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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

I wish we were pounding beers at a Notre Dame football game.

That’s where I’m going this weekend, by the way. I’m going to a Notre Dame football game this weekend.

Eat a hot dog for me.

I wish this were a Notre Dame football podcast, but it is not.

It can be.

Those are my plans for next year. I put that in my goals, my performance review.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion. I’m Carlos Lozada.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

And I’m Ross Douthat.

And this is Matter of Opinion, where thoughts are always allowed.

For now.

So we are back again with a second episode of MOO this week. You just can’t quit us. When we spoke in the hours immediately after the presidential election was called, Michelle and Ross and I focused mainly on the Trump side of the story. What his victory tells us about American politics, about America, period.

So today, I want us to focus more on Kamala Harris and what her defeat means for the future of the Democrats and for the future of the left more broadly. Who better to join us in that pursuit than our dear founding friend of the MOO, Lydia Polgreen?

Lydia.

Lydia.

Oh my god.

Welcome back, Lydia.

Are you saying I’m an expert in losers? Is that what I’m to understand?

If that’s how you interpreted this, Lydia. I don’t know. That wasn’t what I was saying.

It is wonderful to be back with you guys. I wish it was under different circumstances, but here we are.

You mean like, not on a podcast, just hanging out.

Totally.

Yeah.

Totally.

There would be more alcohol.

Lydia, so when Ross and Michelle and I met earlier this week, we started off by giving just some instant gut reactions to the results of this election. You have had an extra day of digestion. So maybe now you can give us your gut reaction. What happened here?

My mind always goes to the rest of the world and what America can learn from the experiences of other peoples. And when the dust settled and the scale and scope of Trump’s victory was clear, I thought of something that my friend, the journalist, Indian journalist, Mihir Sharma, wrote after Narendra Modi, who was the prime minister of India, won a second resounding victory, which was like the death knell and horror to all of the good liberals in India.

And he wrote that, we do not live in Modi’s India. We live in India’s India. And the reason that so many Indians adore Modi is because he represents their preferred conception of the Indian state and the Indian nation. No other explanation for these results is as compelling. And I guess that’s my takeaway. The people have spoken, and this is what they want. And there is literally no arguing with that.

So yeah, we live in America’s America. It’s not Trump’s America. He heard the call, and the people have answered it.

That was a bit of your column, right, Carlos?

Oh, I don’t know. That was like days ago. [LAUGHS]

You’re expecting me to remember? Well, yeah. I mean, I think part of what I was getting at is that for nine years now, the cry on the left, on the well-meaning, self-involved, good people of liberal America is that, this is not who we are. This is not normal. And now, guess what? It is. And wishing it away is probably not a great strategy.

Speaking of good or bad strategies — see what I did there? I want us to hit three things in our conversation today. First, what it is the Democrats got wrong. Second, how they might try to set it right. And third, maybe we can look at what kind of leadership they might need to do that. So I want to start first on just one maybe minor thing that I’ve been a little fixated on, and that is the popular vote. We don’t have final numbers, but Trump seems close to four or five million votes ahead in the popular vote.

We’re not going to get California for like 16 years. So —

But that means we have weeks to just say whatever we want about it.

We have weeks to say whatever we want. But it is important to stress that Trump’s lead will narrow. I think this is a useful thing for listeners to know about. Especially since in the unlikely future event that some election comes down to California, that is actually when the American Republic will collapse. Because California is incapable of counting votes.

There’s a lot of people in California.

So I will say the Golden State addendum. And that is that Trump looks on track to win the popular vote. This would be the first time that the Republicans have won the popular vote since George W’s election in 2004. And for many years, even when they lost, say, Gore in 2000, Hillary Clinton in 2016, the Democrats have consoled themselves with the fact that more Americans had, in fact, voted for their candidate for the White House.

And you could say, well, that means the problem’s not really the message, it’s this arcane electoral college system that’s holding us back. That is something that they will not be able to tell themselves this time if, indeed, Trump has won the popular vote. I’m wondering what you all think of what it means for Democrats, symbolically or practically, to lose the popular vote.

