Opinion | The Trump/Harris Election: Four Columnists Imagine America’s Future

Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and Tressie McMillan Cottom about election night and what will follow.

Patrick Healy: Happy Election Day! What do you think will happen?

Michelle Goldberg: I like the phrase lots of Democrats are using: “nauseously optimistic.” I’d bet on Kamala Harris winning, though I can’t tell how much of that is evidence and intuition and how much wishful thinking. On the evidence side, the J. Ann Selzer poll showing Harris three points ahead in Iowa was picking up something real happening among American women. Many are furious over the end of Roe and revolted by the hypermacho campaign Donald Trump is running.

Ross Douthat: I think Donald Trump will win, for reasons I elaborated when Kamala Harris had a clearer advantage in the polls and I stand by now: Harris is a weaker-than-average candidate who is stuck defending a deeply unpopular incumbent administration, and I still expect — perhaps unwisely — that any substantial polling error will favor Trump. And we may get a presidential winner slightly faster than in 2020, but that might just be a fervent and foredoomed journalistic hope.

Healy: Ross, which swing states do you think could decide the election faster than in 2020? I’m keeping an eye on North Carolina, where polls close at 7:30 p.m. Eastern, and Michigan — two states that usually count votes expeditiously and where both Trump and Harris allies are on pins and needles.

Douthat: To those I’d add Virginia, where polls close at 7 p.m.; if it’s going to be a big night for Trump, we’ll see that in early returns there, even if he’s very unlikely to win the state outright. Conversely, Ohio could herald a big night for Harris if it appears close.

Goldberg: In Michigan, it’s striking that a Republican pollster there, whose most recent survey has Harris up by two points, has concluded, based on absentee ballots and early voting returns, that they were undersampling women, Black voters and people in Detroit. The story of this election could be that pollsters were so desperate to avoid underestimating Trump’s strength — a mistake of 2016 and, to a lesser extent, 2020 — that they overcorrected this time around.

Tressie McMillan Cottom: I think Trump has the advantage. Harris’s message on turning the page does not feel exciting enough to peel off enough of the Trump coalition voters who, despite all reason, simply do not believe or care that he is dangerous. Messaging aside, my sense is that the G.O.P. didn’t make the mistake it made in 2020 when Trump undermined early voting. I will be thrilled to be wrong. If I am wrong, it will be because of Roe and Black voters.

David Brooks: I’ve never covered a presidential campaign like this one, where I had no certainty at this stage of who is up and who is down. It’s unnerving. But if I was forced to make a guess, I’d go with Trump, too. I do that by asking, “Which candidate does the issue landscape favor?” Trump has the economy. People really hate inflation. Trump has immigration. Biden-Harris course-corrected on this issue this year but too late. Many Americans being unhappy with the country’s direction favors Trump, too. Harris hasn’t sufficiently broken with President Biden. Harris has abortion and democracy, but I don’t think those are uppermost on the minds of low-intensity voters. But believe me, this is a total guess.

Healy: Let’s step back and try to get our arms around this campaign, with all the historic twists — Biden dropping out, the assassination attempts against Trump, the nomination of Harris — and unpredictable turns, such as the power of inflation, abortion, democracy, the gender gap and other factors driving voters. What do you think this election is about?

Cottom: This election is about what the 2016 election was about: the Trump coalition. In 2020, Biden benefited from our long Covid nightmare. Without Covid, Trump’s popularity matters. The economy also mattered but not the way we think. Inflation fears are a stylized economic fact that captures how voters feel about the country. Republican voters do not blame Trump for their economic insecurity. Harris had to contend with that anxiety and a clear message from a Republican opponent who is, despite everything, still quite popular with many voters. Trump’s message is that he can fix it. It is wrong, but it is a clear message. The reality is that the American dream is a fiction of a historical aberration. I never felt that Harris made a strong, clear argument that she could start to fix it.

That is why we are back where we were in 2016. The fundamentals haven’t changed; the Republicans just have a clearer story about why.

