On the other hand, it's worth noting that between gerrymandering, voter suppression, intimidation and dirty tricks, the odds were stacked against the Dems from the start, and yes, Trump is, if nothing else, a superb salesman. Narcissists almost always are. They are so good at it because they have no real compunction about swindling people, and so long as they are able to leave town faster than the marks, then they've succeeded.
I have a business partner who's a Trump supporter (we generally avoid talking politics). He doesn't always understand the technology that I create, but he's good at selling it, because he makes it sound far more important than it really is. If you take a look at the people who support Trump, what you see are a lot of people who are like him, but at a smaller scale - they're sales and marketing people, for the most part, people who look good in suits and in general live on the basis of commissions and bonuses. They also tend to be conformists, and to be perfectly honest are disturbingly easy to manipulate, because what they generally don't like are threats to their status quo.
In the typical Republican mindset, hierarchy is the norm - everyone has a place in society, and a successful life is identified by climbing that hierarchy. Your status is predicated in great part by your net worth, and the networks that you travel in, so necessary to advancing the rungs of the ladder, also tend to limit who you interact with. I don't think that they are actually all that actively racist; in general, it's a passive racism that is borne by the the reactions of others within their social circle.
Democrats are outsiders, and as such they are perceived as a threat. Threats aren't human. Many Democrats are intellectual professionals - programmers, scientists, teachers, librarians, academics, engineers, authors, psychologists, analysts, print journalists . The image that most Republicans have of a Democrat is someone who is a lesbian professor of women's studies, or a gay metrosexual fashion designer in New York. In other words, Democrats are non-conformists, and as such, associating with them may very well lower the status of a good Republican man or woman in their various circles.
I love Governor Kate Brown of Oregon. She's quirky and takes a genuine delight in her job. She's hated by the right because she is near the top of her hierarchy and frankly doesn't give a damn - she does the job because its the job she thinks needs doing, and she's pretty effective, but she challenges the status quo simply by her existence.
That's not going to change. I think there are enough people who are getting nervous about Trump that the Independents broke more than expected for the Democrats this time around, but I suspect that the number of people who would be considered Liberal Democrats makes up about 28% of the population, though that number is swelled by other "outsiders" such as immigrant groups, African Americans, non-Orthodox Jews, many Latino groups, Asians and Muslims, though even there I think that conformist vs. non-comformist division cuts pretty deep.
So, I think the Midterms energized the Democrats, but it also revealed an upper bound about the size and influence of Democrats that we should examine very carefully.
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