When one side says their candidate is the Messiah, and the other side says their own candidate is deeply flawed, where does that push someone on the fence?

Probably the one that admits to their candidate’s flaws. The side claiming that their side is the Messiah can only reach people who are willing to believe that narrative. It tends to be very alienating to the average voter.

What’s baffling to me is that there seem to be a lot of people on the democratic side who simultaneously believe all kinds of contradictory things. Trump voters are all blindly devoted to their cult leader, but if we just shift a few more degrees to the right, that will win them over, somehow. Or, the key to winning elections is by winning over moderate swing voters who don’t feel attached to either party, and the way to do that is to demand blind devotion to our candidate while screaming that the other side is Hitler and anyone who even considers them is a fascist. It’s absurdity. And yet, no matter how many times these strategies fail, people refuse to learn from them.

I happen to come from a conservative family, and that made it immediately obvious that even the best attempts by someone like Biden or Harris to win over the right were doomed to fail, and the Dick Cheney strategy was absolutely not even close to “the best attempt.” The reason is that Biden and Harris look and sound like typical, mainstream democrats, who their entire political identity is built on opposing. Of course, my parents are always going to vote Republican, but the one person on the Democratic side I’ve ever heard them say they respect is Bernie Sanders. DNC strategists and their loyalists cannot comprehend this.

So many people adhere to this overly simplistic ideological model as if it’s just a truism - that the things people support are more or less innate characteristics randomly developing from birth and the combination of those things makes everyone fall someone on a one dimensional spectrum from left to right, and everyone votes according to who’s closest to them ideologically. And so the only way to win is to assume the far left votes will fall in line behind you while you move right to appeal to the centrist swing voters. But that whole model is bullshit, and it has been proven to be bullshit time and time again.

A large part of Trump’s appeal is that he’s able to present himself as an outsider. Moving right and shaking hands with Cheney, trying to be like, “See, the whole political establishment hates Trump,” merely reinforces Trump’s credibility as an outsider while also tying Harris to the disastrous policies including the War on Terror. The failure of the Bush administration is a part of why conservatives turned to Trump in the first place! It’s insanity.

If you wanna win by peeling off Trump voters, the best way to do that is by targeting people with libertarian values and running on isolationism and staying out of foreign entanglements. But that would require actually doing that, or at the very least, it would require not painting everyone who disagrees with your interventionist policies with the same brush of being a “Russian bot.” Alternatively, you can say, “screw Trump voters, we’ll win by mobilizing the base,” but that would require adopting popular leftist policies that would hurt their donors’ profits.

So, being unwilling to actually play the game, all that’s left is to put forward the same platform of interventionism and neoliberalism that has simply outlived it’s moment and does not have enough adherents to win.