The New York Times Opinion columnists Lydia Polgreen and Tressie McMillan Cottom discuss what was revealed about America on Tuesday, why the Democrats failed and what individuals can do about the future.
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Lydia Polgreen: I’m Lydia Polgreen, a columnist for The New York Times.
Tressie McMillan Cottom: And I am Tressie McMillan Cottom, also a columnist here at The New York Times.
Polgreen: On Tuesday we found out that the nation really, really wanted a change. Not only did Donald Trump take the presidency, but Republicans took the Senate and made gains in blue states like my home state of New York and big gains in New York City, too.
Before we dive into big ideas and a what-this-means and future-facing discussion, let’s just check in. How are you feeling today, Tressie?
Cottom: I am feeling exhausted, as I suspect many of us are this morning. I wish I could say I was feeling surprised, Lydia. I’m not surprised. I take no pleasure in having thought going into the election that this was Trump’s election to lose. I really, really wanted to be wrong, and I really wanted to be surprised.
And so part of the sort of despondency for me this morning is that things are exactly as I thought they are. You talk about the electorate wanting a change, and in some ways what I think they wanted was a return.
I don’t live in New York full time, I live in the South. I spent a lot of time with working-class people, people living in the mountains and rural parts of the country. And I also saw a sort of acceptance and integration of Donald Trump’s vision of an America where no one has to give up anything to win. And it appeals a lot to Hispanic voters, to working-class voters, especially working-class men. It appealed a lot to people in rural parts of the state of all races. That concerned me and concerned me the entire campaign.
Polgreen: I think I was a bit more optimistic, in part because, to me, this election really turned on this question of who has a stake in the system as it currently exists and who feels that they could benefit from just blowing it all up.
This was a big thing that came up for me in 2016 when Bernie Sanders was running. I ultimately thought Bernie was not going to be able to win because there are just too many people who have 401(k)s who think, like, “If this guy is elected, tomorrow, my 401(k) is going to be worth 40 percent of what it is now, and I know I can’t count on Social Security.” So that sense of having a stake in the status quo — and the Harris campaign, if it was about anything, it was about a kind of “What we got ain’t perfect, but we got to hold on to it.”
I think I felt hopeful that here we had a generic Democrat who had these plain vanilla policies that were not that exciting. They tried to address around the edges some of the issues that people needed from government.
I thought maybe that could work. Maybe there’s just enough chaos, just enough of a sense that this is too dangerous. That gamble was just wrong, and ultimately you were right.
Cottom: Again, I take no pleasure in that because if I am right, I am right because I thought — and now have evidence — that the anger that Americans feel cannot be directed toward the truth.
Polgreen: Yeah.
Cottom: I think there’s a lot of anxiety and anger, and I reject this whole economic anxiety argument — not because it doesn’t have some empirical truth to it but the way it’s been misused to paper over racial differences and gender differences, etc.
But there is something to the fact that there is a deep wellspring of anxiety about the fundamentals of American social institutions not being sustainable, not being predictable — to your point about a 401(k).
When people are talking about housing costs, when they are talking about inflation, even when they’re talking about the price of eggs, what they are talking about is an anxiety about their ability to predict their security into the near and distant future.
I always thought that there was a way and an opportunity for Democrats to reclaim a righteous anger. What Donald Trump has done on the other side is he’s given a story, a clear, by the way, articulate story about toxic anger. A way to direct that anger and that anxiety in a toxic direction.
Polgreen: One hundred percent. I think that the reality is that we’re in this political moment where the right is offering a very clear story about where we’re going, and where we’re going is backward. “We’re going to make America great again.” It’s a mythical time. It’s fake. It’s lies.
America has always been what it is. It’s always been this hot mess. There have always been people who’ve been left out of the story. There’s always been inequality. All of these things have always existed. But as long as you can project yourself as subject — and you could be a Latino man, you could be an undocumented migrant — and you could project yourself into that story, into that glorious past.
And the only antidote to that kind of story is a story about the future, a story about progress. And “progress” has become a dirty word. And there is no party on the center-right or the center-left anywhere in the world that is offering anything but a politics of amelioration.
