I think the importance of having a solid policy platform can't be overstated, but it's not enough. Haven't year after year of polls showing voters backing Democratic positions, followed by elections in which those same voters elect the Republican, shown anything? It's almost as if "we like your ideas...we just don't like you."
And the reason is that, unless things are really, really bad (think 1932 or 2008) and people think their vote might seriously impact their own future, people don't vote for policies, they vote for myths.
From Reagan's "morning in America" onward, Republicans have mastered the art of myth and symbolism. It's always been "all that is good about (traditional) America versus the dark forces of international socialism that wants to destroy our society to build a Marxist totalitarian state" (sure, they never came out and said that, but that's what "tax-and-spend liberalism" meant). The myth they built allowed them to present a draft-dodger as a "true patriot," while a decorated war hero was "un-American." And it works, over and over, because people generally don't vote on issues, they vote on the myths they want to believe.
The symbolic power of the Mueller investigation, beforehand, was the assumption that it would uncover massive crimes, crimes against American sovereignty, by Trump, his family, and his closest cronies. That enabled us to create our own myth, positioning us as "the forces of light versus the forces of darkness," or, in another sense, "the true Americans against the Russian stooges." Now, unfortunately, that attempt at myth-forming has collapsed. In fact, what we're likely to see now is an attempt by Republicans to once again capture that myth for their own purposes -- by insisting on new investigations into Hillary, Obama, the "deep state," etc. for purportedly causing this "witch-hunt" in the first place, they're going to try to create a counter-narrative wherein they're the forces of light, and we're the forces of darkness.
Myths matter. That's the whole point of the voluminous campaign literature on the importance of "framing." If we can't create a compelling myth, an involving frame, to counter the current Republican "Make America Great Again" (which is itself merely another iteration of the standard Republican "things were much better in the past, and we need to return to the way it was then" ), we're going to lose, no matter how good we may be on "bread-and-butter issues." The only chance those will affect the 2020 race is if we fall into a deep recession in the coming year...which is not only dubious, but would be awful for us as well, and which, with Trump's predilection for strongman behavior, may well cause him to seize absolute power with another bogus "state of emergency."
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