The destruction of democracy in the United States has much deeper roots, and has been in-process for a long time. How long the effects have been visible is arguable, and the manifestation unpredictable, but fundamentally, a voting system which doesn’t allow people to express their actual preferences, well, isn’t representative of people’s actual preferences.
I can’t think of any more-profound way to state that truth at this early hour. A “democracy” which doesn’t reflect the will of the people is a democracy in name only, and we can only keep the “lesser-evil” streak going for so long before we’re so far into evil that we “have to” vote for a candidate materially supporting genocide so we don’t get the candidate who supports genocide without having non-actionable “concerns” about it.