They were wrong. The DNC had chased away key voting blocs that they had taken for granted. That pitted the Neo-Liberals who ran the party against the Progressives and the Communists. The Communists who had been enraged that Bernie Sanders had been thrown aside and the Progressives who had come to believe that the old white Neo-Liberals were just as bad as the old white Neo-Cons. The past 4 years has been mainly about the Neo-Liberals trying to balance their need to retain Communists and Progressives while trying to reach out to the voters they'd lost and the swing voters in addition to those. The options for doing this ranged from painting Trump as a racist to pushing leftist propaganda in every form of media they could get their hands on. And they were aided and abetted by Never Trumpers from the RNC, who view Trump's anti-globalist views as dangerous to American power and security (not to mention their personal wealth).
That's why there is all this chaos and anxiety.
That's why there is all this chaos and anxiety.
First, the US party system is in the process of collapsing. I would argue that the RNC's collapse happened in 2012, with Mitt Romney. It was the last chance that Neo-Cons were able to present their own candidate to the country. And he got crushed against Obama. Trump may be the rebirth of the Republicans, but the Republicans are still in a moment of flux, so his policies and the voters he attracts may not stay. The DNC was different. They'd seen the RNC's complete collapse in 2014 and assumed that they'd obtained a sort of manifest destiny in the time between then and 2016. Their belief was that the white, nuclear family was a thing of the past and now multicultural, free living, free loving, and commie loving minorities would civilize the despotic whites capitalists.