One of the things I regard as a sign that we may be able to salvage something is that those swing states (excluding Georgia and Nevada) - North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Michigan - all have popular Democratic governors, and many have Democratic Senators and Representatives. It's a diviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiided nation and the GOP will most likely end up in complete control of all three branches of the Federal Government, and the power imbalance is steep, but the Democrats still have some mighty levers they can use.

I agree; especially the NY case.  Trump clearly committed crimes.  As for why voters chose not to hold him accountable, I think there are at least three reasons (all related).

First, Democrats overplayed their hand, by characterizing Trump as an existential threat to Democracy.  Oprah Winfrey's comments  immediately come to mind as the most extreme example ("If we don't show up tomorrow, its entirely possible that we will never have the opportunity to cast a ballot again.")  Clearly, the majority of voters did not find these types of statements to be credible, and I think that sentiment hurt the effectiveness of legitimate criticisms of Trump.

Second, the fact of Trump's guilt doesn't mean prosecutions weren't politically motivated.  I'm not saying they were, but that was a widespread perception among Republicans and some independents.  Democrats are at least partly to blame.  Pelosi, Schiff, and others vastly oversold the eventual outcome of the Mueller investigation.  More recently, the discovery of classified documents in Biden's garage, and how lightly that was taken by liberal talking heads in comparison to Trump doing the same thing wasn't helpful. 

At the end of the day, what Trump has been actually convicted of (misclassifying business records related to payments to Stormy Daniels) was not perceived as a serious crime (certainly not one that would threaten our democracy) so voters were unwilling to reward or normalize what they perceived as the weaponization of the Justice Department.

Last, uninformed voters may have simply concluded that "he didn't go to jail, so he must not have done anything that bad."

In addition to the foregoing, I think Harris was an extraordinarily weak candidate.  I disagree with a lot of what Jozef said, but I do agree that she was among the poorest performing candidates in the last election, and would likely not have survived a primary.  Unfortunately, Dems were stuck with her because of the way Biden's candidacy ended, and the timing of his withdrawal.  

Living in a battleground state (Nevada) I've been bombarded with ads for several weeks leading into the election, and I found her messaging to be ill conceived and ineffective.  Nevertheless, I was still surprised that she didn't convincingly carry the state.  The population of Clark County (Vegas) is 2.3M, and the rest of the state is only around 860,000.  So Vegas usually determines the outcome of national races, and all of our senators/congressmen have been blue for years. Harris should have won here (Very tellingly, Nevada passed a ballot initiative to create a constitutional right to abortion by almost 70%, but Harris is still behind Trump).The fact that she hasn't (yet), and the fact that Trump is winning the popular vote nationally tell me this wasn't just a case of MAGA extremists being brainwashed.  Harris failed to effectively make her closing argument.  Consequently, Trump gained ground among almost every demographic, and Harris did not get the turnout she needed to repeat Biden's success.

-------------

Hardly the same thing.  When President Biden's docs were discovered he turned them over straightaway and sent his lawyers looking for more, which they found and returned THEM straightaway.  President Trump was given a god-damned YEAR ("spurious prosecutions" - get out of here with that bullshit.  The DOJ bent over backward to let Trump skate) to return what he took and he repaid that patience with lies and tried to hide them.

"Last, uninformed voters may have simply concluded that 'he didn't go to jail, so he must not have done anything that bad.'"

Absolutely, spot-on.  I believe everyone should vote, because I think/hope that the engagement will lead to proficiency, but we have a lot of people - smart people; I know some and I bet you all do as well - who are, at best, uninformed.  Many are woefully misinformed.  And it's a phenomenon that seems to have regular turnover.  Dumb people come in, and either they get smarter or they go away, but what happens is dumb people rise up from the minors to take their turn being the dumb ones.

You are getting close...

Yes I would.  In contrast, I would not have said that about Obama or Hilary Clinton; both of whom I considered to be stronger candidates than Biden when they ran, despite being black or female.  IMO Biden won because of anti-Trump sentiment, more than pro-Biden enthusiasm.

Also, if you go back and look at old posts, you will see the candidate I supported until she dropped out was a woman of color (Nikki Haley).

Harris was weak because:

She was the VP in an administration with a low approval rating at a time when polling shows 70%+ of Americans think the country was moving in the wrong direction, and she prominently declared at one point that she couldn't think of anything she would have done differently from Biden. 

When she actually had to participate in the primary process (2020) her campaign performed miserably.

Her record marks her as the most liberal senator during the time when she served, so she had credibility issues when she had to run towards the center and flip-flopped on many issues.  

She lacks charisma and has difficulty connecting with audiences- does poorly in interviews.

She struggled to clearly articulate a vision and a plan for the future of the country.

Her core message was too divisive

Her policy proposals were lame (as I mentioned before, Nevada was bombarded with ads in the last few weeks of the campaign- around a third of the ad time focused on how Harris would reverse inflation by "stopping price gouging at grocery stores." 

The fact is, I think highly of Kamala Harris.  She's very smart, and appears to be an exceptional attorney.  But that skill set doesn't always translate into being a strong presidential candidate, or a successful president.  In her case, it did not appear to me that would be the case.  I don't agree that no other Democrat could have beaten Trump, but any Democrat would have struggled to mount a successful campaign in the amount of time that was left after Biden dropped out.