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By Lydia Polgreen and Tressie McMillan Cottom

Produced by Vishakha Darbha

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.

Below is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

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........

© The New York Times