Why did McGovern lose so badly?

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The alliance between the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party which was central to the New Deal completely broke down as well. The conservative unionist who had ran the AFL-CIO since its birth, George Meany heavily favoured the failed campaign of Scoop Jackson in the primary, and then went for HH Humphrey; which was probably a bad call on his end - Jackson was extremely unlikely to unite the party and triple HHH would also have been a dud. Maybe they'd have best stuck with Muskie even post Canuck letter. Instead the AFL-CIO were lumbered with a candidate that didn't really get them at all - the first Democratic candidate since Jennings Bryan to represent an agricultural area, in a right to work state with little New Deal-era unionist traditions.

I get the sense the Democratic/union establishment refused to grapple with the new reality of the McGovern-Fraser commission (or didn't really understand the new rules), which is why many of them didn't even bother and viewed their nominee with scorn.

Nixon's unbelievably underhand campaign also deserves a mention, but that goes without saying. The Federal Reserve also started to behave in a rather less than independent fashion, inflating the currency enough that growth increased from zero to seven percent. There additionally was the shift within the Nixon administration to free trade which wooed internationally-oriented businessees and banks (who were the businesses that for the most stayed Democratic throughout the New Deal.