This occurs to me in light of last night's VP debate where Tim Walz generally treated JD Vance like he's decent guy and not a fucking Nazi, arguably with the goal of appearing reasonable to the undecided (white) voters at home.
The problem is, Democrats have been using this approach for a long time and all it has accomplished is normalizing these people. When CBS is treating "deport 25 million people" as a reasonable affordable housing proposal, things are definitely pretty far gone.