person I heard raise this as a causative factor.

One of the political strategists said the quiet part out loud when he said, to paraphrase, "We always want the problem to be something simple so we can fix it, so we hope it's a messaging issue."

That really sums it up. They don't want the problem to be the ongoing effort to overthrow our form of government because that's really hard to solve. They also don't want it to be the 400+ voter suppression laws at the state level, because that's also really hard to solve.