I mean, it means they’ll have to do a gut check, right? I think I have heard a million times exactly what you’ve just mentioned, which is the, oh, it’s so unfair, it’s just the system, and we need to change the structures of the electoral system. Whereas this doesn’t let you duck that the message was preferred by the majority of voters. So it’s time for a bit of a gut check and a little less whining about the electoral college.

Yeah, I mean, I think you can’t understand almost anything about what liberalism did and thought and argued about in the first Trump presidency. If you don’t remember how easy it was to argue that liberalism hadn’t really lost. And it wasn’t just the electoral college. Right, it was also the Russia narrative. It was the New York Times putting Jim Commey on the front page in the waning few days. I mean, there were a bunch of large and small things that were invoked to emphasize unfairness and flukishness and so on.

But the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote was held up above all. And that, in turn, just created a dynamic where certain kinds of reckoning that normally happen after shocking political defeats. They happen to some degree, but not in the same way. Now, I should stress, I mean, it is in my interests as a conservative, obviously, to encourage the deepest soul searching, the harshest possible reckoning among liberals.

I would say, though, that liberals were always kidding themselves a little bit about the idea that they had the majority and conservatives did not. If you look at the 2016 election overall, Republicans won a majority of votes for the House of Representatives. If you add up the third party candidates, the libertarians and the Greens to that election, the Republicans plus libertarians exceeds Democrats plus Greens. Republicans won a majority of the House popular vote in 2014 and 2022 and so on.

So there are ways in which this is not quite as epic a repudiation as some liberals are feeling right now. But that’s partially just because they were always —

Because they’ve always been —

— denial. They’ve always been —

No, not — no, I mean, look, it’s a 50/50 — it is still a 50/50 nation.

Well, I mean, the one caveat that I’d put into that is that one does have to consider gerrymandering, which tends to be more aggressively done by Republicans than by Democrats. The New York Democrats, man, I sure wish that they would be better at gerrymandering.

But to the broader point, I think that my diagnosis is that the Democratic Party, for all of its shouting about — we need to restore democracy and so on and so forth. The call is coming from inside the House. The Democratic Party has not had a truly open competition to choose its nominee since 2008. And to varying degrees, the competition to lead the Democratic Party and to lead the ticket has been stage managed.

And so they have literally cut themselves off from the opportunity to listen to what people want and to choose leaders based on what people want and have substituted for that their own preferences, their own elite peccadilloes and concerns. And we’re seeing the results of that, which is an absolutely catastrophic loss that will shape our lives until we die.

Oh my god. So —

Oh, I’m not even sure I need to sign in after that one.

All right, so we’re neck deep into reckoning territory here.

Sorry.

So Lydia, this may be the first time you’ve heard this structured in quite this way, but what you just said reminded me of Bret Stephens’s column this week. Our colleague Bret Stephens, who wrote a column about how the Democrats lost because they were a party of prigs and pontificators, telling voters that the things that they felt about the economy, about the pace of change, about Joe Biden, that those things were wrong. And that that’s not a way to win elections.

Yeah.

Is this largely a matter of Democrats not listening to the sirens, like the ones that are in the background of our own conversation? Both in the process of selecting its own leaders. But also, once you’re running a general election and listening to the larger electorate beyond the Democratic Party.

Yeah. I mean, I think that’s absolutely right. Look, the reality is that the Democrats do not have a story, right. Donald Trump has a very clear story. It’s, make America great again. We’re going to take you both back to some sort of mythic time when America was great, and also something, something Elon Musk rockets. And that’s the future, right? So it’s a —

Right?

No, it sounds —

In the 1990s plus Mars, right?

Ross could not be happier.

But I think it’ll look less like SpaceX and more like Twitter. If it were to look like SpaceX, we might be able to get excited about that. But I imagine that what’s going to happen if you actually put Elon Musk, Donald Trump’s new best friend, in charge of the future, that the future of our government will probably look more like Twitter, which is like a giant cesspool.

We’re talking about Democrats.

We’re wandering off.

