This has happened before... I don't expect Dems to ever really learn this lesson

Why would they? The party in its current form exists as a reactionary pressure release valve for after the actual party of action deconstructs the roadblocks that keeps the money controlling both parties from self-replicating.

What kind of political landscape will democrats come back to in 2028? Doesn’t project 2025 aim to dismantle a lot of the current establishment?

Project 2025 is not an actual policy of anyone with power.

I saw so many ads by Harris complaining about it, and that's part of how I knew she would lose: when you fight against something that isn't real, you're going to lose.

> Doesn’t project 2025 aim to dismantle a lot of the current establishment?

Didn't the Reps distance themselves from that? Vocally and repeatedly?

You may think that that playbook is their playbook, but apparently their distancing themselves from it worked well enough.

Project 2025 is basically QAnon for the Democrats

Trump and Vance will almost certainly pull strings to erode the current political system in Washington with no regard for the spirit and likely even the letter of the constitution.

Did Harris run on social activism? I didn’t get that from the campaign’s messaging. Not Biden’s, either.

I believe social activism has been associated with the Democratic Party recently, I suppose it is implied when you run under their umbrella.

It’s rather tricky to fight this perception when it doesn’t primarily come from either one’s messaging or one’s actions.

Not tricky at all: any politician can distance themselves from some fringe group of vocal nutjobs.

Even Trump has done so on occasion, like with the project 2025 conspiracy theory.

Indeed, just denying it while having a ton of actual close ties to it worked in that case.

Or, his voters didn’t care in the first place so the blow was never really gonna land (I suspect this is more like it)

It’s clearly the perception. Before Harris entered the race.

It doesn't need to specifically be Harris or Biden's policies to drag them down. There's very obviously a backlash against some progressive ideology going on, and the democratic party is clearly at least partly beholden to adherents of that ideology. That's why Harris can't give obvious and clear answers to (some) simple policy questions.

Yes, but the claim was they ran on that. Fixing the problem (if it is a problem) is a lot easier, and the necessary approach to fix it very different, if you ran on something and it backfired, compared with not running on it and still losing votes over it.

[edit] I also truly wondered if that’d been a significant part of their message, and I missed it—in the age of granular ad-targeting, who knows?