Are Post-Trump Politics Emerging?

0:01This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:19I'm Michelle Cottle, and I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. And as usual this week, I am joined by my fantastic colleagues, David French and Jamel Bowie. Guys, how's it going? Good, Michelle. Hello, hello. Living the dream. Okay. It was a huge week for the Democrats. The party scored major victories in high-profile elections in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, California. Voters were fired up. Turnout was high. Even political junkies obsessively following these races, myself included, were surprised by the severity of the spanking that Republicans took. So I want to get this party started by talking about what all of this means for Democratic Party, for the Republican Party, and where American politics are headed next.

1:12So, Jamel and David, I want your first thoughts. Give me your headline for what Tuesday's elections say about the country at this moment. I mean, I wrote this the night of the elections, but this is just a reminder that Donald Trump has never been a particularly good vote getter for other Republicans. For himself, he's been a very effective vote getter, right? And he's able to turn broad unpopularity into narrow electoral wins through his ability to mobilize infrequent and low propensity voters. But when it comes to other Republicans, when he's not on the ballot, he's an albatross around their necks.

1:52And that's been consistently the case. That was true in 2017. That was true in 2018. That was true in 2022. And it's true this year, in 2025. When Trump is on the ballot, voters will turn out to vote for Donald Trump. And I think that Republicans should not dismiss this as a bunch of blue states, right? Had these elections gone the other way, right? Had Spanberger underperformed the averages? Had Jay Jones lost? Had Mickey Sherrill lost, which the polling suggested was a possibility? If Andrew Cuomo had won, Republicans should be crowing right now about how they've made inroads into blue states.

2:31So what's good for the goose is good for the gander. The scale of the Democratic wins should be a flashing warning sign to the Republican party, not just that the national environment is very favorable to Democrats, but that voters have ceased making distinctions between Trump and other Republicans. They're treating other Republicans like they would treat Trump. And that is like the nightmare scenario. It makes it much more difficult for incumbents next year to distance themselves from the president. So I would say if I were a Republican incumbent right now, I would be like, what can I do to distance myself from Trump?

3:08And interestingly, like the one Republican who seems to have gotten this message is Marjorie Taylor Greene of all people. Okay, a couple things. First, we do not under any circumstances have to hand it to Marjorie Taylor Greene for anything. So this is harsh. Not when I'm on a roundtable are we giving Marjorie Taylor Greene credit for anything. But let me look at this from the standpoint of a similar metric that Republicans used after the 2024 election to indicate that their win, in their view, was broader than maybe the final outcome indicated. And that was that all kinds of places all across America, from blue counties to red counties, they all went more red.

3:54And so that gave a lot of Republicans this sort of idea that what we've done is we've started a realignment. We started a push of the whole country more in this rightward direction. But if you apply the same analysis now, everything went blueward. late in the evening on Tuesday, it looked as if every single Virginia county was more blue in 2025 than it was obviously in 2021. And so applying that same metric, that would be a real warning sign for Republicans. Second, I really agree with Jamel. I mean, we have been down this road for 10 years now. The MAGA world does not tend to do well when they're not named Donald Trump unless they're in a super, super, super red place.

4:41And so when I was writing my book several years ago, at the very beginning of the pandemic, when I was wrapping it up, I did this thing where I went and I looked back at the rhetoric around every election cycle. So whether it was Bush winning re-election in 04, the Democrats having a big 06, Obama's ascendance in 08, the Tea Party revolution in 2010. And the rhetoric was always the same. It was, we've cracked the code. We've figured it out. We've got the realignment. It is, we're winning from now on. And so you had that exact same rhetoric after Trump won in 2024. But if you have a memory greater than a goldfish, you know that unless you actually sit down, hunker down, and govern well and deal with core concerns of constituents, your victory is ephemeral.

5:32And so what did Trump do? He didn't sit down and focus like a laser on inflation and grocery prices and all of that stuff. He launched his vengeance tour, right? He has squandered the goodwill that he had when he was inaugurated in near record speed. Maybe the only speed that eclipsed it is his first squandering in 2017. Oh, but to be fair, David, he did build. He is building a glorious ballroom. I mean, that is what we all voted for, right? Okay, can I say something that might sound lunacy? Like, I think the ballroom might have mattered to people a little bit more than I thought. I think so, too.

