Look at their opponents and their campaign. Let's take Obama, because he's the liberal darling despite running roughly the same platform as Ronald Reagan;

Mitt Romney did not run on a platform of change, in fact he was against an opponent who made 'Change' their whole political identity. Romney ran on a campaign of 'Return to normal,' which was just Bush in the mind of political base. Romney didn't identify any of the proletariat's problems, didn't promise a change from Obama or Bush, didn't identify how exactly he would improve things.

He ran a campaign essentially saying 'change is bad, this change was bad, I strapped my dog to the top of my car while it had the shits and continued driving for at least 500 miles, I promise to return to the policies that caused you to lose your house.'

This, unsurprisingly, lost him the vote. This is also why Obama 'didn't break the brains of the right' or 'cause the racists to come out of the woodwork.' Those are mischaracterizations of the right's response to Obama based on the extremely loud minority that are Fox News viewers. If either case were true, Romney would have won.

But Romney didn't, Trump eventually did. The only effective difference in their campaign was that Trump promised change and was believable as an agent of change.