We’re talking about the Democrats today.

Let’s get back to the Democrats. But I think guess that this is — the point that I was trying to make before I digressed into talking about Elon, was that ultimately, politics is about selling some kind of vision or story that taps into what it is that the populace is thinking and feeling at any particular moment. And what I am seeking is someone who has on the center left or even frankly, the center right, a theory about the future that is not merely amelioration of the existing order.

I mean, there’s got to be something that is not reactive to the libidinal freakouts of the right, but is a positive affirmation or a theory about what progress looks like in the 21st century and what the human future looks like. And it could be something, something, something Mars, which is what Trump and Elon Musk are selling, plus a side of, I don’t know, 1950s social mores. But I think there is a market for something different from that, and I would love to see somebody articulate it.

Lydia, didn’t they try to — I mean, the Democrats offered — you talk about something, something long ago plus Mars. Maybe the Democratic message was abortion, abortion, opportunity, not Trump. Right, and there was a story. right, it was a story about freedom. I mean, what is it that failed about what Harris and company were offering?

We are not going back is not a complete sentence.

It doesn’t tell you where you are going.

Yeah.

And this was a change election. And Kamala Harris did not put forward a compelling vision of how she was the change candidate. She was in this awkward position, lashed to a very unpopular administration. And she just didn’t have the political skills to come up with a narrative of her own that when you’re talking about change, that’s by definition scary. I mean, so much of what we’ve been talking about with Trump is that he was the rare combination of a change candidate with a nostalgia candidate, which is basically what you’re talking about, Lydia. Which means you take the scary out of change.

So when you’re looking for candidates who are going to give you a compelling vision of tomorrow, you still have to find a way to make that not scary to the legions of people who feel that things are changing too fast. And that’s just really hard. And she was not quite up to that task.

Again, continuing my defenses of liberalism here. I mean, they can afford to be magnanimous now. I’m being magnanimous. No, but I mean, part of the issue is that the normal way that liberals and progressives promote a broad, positive vision of the future is by promising new ways to spend money. To say, here are the new things that in our richer country, we can afford to have government do to spread the wealth around. Maybe you wouldn’t use that phrase. But build a new foundation of prosperity and so on, right.

And that was, to go back to 2016, when there was a contested Democratic primary, that was Bernie Sanders’s very effective message. It was that the Democrats are being too timid about spending money. We have money to spend. We can have public health care that looks more like Scandinavia. Let’s do it. That’s really hard to do under inflationary conditions.

And I know inflation has come down. But you still have this sense that there isn’t a free lunch out there in the same way that there was when Sanders-style socialism burst onto the scene. And I think that is a core issue for Democrats. When it comes time to articulate that forward looking vision, that I agree with all of you that Harris didn’t have, it’s just hard to do it when the main thing people have been suffering is not, my health care plan isn’t good enough, but groceries cost too much and the government has put too much money into the economy.

Inflation is just a killer for ambitious welfare state liberalism.

And so the solution to that is to raise prices on bananas? I mean, I don’t disagree on a factual basis with your analysis, right. But clearly, voters are not looking at that and being like, Trump’s policies are going to bring down inflation. Because his policies will actually, if he’s successful, massively increase inflation. In fact, Elon Musk said there’s going to be a lot of short term pain and sacrifice if Trump’s economic agenda is enacted, right.

So I agree with you that those programs, I think, are hard to justify if you feel tethered to anything resembling reality. If you can just make shit up and your voters aren’t actually going to hold you accountable, then yeah, anything goes.

Well, but, I mean, again, we’re officially not talking about Trump, right. But part of —

No, what I’m saying is that Democrats can’t lie.

But part of what Trump had going for him was that he had been president before and he had presided over an era that had the kind of economic conditions that voters want right now. So, yes, Trump’s tariffs are not a cure for inflation. Absolutely. And there is a weird dynamic with Trump where he gets away with a bunch of things because people just don’t take his policy promises that seriously. But it’s not just that Trump was like, oh, he gets to bullshit and say whatever he wants.

