they are somehow crazy good at messaging.*

They are good at messaging because their base is so monolithic. For the most part, it’s religious (mainly christian/protestant/catholic/whatever), straight, white people. There’s so much common ground among them that you can pick a couple issues and make a boogeyman out of them. They’ve been doing it for years. Abortion was a big one, then it was same sex marriage, then it was immigrants, then it was transgender people. Not to mention the cable news propaganda arm that feeds them the lies. But for democrats, the base is so wide that it becomes hard to cater a message that applies to everyone. So there’s positions that you have to take that don’t apply to your entire base and sometimes that ends up fragmenting them and making it hard for people to get out and vote because people vote on their own self interest. Its why it was so frustrating when people were going to not vote for Kamala because of views on Palestine as if 1) Trump was going to be any better and 2) as if that was the only policy that mattered. Democrats need to stop trying to reach the other side of the aisle and reach the people that agree with them and get them out to vote by having inspiring candidates, not just milquetoast politicians that are going to try and be moderate. If the right takes 10 steps further right and democrats take 2 steps right to try and appeal to them, the middle ground has now moved further right which isn’t inspiring to your supporters on the left. And then you start to alienate them.