6:11It's been insane. Yeah, and I'll tell you why I think that. Because it's visual. It's visual. Oh, everything with him is visual. Well, the rule of law is not visual, right? I mean, the Constitution, I mean, you can see it in a case, right? But as a general matter for people, the Constitution is not visible. Corruption, unless you actually have it recorded on video, is not super visible. But you tear down the White House without asking anybody's permission, and it's a living symbol that he's gone rogue. It's a very visual representation that he's gone rogue. I think it didn't do any many favors.

6:48I know. I want to totally agree with both of you on the matter of, like, the electorate. So I believe that the electorate tends to be thermostatic from one election to the next. And by the way, you know, like, you see it in Virginia especially. Whatever party's in the White House one year, the next year when they do the governor's election, they almost always go the opposite way. They did it again this year. So with individual races, you know, individual cycles, I see that happening. But then I also am a firm believer longer term in that politics is a cycle. That wheel of fortune is coming back around to bite you on the ass at some point, especially, you know, and it goes slower or faster in part depending on how much overreach a party plays with.

7:33But I think certainly in this narrow off-year race, we saw the thermostatic at play. But also, I'm kind of hopeful that I smell a cycle starting to shift and people are going to start moving back in a different direction than what we've been embracing for the last few years. You know, hope springs eternal. But I agree that it's not just New Jersey or New York or Virginia. We had the Georgia Public Utilities Commission give Democrats two extra seats by like some enormous margin. I mean, you saw like Pennsylvania Democrats managed to hold their Supreme Court majority against their state Supreme Court majority against, you know, what expectations were.

8:21It was a serious, thorough thumping. So, you know, if I were Republicans right now, I'd be sweating it. I got to say, so much of this was predictable. I mean, beyond the fact of Trump being bad for down-ballot Republicans, what do you expect to happen when you give Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and Stephen Miller control of the federal government to let them do as they please? There's two reasons why that was an insane choice. The first, of course, is that these are ideological extremists, right, whose own personal agendas are divergent from that of the American public and have really nothing to do with what voters thought they were voting for, at least the critical voters thought they were voting for the 2024 election.

9:07But the other thing, and this is, I think, a little underrated, is that they're not politicians, right? They're just ideologues. They just have these substantive goals. And they do not or are unwilling to moderate or weigh those substantive goals against political realities, against the likely reactions from voters and lawmakers in civil society. And so if you're hell-bent on pursuing your ideological agenda, voters are going to respond very angrily because voters generally do not like hard ideologues. They may be willing to tolerate and support kind of like a set of ideological principles, you know, in the Reagan era, small government, in the FDR era, you know, an interventionist government, but the kind of hard, ideological, rigid approach they do not like.

10:00And what's strange to me, honestly, is the extent to which a lot of people of prominence, political observers, business leaders, civil society leaders, somehow got it in their minds that the country had become permanently MAGA. And so, you know, political gravity no longer exists. None of that matters. To my mind, it's just this Tuesday demonstrates the short-sightedness of so many people in the wake of Trump's re-election. You know, I keep thinking back to 2024, and I remember writing about this at the time. If you followed Trump at the rallies, that was one reality. If all you followed Trump by was commercials on TV or social media ads or whatever, like you're a disengaged voter, one of those low propensity voters that Jamel talked about where you're not getting really your news from anywhere.

10:56You're just sort of living your life and politics intrudes on it in some ways, mainly through TV commercials, etc. Then there were just two totally different candidates running for president. The rally Trump was vengeance, conspiracies, vengeance, conspiracies. For hardworking Americans, November 5th will be our new Liberation Day. But for the liars and cheaters and fraudsters and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government, it will be their judgment day. Their judgment day. The TV commercial Trump was inflation, immigration, inflation, immigration. We have created 7 million new jobs, and it led to a growth like we've never seen before.

