You are so correct in your first statement yet imply something in your second I think is so incorrect in a wider context that it strikes me like whiplash.
Paying lip service but not addressing that friction was a significant part of what killed the Harris campaign, IMO.
well yes. That's the big issue. Trump didn't get more votes, Harris got drastically less than Biden. People didn't come out.
She had a bad hand needing to start out 6 months into an election cycle, and she played it poorly to boot. That's why this "we need to appeal to moderates/right wing" narrative is so frustrating. That's exactly what Harris did by trying to downplay Palestine/defend Israel and refusing to talk about the tensions in the job market. She established herself as "more of the same". That doesn't win votes in increasingly bad times.
They were generally good at making sure whoever is "really running the country" stayed in the Lawful Evil alignment. If the trump regime was smarter we may have been truly cooked.
Instead we have cartoon supervillains trying to pick fights with our allies in the open, and police openly shooting citizens. Pretty hard to defend that.
Paying lip service but not addressing that friction was a significant part of what killed the Harris campaign, IMO.