They are bad at messaging. The prisoner taxpayer funded trans-surgery ad won Trump the election. That’s insane to say but the polling is clear.
Reportedly, Bill Clinton saw that ad one time and told the Harris campaign they had to combat it asap or they would lose. They ignore him.
Bad messaging….
Whether or not they are actually bad at messaging, the bigger problem is that right-wingers sit in their reality bubbles and construct wholly fantastical images of Dems. Then they come out with that bullshit into the media, and when the media pushes back on the idea, let's say, that kids go to school and then come home three days later with a sex change operation, the right-wingers scream "unfair! bias!" The media, being a for-profit industry, at least attempts to placate these voices somewhat and what we end up with is a sort of sanewashed disinformation system.
None of that has anything to do with Dems. Dems play no role in that narrative. The best the Dems can do is point out the lies, but people don't want to hear it. It's obvious that voters aren't moved by fact checks.
The other alternative is for Dems to play the same game. It doesn't work as well for us, though, because of asymmetries. The Pubs want people to hate government, so it serves their purposes for elected officials to be idiots and assholes. The Dems want to use government to help people, which makes the sort of intentional lying and gaslighting strategy of the Pubs a non-starter.
Which brings us to the ultimate factor: Dems will win when Pubs fuck everything up. And then, for some reason, voters forget about all the previous fuckups. Maybe this time they will remember because the demarcation line is so strong. The economy was great until now. The policies that are hurting it are the exact ones Trump brags about. Eventually everyone is going to say, fuck these tariffs and fuck everyone who foisted them on me.
But this strategy doesn't help Dems keep power after getting it. It just goes back through the wringer. The problem is that the lies should be illegal. They aren't because the Supreme Court believed that in a fair marketplace of ideas, the best ideas come out on top. Now that's been completely debunked, and I'd really like to see more attention paid to lies. Not with this Court or this Congress, of course.