11:47We developed the greatest economy in history by far. And then the very famous trans ad, and that was commercial Trump. And commercial Trump is the one who really won the election, not rally Trump. But rally Trump is the one who's governing the country. The Trump administration, in a lot of ways, misread its victory in a pretty dramatic fashion. It was not a mandate to pardon all the J6ers. It was not a mandate to go after every dissenting law firm in America. It was not a mandate to put masked police all over the streets of American cities and engage in gross and brutal acts of violence out in public on a nearly daily basis.

12:31It was not a mandate to engineer military deployments to American cities on obviously false, fake pretexts. So, you know, look, none of this should be surprising. This wasn't what he was elected by the big mass of people who are not MAGA. Yeah. Now, you will find on Twitter all the time this sentiment where it's a very brutal video or a very vicious statement from Trump, and people will say, I voted for this, or the grainy videos of the drone strikes or the airstrikes outside of Venezuela. Yeah, but Twitter's still not real life. But that's what I'm saying. That's not real life. They have convinced themselves it is.

13:15And then the other thing here that, unless the Republicans course correct, unless they get this through their head, they're going to continue to have this problem, is that there's no sign that the administration itself is really keeping its eye on the public as opposed to this weird bespoke world of right-wing influencers. This is how they're gauging themselves a lot is how is the right-wing podcast world or the right-wing Twitter world reacting to me? And they're exquisitely sensitive about that. And they don't give a rip about normal sort of political metrics and measures and normal political rhetoric.

13:53And so if they keep doing this, We're not at their floor yet. We're nowhere near their floor. And they have been consoling themselves anytime they feel nervous with the idea that Democrats are even less popular than they are. So this was the first time since Trump's reelect voters have had a substantial opportunity to push back, and they have. So I want to get into a little bit of the juicy details on this, because, again, the early evidence is that it's not just that more Democrats turned out, which they did, but also that there were votes stolen from Trump voters. You know, not. Oh, my God, I don't want to say that there were votes.

14:37Stop the steal. No, stop the stop the steal, Michelle. That people who were supporting Trump shifted over to the blue team. So, you know, we talked about how toxic the brand is for Democrats, but what happened here? I mean, my read of this is that obviously you have voters with strong and deeply felt partisan identities. But like a lot of voters, their sense of either party is very conditional and provisional, right? It sort of depends on the broad set of messages they're getting from all the different kinds of sources that are in their life, whether that's media or social media or family or friends or what have you.

15:18And when it comes to the Democratic Party, I think that first in an election year, you know, top of the ticket candidates have an opportunity to define the party's brand to a certain extent. They can't fully define it, but for the voters that they're reaching to, they can kind of create their sense of what a Democrat is. And in Virginia and in New York City and in New Jersey, even to an extent, the brand that the top of the ticket Democrats created was like, hey, we want these jobs. First of all, we're happy to serve you, right? This was Mom Donnie's big thing, right? Like he always has a smile on his face.

15:54It's very clear that part of his brand is like, I want to be mayor of New York and I want to serve you. But Spamberger as well, so much of her appeal to vote, so much of her pitch to voters wasn't even I'm anti-Trump. It said, I really want to be governor and I really want to be governor to serve you. And then the relentless focus on affordability that you saw on all the top of the ticket Democratic campaigns, I think just like created a positive impression of the Democratic Party for the voters that these candidates are reaching out to. The other thing, and I think the shutdown is something to play with this.

16:24When you drill down in polls of the Democratic Party's low popularity, I'd say half of it is just like general anti-party sentiment, like voters just don't like political parties. And I'd say like a solid third of it is Democrats themselves, self-identified Democrats, people with deep partisan feeling, saying, I wish the party would be more aggressive. I wish they would fight back. I wish they wouldn't be a bunch of weenies. and the shutdown in a funny way, Democrats kind of holding the line on the shutdown may have served to improve the party's position with its own voters because voters can say, oh, look, Democrats aren't backing down.

