You are right in a sense but to have a marketing problem, one must first have something to market. They have small market (issue) appeal but have never had mass market appeal. All they can do is to appeal to as many small issue sectors hoping to have a convergence of those into some sort of coalition of single issue voters. The big problem with that approach is if the other side offers five issues to the one offered by the other, no wonder they are losing.
It used to be easy for them before the alt-media got engaged. Now their media propaganda arm is really looking like a bunch of petulant fools. Because of their arrogance, all they know how to do is to double down in the belief they still hold the reigns of what and how anything is to be reported and the Democrats have no other outlet so the whole thing is swirling down the drain and they are taking the rest of the establishment with them.
. . and Trump keeps tweeting, over, under and around them before they can get their socks on. He controls the narrative now, not them and that is why they hate his tweets so much.
I think that you can only play the gaslighting game for a finite period of time before the target of the deception becomes aware of the situation.
The American people are famous for doing the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else.