politicians who are offering real change". Not that a wealthy
orange white man actually qualifies as an outsider or anti-establishment (the United States was made for rich white dudes by rich white dudes), but people are miserable enough under how things have been for....years?decades?centuries? that they'll go for literally anything different, even if it's motherfucking fascism.
so anyway apologies for the length and the possible rambling, semi-incoherent nature of this post, I've never really been that articulate