Douthat: I agree with Tressie that Trump’s promise to fix what’s gone wrong in the Biden era — a porous border, a bout of inflation, a more chaotic world — is crucial to his political resilience, and for many voters, the election seems to be all about weighing nostalgia for the Trump economy and other aspects of the pre-Covid world against fears of Trumpian chaos and the memory of Jan. 6.

I don’t think either candidate could claim some sweeping legislative mandate. Yes, a Harris victory would be interpreted as a big victory for pro-choice politics and a Trump win as a mandate for more protectionism and deportations. But both candidates have tried to blur the policy differences, and I think, for most voters, the choice is happening at a much more general level, where the broad problems of the past four years are weighed against the personal faults of Donald Trump.

Goldberg: I know it’s a cliché, but I think the election is about whether America will continue to be an imperfect liberal democracy or begin the slide toward what political scientists call a hybrid regime, which combines democratic and authoritarian elements. If voters decide to overlook Jan. 6 because they think — falsely — that Trump will lower the price of groceries, they are making a decision about whether democracy should be a priority.

Cottom: Clichés become clichés because sometimes they are right, Michelle. I agree with you.

Brooks: Our colleague Ezra Klein just released a podcast episode with the historian Gary Gerstle. Gerstle argues that America went through a couple of political orders in the 20th century. There was the New Deal order from the 1930s through the 1970s and what he calls the neoliberal order between the 1970s and the financial crisis. I’d call the latter the individualist order. Conservatives practiced economic individualism, and liberals practiced lifestyle individualism, but it was individualism all the way down.

Since 2016, we’ve left the individualistic order, and we’re fighting about what kind of community to celebrate. The right celebrates populist, we-take-care-of-our-own nationalism. The left celebrates identity-group solidarity and national diversity. Neither side has a fully formed vision of what 21st-century community will look like. We’re still in the transition phase.

Douthat: It’s a characteristically American sort of optimism, David, to assume that a stable political order is out there to be claimed. You wrote a recent column about the paper from Yuval Levin and Ruy Teixeira arguing that both parties have failed in their obligation to forge durable majorities. It was a great column and a great paper, but it did leave me with a sneaking sympathy for the leaders of the two parties. It may be that Americans today, citizens of a rich and aging and somewhat decadent imperium, naturally prefer gridlock and polarization to the kind of discomfiting sacrifices that would be required to forge a new conservative or liberal age.

Brooks: I plead guilty to irrational optimism. Some days it’s the only thing keeping me going. For justification, I’d point to this historical pattern. Every couple of decades, America creates a different political cultural order. From the 1930s to 1950s, it was egalitarian-institutional. By the 1960s, it stopped working. The old order began to seem too racist, sexist and conformist. So in the late 1960s we chopped it up. The transition was brutal. But by 1970s, the rage was over, and people were into crystals, Erhard Seminars Training and New Age. That individualistic order stopped working, but I have tremendous faith in ingenuity to evolve a new cultural arrangement. Politics will follow.

Healy: David, your points about political cultural orders make me think about something Michelle wrote about in her latest column and I’ve heard increasingly: that this election is about men versus women, in intensity and context and consequences. If Trump wins, men win, and if Harris wins, women win. That’s bluntly reductive, but it may be how a lot of Americans feel once we have a winner.

Goldberg: I think that’s clearly true. The anger and revulsion that many women felt about Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was a driving force in our politics for his entire term. And outrage over the end of Roe has been a galvanizing force since 2022. When I said earlier that I think Harris will win, I’m assuming that both polling and conventional wisdom is underrating the backlash to abortion bans.

It’s also true that Trump is running an extraordinarily chauvinistic campaign, even by MAGA standards. In 2016 he had Ivanka Trump and Hope Hicks out there softening some of his macho edges. Now it’s foregrounding pro wrestlers and podcast bros. John McEntee, an aide who was so powerful at the end of Trump’s term that people called him the deputy president, is out there making kidding-not-kidding cracks about taking away women’s right to vote. Trump is telling us he’s going to give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responsibility for women’s health. Just yesterday I got a Kennedy fund-raising email boasting about his workout routine whose header was literally “Macho, Macho Man.”

