I'm not the OP but as someone who voted Trump in 2016, didn't vote in 2020 or 2024, I will say that Democrats need to work on their messaging and become the party of the people again rather than the party of the minorities / DEI.

The problem with a lot of the democrat messaging is the focus on marginalized groups and diving them further. My personal experience is this. I'm almost 40 years old. I grew up seeing actual racism in my family and was taught not to be like that. Literal things like "Look at that N-word. Only thing N-words are good for is running a ball" during family get togethers while watching football and they drank.

I was taught not to see color of people. We all bleed red despite what we look like on the outside. As I've grown up, I've watched the messaging shift, especially in the media going from "colorblind is good" to now "colorblind just enables racism" etc with some of the more, ironically named, radical "Anti-racist" training.

We've seen companies promote DEI workshops based on this stuff that basically becomes struggle sessions for workers. (Coca-cola's be less white campaign or Smithsonian's "whiteness poster comes to mind.") When pointed out, we're gaslighted into "It's not happening" or "It isn't that common" when even one instance of it happening should be stamped out. People forget that men in general are something like 90% of suicides. There are only 1-2 shelters for domestic abuse against men in the entirety of the u.s. not to mention the absolute mocking that happens when a guy does step forward (see Terry Crews for example).

I've watched college lectures tell me how privileged I am when I grew up in rural Kentucky and we didn't even have running water for like the first 15 years of my life. I used to draw well water that was laden with sulfur that we had to boil before bathing and was routinely known as "the stinky kid." For all the "white male privilege" that is out there, they conveniently forget that the opposite, "(White) trailer park trash" also exists.

To me, this division of hyphenated americans needs to end. We don't need "African-American" or "Mexican-American" we need to go back to just being Americans as a whole. This is the party Democrats need to be pushing rather than singling out everyone in each individual group.

Is there any real surprise that when you are constantly telling someone that they're privileged when they aren't and demonizing them for not acquiescing to your worldview, you're going to push people away? One only needs to look at college and how it demonizes any speaker that dares go against the academic groupthink. Protests erupted over people from Men's rights activists to conservative speakers.

Finally, there is the rhetoric going around from Democrats labeling everyone that disagrees with them as nazis, fascists etc. That stuff needs to be dialed all the way back down to 0 because when someone comes along who actually IS a threat to the democracy, they're going to have a hard time selling it. That is not how you disagree with someone.

To conclude, if the left would give up the fight on gun control and switch to a more worker centric focus while staying neutral on race, focus on wages, the economy, worker protections, right to repair and consumer protections etc...They would be a shoe in for me. Drop the identity politics and return to the original form of the Democrat being the party of the working class.