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Hey, Matter of Opinion listeners, it’s Ross —

Michelle.

Carlos.

— and we are actually not in this week’s episode. Lydia Polgreen is handling things all by her lonesome. But we’re here to tell you — well, what are we here to tell you?

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So if that isn’t enticement enough, I can’t imagine what would be. And now —

On with the show.

On with the show.

From New York Times Opinion, I’m Lydia Polgreen, and this is Matter of Opinion.

Last month, Ross brought our fellow columnist, David French, on to debate whether voting for Kamala Harris is the best way to save conservatism. In this episode, we’re going to talk about whether voting for Kamala Harris is the best way to turn a Democrat into a conservative. Just kidding. But really, I’ve been thinking a lot about the very disparate groups hoping to elect Harris as the next president and wondering about the lingering divides within this coalition on a variety of issues, ranging from Israel and foreign policy to the economy. There’s an open question as to who the Democrats are anymore and where they’re going.

So to help me unpack that, I’ve invited my fellow radical leftists, Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Goldberg, on the show today. Michelle, Jamelle, thanks so much for joining me.

Hi, Lydia. Thanks for having us.

Thank you for having us.

It’s a pleasure. Don’t tell the NYPD that Antifa is having a meeting here.

So let’s just dive right in. And maybe, before we get into what the Democratic Party even is right now, it would be helpful to place ourselves in that broader world. We’ve all covered politics from a broadly progressive left-of-center perspective for a long time, so I’m wondering how you guys situate yourselves. Like, where in the political spectrum do you find yourself most at home, if anywhere? And where do you feel the most discomfort? Who wants to go first?

I mean, I always describe myself as center-left. I’m kind of somewhat of a bog-standard liberal as opposed to a leftist. If I could personally install my ideal president, it would be Elizabeth Warren.

And so I am someone who votes blue no matter who and has very little sympathy or patience for arguments for third parties unless people have actually done the work to create a ranked-choice voting system in which a third-party vote isn’t just a spoiler vote. And I’m somewhat impatient with both parts of the left that I think have unrealistic expectations about what politicians can do and still get elected, and also have a lot of frustration with the parts of the Democratic Party that are overly solicitous, especially of big tech and big business.

Yeah, a lot of that resonates. How about you, Jamelle?

I very much don’t like classifying myself, but I think that if you were to just sort of read my columns, it would become very clear very quickly that I’m very much a Social Democrat, someone who believes in a large and robust social insurance state, who believes in broad unionization and broad worker power within the economy, someone who thinks that the United States would be better off if we took more experiments with the Democratic allocation of wealth.

Having said that, when it comes to politicians, I find myself with a real affection for politicians who are less concerned with highfalutin ideas and more concerned with the give and take of actually trying to govern and construct things and deliver things to ordinary voters.

When I think about the politicians I admire most in US history, whether they are guys like John Bingham in the 19th century, like a workaday Ohio politician who ends up crafting the 14th Amendment, or Robert Wagner of New York, the kind of famed Tammany politician of the 1930s who constructed a good deal of the New Deal, or even Hubert Humphrey, who people have complicated feelings about, but who has ideals but fundamentally recognizes that politics is about the pursuit of the possible. Those are the kinds of people that I find myself admiring and who I tend to align myself with.

Jamelle, is there anyone today that you think is really in that tradition?

Yes, actually. Nancy Pelosi obviously comes to mind. Nancy Pelosi may be like the apex of that kind of politician alive today. Joe Biden is that kind of politician. This might be a little controversial, but I kind think AOC has that in her core. I think that is what motivates AOC and that what makes her so interesting is that she is this combination of someone who can speak the language of high ideals and high ideals, but is very much a how can we move a piece of legislation from point A to point B kind of politician. And I think the left needs much more of that.

Like Pelosi especially — I’m not going to say I’ve agreed with every single thing Nancy Pelosi has ever done, right. This isn’t a fandom. But when I think about who has been just an extremely effective legislative leader and legislator over the course of her career, it’s kind of hard to think of anyone in two generations who is better than Nancy Pelosi, especially if Harris does win in November — and Pelosi is kind of an important part of moving Biden out — if Harris wins, I think you can make a very strong case that Nancy Pelosi is one of the five most important legislators to ever grace the halls of the House of Representatives.

That sounds about right to me.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah. So I feel like I’m kind of off on a different planet from you guys because my primary orientation is actually more global. So I think a lot about ideas of progress that go beyond borders. And so I feel a little bit homeless in that it seems like both major political parties in this country feel like they’ve walked away from a lot of the commitments to thinking about what a — “globalization” is a dirty word, but what a moving forward of the world together and cooperation and all of those things looks like. And so I feel a little bit lost in this particular moment because I think I’m a kind of a bit of a global internationalist in more of the kind of Kwame Nkrumah decolonizing world sense —

In a nationalist moment.

In a nationalist moment. And I’m also a big believer in international cooperation in a moment when that is very much falling out of fashion. So I want to start us with a question that we’ll probably spend the entire episode talking about and trying to answer, but I want a quick diagnosis. What is the Democratic Party now? And where do you place it on the political spectrum in October 2024?