Unfortunately, I published my column before the rally where Trump fantasized about sticking Harris in a ring with his rapist supporter Mike Tyson.

Douthat: What’s the old line about the war between the sexes — that it doesn’t really happen because there’s so much fraternization with the enemy? Clearly the entire developed world is disproving that maxim to some extent right now, with the alienation of men and women manifest in declining rates of marriage and dating and even sex forging a novel kind of political polarization.

At the same time, that polarization really seems to be strongest among the uncoupled, the single and divorced. Which makes me very interested in the Democratic campaign ads trying to woo what they take to be a meaningful group of married women who want to cast a very secret Democratic vote. If that wooing works, if there’s a big swing in married G.O.P. women to the Democrats, it’s obviously good news for Harris — and for pro-choice politics if abortion is the causal issue. But it will be a rather darker indicator for male-female relations, suggesting that this novel form of polarization cuts even deeper than we thought.

Goldberg: Ross, this is why I think you should vote for Harris. A Trump presidency would deepen women’s anger at and alienation from men. Look at what happened in South Korea, where in 2022 they elected the trollish anti-feminist Yoon Suk-yeol. Women in that country are increasingly rejecting both marriage and motherhood, and as you know, the birthrate there is the lowest in the world.

Douthat: It’s true that if a second Trump term ushers in the South Korean dystopia, it will be a divine judgment on my head.

Cottom: I agree with Michelle that this is an election about gender. I have a slightly more complicated view about how gender is operating than just men versus women. But at the highest level of abstraction, that is correct. This is about a projection of masculinity onto politics as a proxy for the fear of the unknown. Harris’s challenge, should she win, will be dealing with that fear after the thrill of a historic win inevitably wears off. This is still a post-Dobbs America with unsustainable child care and elder care costs, no matter who wins. It is a better-equipped America if Harris wins and a terrifying America if Trump wins.

Brooks: I’d say that gender now overlaps with class. I’m struck by the chasm between college-educated women, who are doing relatively well and are swinging to the Democrats, and men without college degrees, who are doing poorly and swinging to the Republicans. Biden did a great job of shifting resources to men without college degrees — the infrastructure bill, etc. — but got no credit for it. The Harris campaign was, in my view, tone deaf on how to give men a vision of how a Harris administration could benefit them. If you want a glimpse of what such a vision could look like, read this recent piece by Richard Reeves.

Cottom: Harris gave men so many plans and visions that they turned into a choose-your-own-adventure chapter book. Her campaign understood men are looking for something. They gave Black men an entire white paper, white men their own campaign conference call — has any other candidate ever done that so directly? — and frequently put men at the center of fears about reproductive rights. The reality is that a lot of men cannot hear a plan from a female leader, and many more men are more invested in masculinity than they are political transactions. It is no secret that I believe that money moves emotions and emotions move votes. But the promise of money is enough for some men to vote against their immediate interests. That is not about vision. That is still about patriarchy and sexism.

Douthat: Tressie, did you think it at all discordant that a centerpiece of the Harris pitch to African American men was a promise to legalize marijuana and help minorities get into the business? I feel if that pitch had been made by a white Democratic candidate, it would have been seen as a peculiar form of racial stereotyping.

Cottom: That pitch to Black men was horrifying. I understood the political impulse to issue it, but it read like a post-’60s Black conservative screed. I support legalizing marijuana, but making it a centerpiece of a policy proposal tailored to Black men’s interests was dismaying. Making it a centerpiece without aggressively calling out the racism not only of drug sentencing but the financing of legal cannabis operations is depressing. A female candidate leaning into paternalistic ideas of leading your family made me cringe. Having said that, what could she do? She is a former prosecutor. She is a law-and-order Democrat. She is making a direct appeal to the “I’m not racist, just economically anxious” white voter in the Trump coalition. This is a message that promised some policy solutions for Black men without jeopardizing those white voters.

