As I just argued here, I think one of the big reasons Democrats got blown out last night is that they spent two years telling a big lie to the American people which blew up in their face. They tried to recover by installing Kamala Harris as Biden's replacement, but it didn't work because a) their credibility was shot and b) they were still lying. 

In my view, this was the big problem which doomed their efforts, but there are arguably other problems which also led to last night's defeat. Over at the NY Times, Bret Stephens looks at a few of them. 

Why did Harris lose? There were many tactical missteps: her choice of a progressive running mate who would not help deliver a must-win state like Pennsylvania or Michigan; her inability to separate herself from President Biden; her foolish designation of Trump as a fascist, which, by implication, suggested his supporters were themselves quasi-fascist; her overreliance on celebrity surrogates as she struggled to articulate a compelling rationale for her candidacy; her failure to forthrightly repudiate some of the more radical positions she took as a candidate in 2019, other than by relying on stock expressions like “My values haven’t changed.”

All of these "tactical missteps" may have mattered but ultimately (like me) Stephens sees bigger problems for the party, problems that could have been solved with just a tiny bit of the scrutiny Democrats apply to their opponents.

These mistakes of calculation lived within three larger mistakes of worldview. First, the conviction among many liberals that things were pretty much fine, if not downright great, in Biden’s America — and that anyone who didn’t think that way was either a right-wing misinformer or a dupe. Second, the refusal to see how profoundly distasteful so much of modern liberalism has become to so much of America. Third, the insistence that the only appropriate form of politics when it comes to Trump is the politics of Resistance — capital R.

Regarding the first, I’ve lost track of the number of times liberal pundits have attempted to steer readers to arcane data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve to explain why Americans should stop freaking out over sharply higher prices of consumer goods or the rising financing costs on their homes and cars. Or insisted there was no migration crisis at the southern border. Or averred that Biden was sharp as a tack and that anyone who suggested otherwise was a jerk.

Again, I think it was the last of these that really undid them, but Stephens may be right that a similar type of self-deception was taking place with regard to the economy. All of the talk about a "vibecession" was really just a way of saying Democrats were right and people who felt the economy was bad were wrong. And that same smug overconfidence extended to other issues.

The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.

I saw a lot of reports in the weeks before the election saying that Republicans were running heavily on trans issues. Now that Trump won resoundingly I wonder what Democrats will take from that. Granted, most people seem to have been voting based on economic issues but clearly the focus on left-wing extremism didn't hurt.

Finally, Stephens points out that the whole argument against Trump was a moral one. Democrats said he was a fascist, that he was like Hitler, and the end of democracy was imminent if he were reelected. 

At some point, people clearly tuned this out or maybe they were just turned off by Democrats' own moral licensing. If Trump is Hitler then anything we say or do to stop him is justified.

It goaded them into their own form of antidemocratic politics — using the courts to try to get Trump’s name struck from the ballot in Colorado or trying to put him in prison on hard-to-follow charges. It distracted them from the task of developing and articulating superior policy responses to the valid public concerns he was addressing. And it made liberals seem hyperbolic, if not hysterical, particularly since the country had already survived one Trump presidency more or less intact.

They really did become hysterical in the last couple weeks. All of the hundreds of stories about a comedian's joke turned out to be nothing. All of the claims that Trump wanted Liz Cheney to face a firing squad were also junk. There were new media-manufactured lies being told almost every day until, ultimatley, the Democrats entire campaign turned into a demonstration of Godwin's law, i.e. "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." For all the experts cited, this is what the left's argument really came down to, the kind of ignorant nonsense you're likely to find in the comments section on YouTube.

The Democratic campaign was based on making people afraid and in the end a majority of Americans just felt they were being manipulated and lied to by the same people who were simultaneously telling them Biden was fine. Once the big lie about Biden collapsed on television, Democratic credibility collapsed with it. If people can't believe what Dems were saying about Biden, why should they believe what Dems were saying about Trump?