I mean, this isn’t I don’t think, unique to the Democratic Party. This is true of a lot of social Democratic parties in Europe, that it’s basically a coalition of urban professionals, people of color, the labor movement. This is, I think, specific to the United States because we don’t have a parliamentary system. So the right-leaning suburbanites who are horrified by populism necessarily get absorbed into the Democratic Party in the way that they wouldn’t get absorbed into a social Democratic Party in a parliamentary system.

You’d have the liberal Democrats in the UK or some other kind of place. Yeah, all of that and, apparently, Dick Cheney in 2020.

But I think he sort of fits in that, to be honest.

I would say that the Democratic Party is what it’s always been, which has always been this kind of interest group brokerage party, even going back to the Jacksonian Democratic Party. If you step back and look at what were the constituent parts of that Democratic Party, it was new immigrants to the urban centers of the North. It was the game and farmers throughout the old United States. It was new frontier-y farmers in what was called the Old West, so like Ohio and Michigan, it was Southern slaveholders.

This was the Democratic Party. And I think, at every stage in the party’s history since then, it has always been a big and unwieldy coalition of groups with lots of internal antagonisms and internal contradictions.

And Michelle pointed to one of the big ones right now, which is that because Trump has reshaped the Republican Party in his image and essentially purged it of any figure or groups of voters who are uncomfortable with that, the Democratic Party has taken in a bunch of right-leaning voters who like the status quo, who don’t think that there needs to be big changes to the nature of American society or whatever, and so that’s just made the Democratic Party even more unwieldy than it typically is. But also, I think giving it a kind of small c conservative cast that the Democratic party is a party of conservation of America’s —

Of normal, of normality —

Of normality of America’s political institutions. But that’s all to say the entry of former Republicans into the Democratic Party has given it this small c conservative orientation and cast that I think is shaping things. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this kind of dynamic also happens all the time in American history, that even the Republican Party at one point, the OG Republican Party, comprised of former Whigs, antislavery Liberty Party members, antislavery Free Soilers, and a bunch of antislavery Democrats. So it’s like, this happens. This is part of how American political parties form and change. And I think we’re in this moment of party — not realignment, but sort of things are getting shaken up a bit.

Yeah, well, but who’s driving, I guess, is the question? We’re in this extraordinary situation, where there’s an incumbent president who decided not to run again, and his vice president is now the nominee, and she seems to be — Kamala Harris — a little bit of all things to all people. I mean, at the VP debate, you had Tim Walz thinking this unlikely coalition of Bernie Sanders, Dick Cheney, Taylor Swift. I mean, it’s really a grab bag. So I take your point, Jamelle. But when you have this many different parts in the coalition, what’s driving that coalition forward? Is it just Trump?

Right now, I think that the Democratic Party is organized about stopping Donald Trump. I mean, Joe Biden’s presidency was, in many ways, an effort to make the Democratic Party much more than that. He had this extremely robust industrial policy. He had this robust economic policy, that he wasn’t going to be bound by the kind of austerity that hamstrung Barack Obama. That he was going to try, as best he could, to govern in a much more both social Democratic way, but also in a much more protectionist way, certainly a much more pro-union way.

And it’s actually gotten him very little. In some ways, it has turned a lot of people’s assumptions about policy upside down. I think a lot of people hoped that if you had a Democrat who governed in an economic populist manner, that it would cut into some of the appeal of right-wing populism, certainly that they would be rewarded for it by the labor movement. And I don’t want to overstate the amount of the labor movement’s defection from the Democrats. Most unions are supporting Kamala Harris.

But nevertheless, you do have more union support for Donald Trump than you have for previous Republican presidents. And so I understand why Kamala Harris, looking at this situation that she has inherited, would think that she has a better shot at. Inning by reaching out to some of those kind of small c conservatives who are appalled by Trump but not necessarily looking for sweeping social change.

So the question is what’s driving the Democratic Party right now?

Yeah.

I do think that it’s mostly just opposition to Trump. This is a big tent coalition whose main goal right now is to keep Trump out of power. I think that the end of Roe v. Wade has also been another broad energizing issue. On everything else, there is lots of internal debate and fractiousness about what’s the best path forward.

I would say one way to think about the Democratic coalition right now — and one way to think about the chief divide in American society, honestly — is it’s just between high-trust and low-trust people.

Absolutely.

That’s the unifying thing for the Trump coalition is less, these days, race or gender or education than it is a lack of trust in the institutions of American life. And this is what made Biden’s gamble, that maybe you could cut into Trump support by governing with an eye towards raising wages for working people, the mistake he made was that entire gamble depends on working with institutions. It’s accomplishing something through the usual institutional pathways. This trust —

Can I just back up? I don’t think — I mean, I don’t know how to say this, but I think, on the one hand, it didn’t work, but I don’t think it was a mistake, if that makes sense.

No, I don’t think it was a mistake either. It’s one of those things where you have to do something. You can’t not do anything.

And it’s also the right thing to do, even if it doesn’t pay political dividends.