Healy: I’d like to look ahead to the two Americas we could have in 2025 — one led by Harris and one led by Trump. A simple question first, which I know might feel like a provocation: Would these two Americas in 2025 be all that different from each other?

Cottom: How different the respective Americas are will depend on who you are. Without a doubt, we’ll have a worse America if Trump wins. He is reckless on foreign policy. Tariffs are a form of geopolitical warfare. In Trump’s hands they could only escalate tensions with China, for both the U.S. and our allies. Domestically, Trump’s biggest threat is his ideological incoherence. He is willing to sacrifice any civil liberty, any norm, any group of people for his own purposes. That is not a person who can be contained in the way we think that democratic institutions contain erratic politicians. He would be more afraid than he was before. That would make him more desperate. That would make his America more unstable for all but the wealthy and the Trump devout.

I agree that stasis is probably the likely outcome of a Harris win. She is an institutionalist, and a center-right one at that. I don’t expect sweeping changes from her administration. Similar to Barack Obama — the yoke of being the first is likely to make her even more conservative. Still, stasis feels like progress compared with Trump’s incoherence.

Brooks: On some issues I’d guess the two Americas would be surprisingly similar. We’re going to have tighter borders. We’re going to have industrial policy. We’re going to have some sort of tariffs against China. On some issues we’re stumbling toward semiconsensus. The vast gap is on rule of law and foreign affairs. Let me focus on the latter. I don’t know what happens to Ukraine next year if Trump wins. I worry about NATO. Mostly I just worry about Trump’s general incompetence. We got lucky during his term, because there were no existential or complicated threats, until the pandemic. Today we’re surrounded by such threats.

Goldberg: I think it’s the difference between stasis and crisis. A lot of our problems, particularly around inequality, are structural and beyond the ability of Harris or any other president saddled with a closely divided Senate and a right-wing Supreme Court to address. But a Harris administration would not be a festival of corruption. She would not send paramilitary forces into U.S. cities to round up undocumented immigrants and warehouse them in internment camps or use the Army against American citizens. I think people have forgotten just how destabilizing it was to live under Trump, and I think they’re underestimating how much more dystopian American life will feel if he returns.

Douthat: I think the obvious differences will be on immigration and deportation, the unknown economic effects of Trump’s tariff plans and how the two different White Houses would handle both existing challenges like Ukraine and emergent foreign policy threats — with the further point that a Harris administration may encourage different moves from our adversaries than a Trump administration would. But the different scenarios for a second Trump administration alone are extremely high variance. Who runs it? How does Trump behave? I can imagine very different scenarios for the country just within the range of Trumpian possibilities.

Goldberg: Whoever the next president is will probably get some credit for the coming manufacturing jobs that Biden created with the Inflation Reduction Act. I suspect there’s far more of a chance for a decent — if disappointing — settlement in Ukraine if Harris wins, because Ukraine will have the leverage of ongoing U.S. support. America will still have intractable problems, but life will hopefully feel, by pre-Trump standards, basically normal.

Healy: What is the worst-case scenario if Trump wins and everything Democrats have been saying comes to fruition — he leads like an autocrat, he uses presidential immunity with abandon, he aligns with Vladimir Putin, he wants a third term, he undertakes mass deportations?

Douthat: I think this scenario lumps together the totally credible and the much more extreme. Trump would absolutely seek some kind of deal in Ukraine, and he would try to push deportations up and up and up. But those issues fall within the normal range of presidential powers. The U.S. has a long tradition of negotiating insalubrious deals with nuclear-armed dictators, and remember that deportation rates were higher under Obama than in Trump’s term. A vast deportation effort could certainly prompt mass protest and all kinds of resistance — but these are familiar features of democratic politics, not signifiers of autocracy.

To go from there to the actual autocratic scenarios or even just to the extremity of a third term would require two things to happen: The courts would have to simply rubber-stamp radical forms of executive action — which is not what the Roberts court’s immunity decision does and certainly not how John Roberts himself behaved in his rulings on many Trumpian matters in Trump’s term — and the military would have to become his cat’s paw, embracing nakedly unconstitutional orders. That seems essentially impossible, not just implausible, absent some external shock that dwarfs even the Covid-19 pandemic.

