Because people have memory that lasts longer than a goldfish’s. People remember the DNC and its politicians hyperfocusing on controversial social issues for the last decade to the exclusion of everything else. They remember Kamala’s fringe and cringe positions and statements from her California and 2019 campaigns and don’t believe she’s a proud gun owning moderate that just wants to make government work for us. Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader.
If you have the time, I highly recommend this interview between Ezra Klein and Democrat strategist David Shor (https://youtu.be/Sx0J7dIlL7c?si=VCLdHs48Tsk63GqP). He goes into a lot of the details around the question you imply. Long story short, Republicans have done that, but also on the issues people actually care about. This has given them a large trust lead in topics like the economy, crime, immigration, the border, etc. If Democrats had also hyperfocused on kitchen table issues, they might have won. By the time Kamala was campaigning, it was far too late to convince everyone that she actually cared about important issues. She had four years to prove she did not.
> Bonus, she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked in an interview, tanking her perception as a leader.
I have no idea how movement Democrats convince themselves to make up a platform for Harris, often from whole cloth, although usually from some vague, unenforceable statement or general platitude repeated at a few speeches. Instead they blame people for attaching policies to her; either conservatives attaching policies that she articulated clearly in past statements and campaigns, or Democrats attaching Biden's policies to her (which, nonetheless, were all perfect and he was the greatest president in a generation.)
People asked her point blank whether she still had policies that she articulated in the past. She refused to answer, and would just give some memorized speech (that someone else obviously wrote.) People asked her whether any of Biden's policies were wrong. She said none that she could recall, like a person carefully lying on the witness stand. She relied on media surrogates to make up policies that she could possibly have, and spent a lot of her campaign denying that things that her surrogates said could be her policies were her policies.
The only thing we knew for sure about Harris is that Israel, crypto, and big tech were in. We could get that from Trump.
Harris lost because she wasn't willing to alienate a single donor, and would never be.
> she couldn’t think of anything she would do differently than Biden when asked
Which, though definitely suboptimal, would have been a pretty reasonable alternative to her opponent’s plan to self-cannibalize the government, threaten the sovereignty of long-standing allies, and chaotically disrupt world trade.
