Democrats ran mostly fine candidates. I think people have really unrealistic if not impractical expectations. I personally want my politicians to be boring.

As to how to get Republicans to stop voting for evil? I have absolutely no idea and I'm not sure anyone does. I'm not sure why anyone thinks the Democrats can conjure great people either. I just think that Republicans are the bigger problem by far.

Why can't there be 2 good parties? The very existence of an "evil" party is a problem.

Voters still need to look through the barrage of miss- and disinformation, hatred, blaming etc. in short through all the shit the zone is flooded with. Republicans can if required always turn the dial further.

A principled democratic opponent on the other hand should not succumb to all of this, they should act with integrity etc. traits that also seem to not be pushed by algorithms nowadays. All in all I think it's a lot harder, especially when paired with short attention span of viewers.

They already did that - the Democrats are/were clearly not the same as the Republicans and that should have been enough (especially after we already got a preview of Trump's Republican party the first time around). They already ran strong enough campaigns and their candidates were already good enough. Most of them actually wanted the job because they believed in the mission of government, not because they personally benefited from ruining whatever office or authority they might be given.

The only thing the non-Republican voters had to do was show up, hold their nose over whatever bullshit short-coming their rep had (in comparison to "perfect" and whatever it is the Republicans offer to voters), and vote for whichever jerk had a D next to their name. There were only ever two options and U.S. citizens fucked up - through either silence (mostly) or blind support of whatever it is that's happening now.

D's need to figure out effective ways to counter the Republican bad actors, but no strategy is ever going to be enough, with a full blown authoritarian party in a 2 party system and massive propaganda ecosystem absolutely dominates the media and has thoroughly cooked millions of brains.

There's just no way to overcome all that every time, at the candidate level.

The right-wing propaganda machine, from Fox to Nick Fuentes to Joe Rogan - even to Twitter - has to be effectively dismantled or countered.