All they’re saying is, “We’re going to tinker around the edges. We’re going to find a way to hold on to the elements of globalization that work. We’re going to find a way to hold on to the technology” — to all of these things that have fundamentally left people feeling alienated and alone and scared about the future.
And nobody’s saying, “No, over there on the horizon, there is some new thing, this new thing that we’re building together.” I think that is the absolute global failure that I see, and it’s way beyond the United States.
The other thing is that we are living in this zero-sum moment where people think giving something to someone else means taking something away from me.
There was that moment where JD Vance was talking about how if immigrants made countries rich, then Springfield, Ohio, would be the richest city in the world, and the United States would be the richest country in the world. Well, news flash, the United States is the richest country in the world.
Cottom: We are!
Polgreen: So this idea of the zero sum, how do you get beyond that? Where does the idea of progress come from?
Cottom: One of the things that JD Vance is actually very good at that Donald Trump is not as good at, is he figured out how to take something that is a problem about relative differences and make it feel like an absolute loss.
There are some relative losses, right? Sure, part of being a leader in a globalized society means that the United States has lost some direct power but still has a disproportionate share of soft power around the world, still dominates in economics and markets and in culture, by the way, which I don’t think we pay enough attention to.
But that relative loss, despite the fact that objectively, they are still doing OK, is enough when turned into anxiety and fear and aggression, which Donald Trump is very good at doing, feels like an emotional catharsis. And then JD Vance comes behind and says, “Not only are you losing, but yes, your loss is coming because someone else is gaining.”
What we do not have on the other side, to your point, is either a center or center-left and, I’d even argue, a Democratic center-right story that captures that emotion in the same kind of way. And I’m afraid that we took the wrong lessons from the last four years about the importance of the left to the Democratic Party in crafting that kind of message.
What we have said is, “Look, abolish the police failed. Americans don’t want that. People don’t want Occupy. We tried that. Your so-called identity politics failed.”
And so we’re going to retreat into this tinkering around the edges that you so eloquently described, because when we presented a grand vision that included some elements of what the left wants, America rejected it because we are more conservative than the left wants to believe.
What I think we should have taken from how Americans understood that message and how they responded was: Do better at that messaging. The fundamentals of the rising cost of housing, for example, do not change because you refuse to tell people a story about how you can make it better. They actually do want that story. They just didn’t maybe like the one that we gave them.
One of the things that is important for the left’s role in the Democratic Party is writing that story. That’s what populism on the right has done for the G.O.P., and the message we took was: Our populism on the left is too toxic and too dangerous for us to even entertain salvaging the best parts of their storytelling.
Polgreen: Yeah. And I think that the idea that the Democratic Party has to work within a set of defined rules of the existing order is just a brain disease.
The other thing is, abortion was supposed to be the thing that kind of rode into the rescue. There was a Reductress headline that said, “Nation Rejects Far-left Position of ‘Woman.’”
Let’s talk about gender in this election, because this was supposed to be the one where white women were going to finally abandon the Republican Party and cede their self-interest.
Cottom: Let me tell you.
Polgreen: And no, we are not going back. No more backroom abortions, women bleeding out in emergency room parking lots. What happened?
Cottom: What happened is what always happens, which is why I kept saying to people, “Listen, I am hopeful on your behalf, but I do not have my own high hopes that you are going to see a mass exodus of white women from the Republican Party and from carrying the Republican line.” Not even around abortion.
I agree that women are angry and that they were angry across the ideological spectrum. But anger doesn’t mean that they will make the same actions. Once you get to the realm of social action, your anger gets filtered through a whole lot of identities and through a whole lot of relationships.
And at the end of the day, gender did matter, but it was how people thought gender should matter that mattered the most.
If you looked out at the post-Dobbs reality and you’re a conservative woman who may not be particularly religiously conservative and you do believe that women should have bodily autonomy — if you looked at that and you thought two things: One, my husband won’t allow that to happen to our children, and two, this decision has been made; I now need to survive the decision.
And if you want to survive Dobbs, there is a strong conservative case for saying, “OK, then you make better choices in a mate who won’t put you in that position,” and more important, you get enough economic security so that you can buy your way out of the consequences of Dobbs.