Brooks: Lots of presidents have deported undocumented workers. But they didn’t deport families that are well embedded in our society. I may be naïve, but I think the image of that kind of deportation would shock America, prove very unpopular and force Trump, who wants approval more than anything, to backtrack. I think a lot of people are voting for Trump because they want the economy of 2019, not the full Viktor Orban.

Goldberg: I think the worst-case scenario looks different from Hungary. It’s hard for me to imagine Trump gaining Orban-like control over the media, such that opposition candidates are hardly even mentioned in major news sources. At the same time, America is a more violent country than Hungary, and Trump is a violent man, so I’d expect both more unrest and more bloody repression here.

As I’ve written, my greatest fear is that Trump acts on his promises to conduct mass deportations, which, aside from the essential inhumanity to migrants who are deeply rooted here, would require an enormous expansion of police and military powers that would transform American life.

Douthat: Without negotiating all the details of Orbanism, I will just say that it’s very hard to see how you could import the political model of a small and relatively homogeneous Eastern European republic with a history of subjugation by larger powers to a vast continental empire of nearly 350 million people in which neither political coalition seems capable of building a majority that lasts more than an election cycle or two.

Cottom: We lean too heavily on academic definitions, but governance has always been a hybrid. We got mired in the whole “Is he or isn’t he a fascist?” debate, for example. We risk doing the same thing with autocracy versus democracy. Does it really matter if mass deportations are within the scope of presidential powers if they are inhumane and most Americans don’t want them? Does it matter if Trump doesn’t authorize the arrest of journalists if he doesn’t do much to stop the unlawful targeting of journalists?

Healy: And what will it mean if none of that comes to pass and Democrats are seen as alarmist about Trump?

Brooks: I’ll answer your question with a question. In 2017 the left went into full resistance mode, which led to the ideological excesses of 2019 and ’20 — ban fracking, decriminalize the border. If Trump wins, will the Democrats go that way again? I suspect not. I suspect there will be more introspection: “How did we lose touch with the working class, and how can we get back in touch?”

Goldberg: Patrick, what do you mean by “alarmist”? Trump’s term was extremely bad. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which his second term would be better.

Healy: Not better, Michelle, but not fascism.

Goldberg: I’m just not willing to accept that anything short of full fascism means that Democrats were being alarmist about the risks of electing someone with dictatorial aspirations.

Healy: What do you think we’re going to learn about America in Tuesday’s election?

Brooks: I went to a Christian nationalist church in Tennessee nine days ago. The preacher was a narcissist, just like Trump, and I was reminded how claustrophobic it is to be trapped inside the mind of a narcissist. But the other phrase that leaped to my mind was “dark world.” The world described at that service was filled with enemies, threats, traitors and aggression. If Trump wins, we will learn that many Americans are still in that distrustful, dark world. If Harris wins, we’ll learn that many Americans are sick of the negativity and want some happy normalcy.

Goldberg: I feel like a broken record about this, but if Trump wins again in spite of losing the popular vote, I feel we’ll have learned that the American Constitution has become a fundamental obstacle to democracy.

Douthat: For that reason and others, I hope that if Trump wins again, he does win the popular vote. More broadly, I think that a second Trump term that doesn’t generate a constitutional crisis would nonetheless finally do away with an impulse that has animated both liberals and Never Trumpers — myself initially included — ever since 2016: a desire to just declare the Trump era abnormal and hope for a reversion to a pre-Trumpian reality. That reality simply isn’t coming back. However good or bad a Trump second term may be, the much weirder world that his election helped usher in is here to stay.

Healy: I’d like to end with a lightning round, and I’m taking out my crystal ball again. Which party will win the House and the Senate?

Brooks: Whichever party wins the White House. The days of split-ticket voting are ending. If Trump wins Pennsylvania, so will the Senate candidate David McCormick. What amazes me is how few House seats seem to be in play.

