I would personally say that pushing aside the like of Yang or Gabbard, or Sanders back in 2016, doesn't help. Those voters will just go somewhere else. Conservatives had events like CPAC where people who as much as despised one another rubbed shoulders. The party with the narrowest window of acceptance will probably lose the most elections. It's also hard to say you're fighting intolerance when you don't tolerate ideological deviation.

Carter was hugely charismatic, new & fresh, especially for the South, where his base & 13 of his 23 states were. Of course Southern charisma isn't to everyone's style for sure. And he won by 1.7 million votes, which is almost as good as Hillary's 3 million handicapped by Russian intervention [1976's total vote just under 2/3 of 2016's]

Hillary was "charismatic enough". The people who don't think so largely wouldn't have liked Carter either. But her job was not to please all the people - it was to please enough to get elected. And without the Russians, she did exactly that - despite 10 Benghazi hearings or whatever, media bias, her own screwups, inherent sexism.

While it'd be great to have a great charismatic leader, we don't *need* one. John Kerry was just a smidgin away, and arguably could have campaigned much more effectively to get over Swift Boating and his somewhat Lurch appearance. Al Gore could have navigated his post-Clinton transition better, not simply denied his faith in the Internet prosperity he'd helped create and try to out-liberal Bill Bradley, and avoided the theft in Florida - and weathered all the unfair media criticism.

Yes, in the end the media is the Republicans' friend. Bush got a Hail Mary/crooked relief from abandoning Guard duty (though I must say that the cojones to even learn how to fly a jet shouldn't be understated - beats discussing bone spurs and a fake note from the current President's doctor - though it also took major cojones to sail a Swift Boat up the Mekong in wartime). For all the reporting on Trump, they left the impression that Trump Org was some huge enterprise on par with GM or Chase Manhattan, rather than a family daughter-and-pop pyramid scheme, and ignored tax evasion & decades-old evidence of being largely bankrupt until too late, so Trump's "let a businessman run it" scam survived largely intact.

Obama drove his own coverage through the internet - and mainstream media largely didn't have a sound internet presence, more "let's publish our morning paper on the internet too" PC-as-legacy-typewriter approach. [Twitter was founded in Mar 2006, Facebook in Feb 2004, and Obama's campaign helped establish both platforms more than they determined him, or say symbiotic - but by 2016 both had grown up as behemoths (and MySpace was history).

Trump instead hired on a Russian fixer who'd cut his teeth on painting reformer Yulia Tymoshenko as a criminal and defending Russia's bombastic corrupt Ukrainian puppet, using Russian hackers/bots as background support - rather a perfect mockup & staging for our 2016 election. Of course with the NYTimes giving its imprint just days before the election that there was no Russian influence on the Trump campaign, and Comey's waffling about maybe there's fire in all that laptop smoke after all, the deal was signed-sealed-delivered. [still wondering if Jill Stein's recount effort was a trick to prevent a real recount, but doubting we'll ever know]. Like Florida 2000, there won't be an exact repeat, but as we know of 2004 vote malfeasance in Ohio and 2018 vote funniness in Georgia, the future election hacking *will* occur in various forms & guises, including gerrymandering & vote suppression, and these are factors far more important than candidate "charisma".