17:02They're doing what we want them to do. And I would bet that this has also contributed to just more positive feeling. Now, I feel like the big lesson people need to take from everything, from all politics, is that nothing is static. Nothing stays the same. Like there's no such thing as a singular majority. There's no such thing as a singular people. Everything is fluid. Everything moves. Everything changes. And so for Democrats having won this victory, they have to actually do things to kind of maintain the momentum. In the respective states, they actually have to deliver the things they promised they would deliver.

17:35And for the legislative party, it needs to, I think, continue to adopt this posture of opposition, right? to continuously signal to voters that if you put us back into power, we are going to fight for you. And then if they get into power, they have to deliver on this. Like they have to deliver. And if they do not deliver, the thermostatic public will react accordingly. David? You know, when you look at New Jersey and Virginia in particular, I think one thing that's interesting about both candidates is that both candidates in New Jersey and Virginia, really, they don't fit well with Republican messaging about what the Democratic Party is.

18:13So Republican messaging for a long time, especially including Republican messaging on Republican networks like Fox and Newsmax and et cetera, has been to basically cast the median Democrat as a 2020 rioter. So that, and I'm only slightly exaggerating here, that the median Democrat is an absolute wild-eyed radical. And so, you know, you may have your qualms about Trump, or you may in ordinary times not be super excited about, you know, masked people in the streets. These people, these people are the worst. They're horrific. And so then you have Spanberger, Sheryl, and they present about as opposite from that as you can imagine.

19:00Neither one of them sets the world on fire in the charisma category. but in many ways, that's actually a little bit in their favor. So I think that the Democrats did a good job running people who are just sort of living contradictions to a lot of Republican messaging. And I do feel like in some ways that Republican messaging, and it will keep up because this is the irresistible momentum of the moment on the right, is everything is taken to 11, everything is hyperbole, that you're going to continue to see this. But if the Democrats are tacking towards reasonable, normal, okay, where they're tacking towards somebody that you wouldn't be afraid if your kids are around them too much, you know, then you're talking about a situation in which they're just going to be a living contradiction to a lot of Republican messaging.

19:52And the more the Republicans live in that alternative universe, the more vulnerable they're going to be. This is something that I've did a lot of reporting into this year, the kind of national security moms, which Abigail Spanberger has a background in the CIA and federal law enforcement and Mikey Sherrill was military for years. And it's this interesting combination where, you know, I talked to some Democrats who were pointing out that the caricature of a national Democrat is weak, woke, and whiny. And both of these women kind of just don't, you can't stick that to them. You know, they tried to paint them as extremists in certain ways, but you can't paint them as soft on crime like you'd want to.

20:37You know, Abigail Spanberger did counterterrorism work for the CIA. These are not weak, woke, whiny. But at the same time, because they're moms and they can talk about their kids and their concerns about schools and jobs and economies and safety and housing, I traveled on the trail with Spanberger a fair amount. And it was great to see that she could take those criticisms and just kind of jujitsu them to her advantage. So, I agree that with governors in particular, there is this opportunity to redefine the brand because you're not having to worry about all those team dynamics. And I think both of them did a good job.

21:18But all three of them, I just want to stress again, what did they focus on? All three of them focused on affordability. Their opponents tried their best to make this about the culture wars. In Virginia, Winsome Earl Sears aired ads that were explicitly anti-trans trying to, you know, paint Abigail Spanberger as very extremist on this. She even had the riff that they had used on Kamala last time, which is that Abigail Spanberger is for they, them, I'm for you. But it did not work. And I think you have gotten to the heart of why that is, David. It's like they weren't addressing the actual candidates they were running against, they were running against the national brand.

21:58Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, other than the affordability, did you guys detect other through lines with, you know, the high profile races we've been talking about? I think affordability is the big thing. There's been this ongoing debate about what Democrats should do. But I think to an extent what you see, what they should do is they should they should run candidates that like fit the particular areas that they are campaigning for. And they should – those campaigns should be, you know, voter-focused. They should listen to what the voters are talking about, what voters care about, and then, like, focus on that.

