Were you alive in 2024?
Trump won by <1% against an incumbent in a time that incumbents lost by >10%.
It's absolutely not that people like Trump, it's just that democrats are inept. Literally all democrats had to do was run somebody that didn't have a record of losing primaries.
They're not legislatively inept, it's simply that viscerally, the electorate knows both mobs are guilty of the same representational transgressions. The GOP was always the party of big biz, while the dems were fronting as the hoi poloi's party, and everyone kinda figured that out as Trump played that irony and the anger behind it, masterfully.
How do you get out from behind that, is what renders them inept.
... or spend four years dancing around the idea of imprisoning a man who did quite a few things that should have earned him a prison sentence.
New York state's judiciary is spineless.