Was the victory impressive? I disagree. It's just a matter of fact that people blame incumbent administrations for poor material conditions, and unfortunately for Democrats, they were the ones who had to deal with the aftermath of a global pandemic. And they handled it terribly, both from a public perception and real material perspective. Obscure economic policies that failed to reassure people or properly address inflation. Repeatedly claiming that things are good, that the economy is strong, that unemployment is at an all time low, despite real people clearly not doing well. Would a Trump admin have done better? Maybe, but it still would have been bad. It's ridiculous to think that your life should be better compared to before the massive economic disruption that was the pandemic, but that's exactly what people will do in elections.
And beyond that, Biden basically completely ruined the election by staying in for so long despite being insanely unpopular. The Democrats could have either run a primary and lost even more precious campaign time or just run with the endorsed candidate. Both were terrible options, but somehow they picked the worse one. Then the execution was even worse than the choice they made. Kamala Harris for whatever stupid reason decided to run on the platform that she was, in fact, exactly identical to the insanely unpopular Joe Biden, just less old. Then she decided to lean rightwards to "appeal" to centrists, which most likely just pushed people to think that right wing policies were actually correct and thus to vote Trump anyway while alienating her own progressive base.
I don't think Trump himself is very competent. And because of his ego, he seems likely to push away people who are competent around him in exchange for yes-men who will ultimately just listen to whatever he says. But I don't think you need to be particularly competent to enact policy when you have control of all three branches of the government.
