TBH, it wasn't that far outside of the basic corporate Dem playbook. Incredibly stupid and definitely lost her the election, for sure, but Dems have been "courting the moderate Republican" (is this "moderate Republican" in the room with us right now?) since Clinton left office - if not longer. It was the most strange and open version of it I've ever seen, but I wonder how much of it was her doing and how much was pushed by the party and the party's campaign managers. Practically all the party ever talks about is how they have to reach across the aisle and convince conservatives to vote for them. We saw it with Hillary as well. They alienated the leftist vote and their own voters to push more conservative policies and lost themselves the election.
Kamala and Walz had a goldmine when they started calling Republicans weird, and they suddenly stopped like 8 days later. If that wasn't the party muzzling them, I don't know what is.

Part of the issue for industry in the US as well is that we also generally lack a lot of important manufacturing resources. We get something like 65% of our aluminum from Canada. When the tariffs were first going into effect and Trump was throwing a tantrum about Canada, the auto industry declared that they would be shutting down factories within a couple of months if the tariffs went into effect because they wouldn't be able to afford the aluminum to continue production in the country.