Oh, come on, she did lay out an agenda, one that would help average Americans, but that wasn't what the Trumpers wanted to hear. Retribution, hate, fear. The tools of the demagogue, that's what worked.

Almost every developed country tossed out their incumbent parties in the last election cycle. Left, right, center - whoever was in charge during the inflationary period got thrown out, save a handful of groups that went from expected blowout to barely hanging on (like the Democrats in 2022). The American people were looking for an agenda that radically changed an approach to the country (and specifically the economy) from what they had experienced, because they did not like that. Harris didn't lay out anything like that. Hers was an agenda of minor tweaks and small increments.

David Brooks' description of the situation resonated with me, though I often disagree with him on policy:

For the past 40 years or so, we lived in the information age. Those of us in the educated class decided, with some justification, that the postindustrial economy would be built by people like ourselves, so we tailored social policies to meet our needs.

Our education policy pushed people toward the course we followed — four-year colleges so that they would be qualified for the “jobs of the future.” Meanwhile, vocational training withered. We embraced a free trade policy that moved industrial jobs to low-cost countries overseas so that we could focus our energies on knowledge economy enterprises run by people with advanced degrees. The financial and consulting sector mushroomed while manufacturing employment shriveled.

Geography was deemed unimportant — if capital and high-skill labor wanted to cluster in Austin, San Francisco and Washington, it didn’t really matter what happened to all those other communities left behind. Immigration policies gave highly educated people access to low-wage labor while less-skilled workers faced new competition. We shifted toward green technologies favored by people who work in pixels, and we disfavored people in manufacturing and transportation whose livelihoods depend on fossil fuels.

nytimes.com - Trump elites working class

This critique is basically that college-educated folks pulled every lever to make sure that the economy would favor college-educated folks, that policy would be set by college educated folks to favor college-educated folks, and would emphasize the policy preferences that college-educated folks liked. There were some things that the Information Class supported that favored the working class (unions! We support unions!) - but every time there was a conflict between the preferences of the Information Class and the working class, the former would win out. The majority of the country - that isn't in the Information Class - is unhappy with how that's worked out for them. So they hired someone who they knew would do something very different than let the Information Class continue to be in charge.