I agree to some extent but there were a lot of advantages that Trump had that aren't particularly democratic. Electoral college gives more weight to rural voters. First past the post sucks. It's easy to mislead people because most metrics are lagging indicators (which is why neither party will ever fix the deficit). It also helps that his electorate tends to be less educated.

> they are incompatible with a fair debate

Considering his polling tanked after debating Harris and then he refused to debate again, I'm not sure if you can make this argument.

Didn’t a lot of that polling turn out to be massively wrong? The fact that it was off by so much seems to imply you’re right, it wasn’t a fair debate. Harris received significantly more sympathy from the press and polls, even to the point of peddling outright lies.

The dominant effect of the electoral college isn't giving more weight to rural voters, it's giving more weight to swing states. Votes in California and Texas don't count. Votes in Alabama don't count either.

And first past the post doesn't give an intrinsic advantage to either party. What it does is cause there to be two parties instead of more than two, which doesn't benefit anybody except for the party leaders in both major parties who don't want competition.

> Considering his polling tanked after debating Harris and then he refused to debate again, I'm not sure if you can make this argument.

The general consensus was that Harris would be defeated in a debate if there were neutral moderators, so she would only agree to a debate if the moderators were in her camp. Trump took a chance on that once and it went about as you would expect, after which Trump wouldn't agree to left-wing moderators and Harris wouldn't agree to right-wing or neutral moderators which meant there were no more debates.

The Harris campaign tried to paint this as "Trump won't do any more debates" but it's hard to make that seem credible when Harris was the one dodging media interviews.

The Democrats had better candidates than Harris. Their problem was they didn't nominate one.