He could say, we didn’t have inflation before you guys came in, and then we had inflation. And yes, that’s a very simplistic argument. But it’s more potent than just, oh, Trump gets to lie and we don’t.

Trump inherited an economy that was created by the presidency of Barack Obama, right. And then he’s once again going to inherit an economy created by the presidency of Joe Biden, right. And he will absolutely claim credit for that. And that will be his like, look at this amazing economy I created that literally fell in his lap.

So if we’re talking about the Democrats, one of the biggest problems that the Democrats have is that they act like grownups. And they actually fix and try to make the world better. And then when they lose because Republicans believe lies, then the Republicans who get elected based on those lies are like, oh my god, look at how amazing our economy is.

Kamala Harris didn’t run saying that, Joe Biden and I created this awesome economy for you. And now we’re going to just take that puppy out for a spin. She ran saying, we know costs are too high. We know there’s a lot of work to do. She was apologizing for inflation. I mean, this gets back to the question of, are you going to listen to voters or are you not going to listen to voters? Voters thought the economy under Biden and Harris was not great.

And yes, maybe you can say legislatively, they set in motion many things that down the road will create a much stronger, firmer footing for the American economy. I get that. But when it comes time to voting, I can absolutely say that I worry about what Trump’s policies will do to prices in a future forward looking sense. What I can say with even more confidence is that if you look at inflation under the Biden administration, it was high.

Even Kamala Harris ran on the notion that the economy was a problem. And now I’m going to create the opportunity economy and I’ll bring costs down with my anti-price gouging initiatives. Right, she wasn’t making the case that you are making. And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe that was the problem.

I think that’s the problem. I mean, the stroke of genius of Donald Trump to put his name on the stimulus checks. He knows that branding, that putting himself at the center of this emotional place and responding to the emotions that Americans are having is great marketing. I mean, this is a guy who knows how to connect with people.

So my complaint about the Democratic Party is always that it tries to lead people by their heads. And the Republicans are much better at leading people by their guts. And being a salesman and a branding genius is part of the job of being president. Now, do I think policy ideas that he’s floated are what people are voting for? No, I do not. I don’t think America can tell you what a tariff is or what it does. They vote on their feelings. They just do. On presidents more than anything else. And Trump is just better at that.

This is the job interview where you are asked what your defects are and you say, I just work too hard. The —

[LAUGHS]

So Lydia says the Democrats are too honest. Michelle says they think too much with their heads. Here —

I’ll say, let me suggest — so I think there are areas where the Democratic Party, especially in the Trump era, does feel it’s the party of the intelligentsia. Most policy wonks and professionals who care about the federal budget and so on nowadays are Democrats of some sort or another. And so inevitably, that does create a tether to, study says this, projections say that in the Democratic coalition that’s weaker in the Republican coalition. I will concede that point.

I think on a lot of other issues, anything related to race, sex, culture, and history, the Democrats have spent the entire Trump era in a mode of gut level, we’re being dragged back into reconstruction, we are being dragged back into the patriarchal family of 1940. We are being taken into the republic of —

Have you been to school board meetings, Ross?

Well, see, there you go. Right, you think that the school board meetings wherein, as happens throughout all of American history, people have often uninformed arguments about what books should be on reading lists and in libraries are the equivalent of, what, going into the Republic of Gilead and dressing women in red?

What I’m saying is both teams do that.

OK. But you were just talking about the limits of the Democrats’ head first, heart later strategy. I’m saying there’s been plenty of, we are trying to stir a mood of deep alarm on the Democratic side. And I think —

Yes, both teams.

One weakness that the Democrats have is that part of the Republican coalition now very clearly does not want to go back to the 1950s. It really does just want to go back to the 1990s, which we’ll call it the Joe Rogan constituency. Joe Rogan and the bro podcasters are not trying to rebuild the world of father knows best. They’re trying to smoke a little weed and have freewheeling discussions where they say politically incorrect things on their podcasts, right. That’s the world of 1997. Maybe it’s the world of 2007.

And that really helps the Republicans when there’s a perception that when the Democrats........

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