You can still appeal to emotion and not lie, Trump lying about tariffs being paid by China is a clear lie, but saying that you will increase real salaries for working families by for example doubling minimum wage is a partial truth, perhaps unsustainable in the medium to long term but enough to have seen him go away.
At the end of the day democrats messaging went from BBB, to austerity THIS ALWAYS HAPPENS and that is why we get crushed by the absolute trash of this earth, it should have gone from BBB in year one to double down with handouts and promises for the working class, Poverty IS rising we need to drill down to people on who did this to them, and that is our only ticket to finally end the "republicans are better for the economy" murderball. Even if inflation rises even if the macro indicators are sluggish, the number 1 goal was to prevent the orange ball from power and they chose to follow the corpocrats and chase never trumpers.