The theory that I like to think contains more truth than any of these, however, is that advanced by Jim Geraghty at National Review who wrote that,
[The] Democrats just learned the hardest of hard lessons: The electorate — not just straight white males — doesn’t want their brand of deeply divisive identity politics, deliberate conflation of legal immigration and illegal immigration, policies that reflexively recommend and enact permanent bodily changes for teenagers questioning their gender identity, and basically the entire agenda of the 2019 Kamala Harris presidential campaign.In other words, I prefer to think that it's the policies that the Democrats have come to embrace over the last two decades that did them in - the wokeness, DEI, Critical Race theory, the refusal of big city attorneys general to prosecute crime, the resort to lawfare against their political enemies, males competing against females in sports, the Green New Deal, high taxes, high inflation - the whole panoply of contemporary progressivism.
Washington progressives live in a media bubble that constantly reinforces their opinions and insulates them from how most Americans think. Those Americans whose contrary opinions do manage to seep through into the left's email boxes are considered "garbage," "fascists," "racists," and sundry other variations on the same theme.
This is how they think of much of America, but thinking of their constituents this way is not conducive to winning elections. It'll be interesting to see whether the Democrats have learned the salient lessons from their "shellacking" this time around or whether their ideology and mindset is so ingrained that they can't help but repeat the same mistakes throughout the second Trump administration.