22:30And where ideology or approach might come in and district comes in is sort of like, well, what does – how does a candidate interpret what that means, right? So Mamdani in New York City is hearing voters say, I care about cost of living. And being his political background and his sense of how things should go, he says, oh, I'm going to address that with these more, you know, government-focused solutions. But I'm a big believer in, you know, you could let the candidates figure out what works for them in their particular situations and let the candidates do the kind of serious outreach to voters that can only come through like campaigning, can't come through focus groups.

23:12Well, that was one of the things Bon Domi was so great at, right? Like a lot of his stuff won't translate out necessarily outside of New York. And, you know, he just has that very intangible it quality that you cannot train. Like Abigail Spanberger, Mikey Sherrill, never going to be, never going to be that. But he also just worked his butt off. Like he got out there, talked to voters, built a ground game, and he had the good fortune of being, you know, up against Andrew Cuomo, who thought he was entitled to this whole job. But you're right. He was out there listening. Right. And I think that if I had to like diagnose a problem with Democratic Party politics over the last half decade, it is not just a defensive crowd, not just a timidity, but it's sort of this, we can moneyball this.

24:00And it's like you can't. You kind of just have to like – you have to have candidates who are willing to work their asses off, who are willing to from dawn till dusk be campaigning. Always be campaigning, right? Always be campaigning. And that's not going to guarantee a win, but it can set up the conditions for winning. And it's a thing – it's an approach that's translatable. I want to note that in Virginia, Democrats swept the House of Delegates winning. They have like a 64-seat majority going into next year, which is wild. So that's a really impressive sweep. And part of what the Virginia Democratic Party did was just run candidates everywhere.

24:38Every single House of Delegates district had a Democrat running. And some of them got lucky. And to me, that's the formula. Work hard. Listen to voters. and the contrast you're making with your opponent is that I'm actually interested in representing you. I'm not running to be the president's little soldier. I'm not running to fight a culture war. I'm running to represent you. All right, before we shift over to a postmortem for the Republican Party, I did want to just dig into one more point, which is that both Spanberger and Sheryl won Latinos by a two-to-one margin this time around, according to exit polls.

25:14Obviously, there's been a lot of hand-wringing about the rightward shift among Latinos in the Trump era, and, you know, with good reason, but what do we make of this particular shift back? Ooh, Michelle, I got stuff to say about this one. Oh, hit me. Okay, so if you go back to my sort of rally Trumpist versus commercial Trumpist, this is where it's very salient, because a lot of your Latino voters who shifted for Trump, what was the situation there? For a lot of them, there were actual concerns about immigration. You have a lot of working class Hispanic men in particular who moved Republican. This is a group of people who were facing directly as working class folks and as folks along the border, the two worst failures of the Biden administration, which were immigration and inflation.

26:07And so they're receiving the brunt of it. So what does Trump do when he comes in? When Trump comes in, he treats all these new Hispanic voters like they're rally Trumpists. And he thinks for what? How does anyone think for half a second that you can go and start stopping anyone who speaks with a Spanish accent or somebody who looks Hispanic or somebody who's speaking Spanish, that you can now start stopping them, detaining them, sometimes in brutal conditions, disappearing them for days at a time? This is insanity. How did you think that you would retain a Hispanic shift by then winning a presidential election and beginning a nationwide racial profiling spree?

26:55Republicans, for a lot of very good reasons, took great pride in assembling a much more multiracial working class coalition. That is something that I think Republicans have been looking for for a very long time is how does party become more diverse? How does it become more multiracial? And in 2024, it did. And then now what's one of the most salient issues that the GOP is dealing with in 2025? It's the shocking realization that all of a sudden there's a lot of these young fascists, literal fascists in their midst. And this has become the dominant focus, you know, for the last several days, in particular after Tucker Carlson hosted Nick Fuentes.

27:34you're not going to keep together a multiracial coalition when you hand the keys to the car to a collection of online edgelords. But that's what's happening. So, yeah, I mean, there's, there's an extent to which, you know, if you organize a program against people, they're probably going to vote against you. They're going to take that personal. Jamel, Jamel, we don't need, we don't, this is the New York Times, we don't do like hot takes here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, David, I was going to target you as the formerly proud Republican in the group. The party has just gotten a complete reality, brutal reality check.