No. People voted opposite what the president did. People tend to do that when the president fails to do things, or does things that the other candidate would have done.
You're thinking and applying legislative changes and votes to a presidency. People notice more than that. They notice when Presidents refuse to veto far-right bills. They notice when presidents give guns to cartels. They notice when presidents spend their political capital calling black children super predators and ordering the DOJ to go after children with harsh jail time. They notice when they drop more bombs per day than WWII on random goat herders that had never thought about harming our country before then.
People tend to vote the opposite of what they see. If they see that 'Democratic President Bill Clinton and his Wife Hillary' pushed propaganda and the DOJ policy demanding the harshest sentences for black teens and set internal DOJ policy to explicitly order gang connections to be found for 'violent drug pushers' increasing their sentencing and destroying yet another generation of young black men -- then they associate that action with the Democratic party.
Those people will either then vote the opposite party in hopes it behaves in an opposite manner, or they stop voting entirely.
Obama was so right-wing he was the second president in history to receive less electoral votes for his second term than his first term. If any other person besides Mitt Romney ran under the republican banner, Obama would have been a one term president. And he would have earned that failure.
Are republicans objectively better than Democrats? No. Are they worse? Depends on if you think leukemia is worse than colon cancer. Both are pretty bad. Neither is really preferable. Only those damned to one or the other would even think of picking one, and without suffering long enough you'd never have enough information to make an informed decision.
People vote for what they want, even more than their sports team.
People do not vote when no candidate offers what they want.
People do not want the 'lesser evil.'
People want progress, and to be left alone to enjoy said progress. Dems took this to mean they could run on progressive values and then do nothing actually effectively progressive since 1968. Republicans took this to mean they could say Dem policies are what's preventing progress and then do nothing actually effectively progressive.
The two parties aren't the same, just like leukemia and colon cancer aren't the same. But if I tell you your son has colon cancer you're not going to be happy its not leukemia.