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David Brooks

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

Let me ask you a few questions:

If the Democrats nominated a woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among female voters than the guy who ran in her place four years before?

If the Democrats nominated a Black woman to run for president, would you expect her to do better among Black voters than the white candidate who ran in her place four years before?

If the Republicans nominated a guy who ran on mass deportation and consistently said horrible things about Latino immigrants, would you expect him to do worse among Latino voters over time?

If the Democrats nominated a vibrant Black woman who was the subject of a million brat memes, would you expect her to do better among young voters than the old white guy who ran before her?

If you said yes to any of these questions, as I would have a month ago, you have some major rethinking to do, because all of these expectations were wrong.

In 2024, Kamala Harris did worse among Black voters than Joe Biden did in 2020. She did worse among female voters. She did much worse among Latino voters. She did much worse among young voters.

She did manage to outperform Biden among two groups: affluent people and white voters, especially white men. If there is one sentence that captures the surprising results of this election, it is this one from the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi: “Democrats lost because everyone except for whites moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle.”

Going into this campaign, I did not have that one on my bingo card.

Why were so many of our expectations wrong? Well, we all walk around with mental models of reality in our heads. Our mental models help us make sense of the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world. Our mental models help us anticipate what’s about to happen. Our mental models guide us as we make decisions about how to get the results we want.

Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go through life with false assumptions about how the world works.

Where did we get our current models? Well, we get models from our experience, our peers, the educational system, the media and popular culture. Over the past few generations, a certain worldview that emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic identity has been prevalent in the circles where highly educated people congregate. This worldview emerged from the wonderful liberation movements that highlighted American life over the past seven decades: the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the gay rights movement, the trans rights movement.

The crucial assertion of the identitarian mind-set is that all politics and all history can be seen through the........

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