And if that is how you’re looking at gender — if you are feeling anxious about your security as a woman, hitching yourself to a man’s economic security is actually a type of solution. It is certainly a solution that doesn’t challenge your core identity as a conservative, as a soccer mom, as a mama bear. You get to keep all of those identities.
Polgreen: Yeah. The other demographic that I think the Democrats have traditionally banked on was young people. And one of the places where I’d love to hear your perspective on this as someone who’s on campus and who’s been dealing with this. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about and writing about the war in Gaza and how that is playing out in the hearts and minds of young Americans.
And I have to say that the way in which the campaign bear-hugged the Cheneys —
Cottom: I thought it was such a mistake.
Polgreen: And just gave the middle finger to the uncommitted movement. The reality is that there was just a complete and total theory of the case that was “We can just ignore this.” So what went wrong here?
Cottom: I think there are two sides of that, because there’s also a youth conservative movement.
On the one side, I think there’s been a level of organizing young conservative people’s interests to the benefit of the Republican Party. Especially sanitizing Trump for them in a way that makes voting for him palatable.
On the other side, the complete disavowal of young — now, I won’t even call them leftists; I would actually just call them young moral voters — and theirs, to be fair, is a morally righteous cause. It is the mass death and destruction of people across the world.
I think that’s fair. And it is fair to think that your electeds, if not capable of changing the geopolitics, should at least acknowledge why you are so angry about this.
To your point, people may not vote on foreign policy; they do vote on apathy. I think it will go down as a major mistake. I think it will go down as really an arrogance and a hubris on their part that I thought was really unfounded.
You lost to Donald Trump a few years ago, how dare you have any hubris about thinking you can write off parts of the Democratic base? I thought that was ridiculous. And I also think they underestimated how well the Republicans are doing with young voters on the other side.
Polgreen: I think that’s right.
So what happens now to the Democratic coalition? Where do we go from here? Because I don’t think that it’s simply a matter of getting the gang back together again. I wonder if there are generative possibilities in the breakups of these coalitions? Does depolarization by race and by class and by gender and by geography — does that create opportunities?
Cottom: Yes. Thank you for putting it that way, because I actually think if there is a hopeful glimmer, it is that.
One of the things that has happened is that I think the categories that we have relied on to sort of do this consumer approach to dividing up the electorate so that we can tailor a message to your particular needs — those categories are crumbling.
I think one of the challenges that the Democratic Party has is that it is going to have to rediscover the language of class and not what class meant in the 1960s but the understanding that, really, the working class today is women and women of color. And so, yeah, building a new factory actually is not responding to their economic needs.
Polgreen: We’re going to have a lot of people listening to this who are really down in the dumps, disappointed by the results and wondering where to go next. I’m curious: Your students are going to ask you this, right? What are you going to tell them, and what would you tell our listeners and readers?
Cottom: I think maybe I would tell them both the same thing, because in moments like this we’re all kind of students, in the sense that we are looking for someone to help us make sense of the world, and what I have said to them before and what I will say to them in class on Tuesday if they are listening is, “You know how to do this. You may not believe you know how, but you actually have already done this. We have lived through this once before.”
That is not to say that there is not a great existential threat and danger. I think there is, and I’ve always thought there was. But I think it’s important to remember something my mentor told me years ago, when I would be despondent about reparations programs or something and I’d say, “This thing is never going to happen.” And he said to me, “Yeah, that’s what they once said about ending slavery, Tressie.”
The thing is, you don’t know your moment in history until it’s long gone. So you can’t treat things like you know your moment in history. You really do have to operate as if tomorrow is happening.
If you want to feel empowered to do something, know that history actually is only written after the things are settled, and it is our job to settle them. I think Donald Trump is not the last gasp of the G.O.P.’s descent into chaos and madness, but he is a sign that it’s the only strategy they have. They only have one tool.
If there’s an upside today, it’s that, yeah, the tool worked this time, but they only have one. That means there is plenty of opportunity here to build more and better tools, and that’s our job right now.
Polgreen: I totally agree. Tressie, I don’t know about you, but I feel a little better just hearing your voice. Thanks so much for talking with me today.
Cottom: Thanks for having me.
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