Douthat: I assume that the G.O.P. will have the House and Senate in my Trump-wins scenario, but my bet is that this time Trump slightly outperforms a few Republican senators and wins a blue wall state or three while the Democratic Senate incumbent narrowly hangs on.

Goldberg: I think Democrats take the House and Republicans take the Senate.

Cottom: I agree with Michelle. The political organizers I talk to are preparing for that scenario.

Healy: Aside from the winner of Harris versus Trump, what do you think will be the biggest surprise of the night?

Cottom: My friends on the ground are very interested in Hamilton County, Ind. It appears to be leaning Democratic for the first time. A Harris win there would be a big surprise. They believe that if Harris wins this county, it bodes well for a Democratic trend across races that are currently within the margin of error.

Goldberg: My hope is that it’s Nebraska. If the independent candidate Dan Osborn is able to beat the Republican senator Deb Fischer, it could open up a really fascinating chapter in our politics. I don’t think there’s much room for a third party in America, but I could imagine a bunch of independents emerging, especially in places where, because of polarization, one of the two major parties isn’t viable.

Douthat: I endorse the Goldberg take: I think the Osborn campaign has been a model of how to run as a heterodox candidacy in a polarized age. I doubt he’ll win, but it would be a useful jolt to the system if he did.

Healy: If Trump wins, which adviser or ally of his ends up with real power that concerns you the most?

Brooks: At this point, Kennedy. But the list of miscreants will be long.

Douthat: Foreign policy is the area where I think Trump’s term looks best in hindsight, and so to the extent that he staffs up with professionals who came through the first four years with their relationships with him and their reputations intact — the two former appointees I interviewed last month are good case studies — the more encouraged I’ll be. If he seems to be just throwing Putin-friendly cable-news guests and professional sycophants into key foreign policy positions, then the more destabilizing scenarios will look a lot more credible.

Goldberg: Stephen Miller, obviously, as well as McEntee and Kash Patel. And certainly the truly fascistic Michael Flynn, if Trump decides to bring him back.

Healy: If Harris wins, are there steps she could take to unify the country? Or do you think unity will be out of reach?

Cottom: Why would a President Harris be expected to unify a country that was never unified before? I want her to expand the court, make care work part of American infrastructure and use the bully pulpit responsibly. I don’t care about unity.

Douthat: She probably isn’t going to have room to make big legislative moves, for better or worse, but I think her best move as a unifier would be to avoid turning her agencies into tools for culture war, which is the temptation that all presidents facing congressional gridlock seem to give in to.

Brooks: We need to stop looking to politicians for unity. We need social and cultural movements to be engines of change. The politicians will come later.

Healy: If Trump loses, who’s the Republican nominee in 2028?

Brooks: Tom Cotton.

Douthat: Donald Trump. Well, probably not, but you can’t rule it out. If not him, JD Vance currently has the inside track, but it will be a genuine contest.

Cottom: Whoever it is, the person will know that the structure of our electoral system will make any Republican competitive, no matter how dangerous the candidate. That should be fun. It will be Vance.

Goldberg: I have no idea, but I will enjoy watching the civil war in the Republican Party. It will be in the interest of social conservatives to blame a Trump loss on his abortion waffling and try to get the party to double down on its commitment to abortion bans. Whereas others who are sick of losing will try to move even farther away from anti-abortion orthodoxy.

Healy: And if Harris loses, who’s the Democratic nominee in 2028?

Brooks: Wes Moore.

Cottom: If Donald Trump is re-elected, I am not sure I will care who the Democratic nominee is in 2028. It will be Josh Shapiro. It should be Andy Beshear. The Democrats need to look to the South again.

Goldberg: My guess would be Josh Shapiro and Gretchen Whitmer.

Douthat: The fully self-aware form of ChatGPT, uploaded into the flesh of Gavin Newsom. Or maybe Whitmer.

Source photographs by Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times and Anna Moneymaker, via Getty Images.