It was the right thing to do, for example, for the Biden administration to focus much more on keeping unemployment as low as possible during pandemic recovery than worrying so much about prices. That was objectively the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do for the Biden administration to do as much pandemic aid as possible. The child tax credit, for example, cut child poverty in half for the year that it was in effect. And neither Biden or the Democratic Party got literally any credit for it whatsoever.

And I think part of that is simply you’re not going to have a good, easy time attracting low-trust voters by touting what you’re doing with the government. And the thing Trump — I wouldn’t say figured out, I think it’s very instinctual. It’s just that him being, himself, a low-trust voter, sort of embodying that for this portion of the electorate, they look at him doing nothing, but they still perceive it as him acting in their interest because he shares their distrust of the political system.

But, in any case, I think that’s the divide. And I think the Democratic strategy right now, the Harris strategy, is, like, can I get every single possible moderate to high-trust person into this tent? And if I can do that, then I can win. It is noteworthy that in the interviews Harris has done, no one has asked her, really, what are your three top legislative priorities? What are the three things you want to do if you [INAUDIBLE]—

Well, some people have asked her. She just doesn’t really —

She doesn’t really have an answer.

I mean, she’ll say strengthen the middle class, some version of that.

Is she basically responding to the political environment that Jamelle is describing?

I think absolutely.

And that’s how you end up with Dick Cheney as a kind of showpiece, and you end up with a DNC that’s got plenty of space and room for various Republicans to speak, but other parts of the coalition feel that they’re pushed to the side. I think this was the first time in a couple of election cycles that there hasn’t been a transgender speaker. There was no Palestinian-American speaker who was allowed to speak at the DNC.

And so there’s been a very clear message that, based on the description that I think both of you are sort of coalescing around, makes a good deal of political sense, that it’s about just sort of getting the gettable voters rather than trying to tell a real story about where you want to take the country. But I wonder, is that good or bad for the future of the Democratic Party? I mean, where does that leave you?

I think that within the kind of — given that Kamala Harris didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree and exists within the context of all that came before, within that context, what she’s doing makes total sense. This is, from my point of view, such an existential election. And it makes sense to me for her to try to win in the safest possible way.

I do think that, inshallah, if she does win, a lot of people are going to be disappointed by whatever comes next because it’s not obvious what direction she’s going to try to move us in. B, it’s not obvious that her administration would be able to accomplish anything at all given that she’s likely to end up with a Republican Senate who’s going to be kind of completely intransigent.

And nobody has ever been able to really level with the American populace about all the choke points in our system and just about how broken the legislative process is right now and the scale of changes that would be necessary to unstick it. And so I think there will be euphoria, well-deserved, because I do think that a Donald Trump presidency would be the end of the version of American democracy that we’ve all come to take for granted to some extent. But once Trump is off the scene, we’ll be confronted with these much more enduring structural problems.

That is a good place for us to take a quick break. And when we come back, we’re going to dive into some of those divides and what that might mean for the future of American democracy. Stick around.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ve been talking about this campaign and its singular goal of defeating Donald Trump, once again. But, as we’ve said, there are some very real divisions roiling beneath the surface in the Democratic Party. And whether Harris wins or loses in November, we’re going to see them deepen. So I’m curious, from each of you, of all the divisions that you’re watching play out in the Democratic coalition, what’s the most consequential one to your mind? Jamelle, you want to go first?

I mean, for the obvious, most consequential one is just that where Democratic Party elites and where Democratic voters are on the question of the United States’ relationship to Israel is — that’s the division. That’s the one that is most likely, I think, to create the most acrimony going forward. It’s clear that everyone has sort of suspended it for the moment. I think part of Biden not being in the race really helps in that regard. Everyone sort of been like, OK, Harris is not Joe Biden. Harris does not actually lead the Biden administration. So we’re going to bracket, for now, this through the fall, through the general election. But it certainly clear to me that if she wins, that’s going to be the big question about her foreign policy. How do you relate to America’s relationship with the Israeli government? There are obviously other foreign policy issues, but there’s not really like a big internal Democratic Party debate about China.

Or about Ukraine.

Or about Ukraine. For the most part, Democrats are like, we should be supporting Ukraine. For the most part, Democrats have been on board with Biden’s sort of like — we have to bring manufacturing capacity back to the United States, treat China as much more of like a rival and a competitor. There are no Democrats who are like, no, we got to be easier on the Chinese Communist Party. That’s not a thing that happens. There’s no Democrat that’s like, we got to be easier or less harsh on Putin’s Russia.

But Israel is where there’s a real divide. And it’s a divide that exists, I think, principally among the voter base versus sort of elected officials. But it’s creeping up among elected officials, too.

Yeah, I mean, I think that this truism, that American elections are never really decided on foreign policy, probably remains true. But Israel feels like the closest thing to a domestic foreign policy issue. But Michelle, I’m curious, do you think it’s as a divide within the party as it seems?

I mean, the number of people who vote on Israel-Palestine is certainly relatively small, or at least that’s what all the polls suggest. To me, one of the most difficult things about grappling with this from a political point of view is that I can’t think of another issue where what I consider the right thing to do and what I consider the politically savvy thing to do are so far apart. So it’s because of that that I have some degree of sympathy with Kamala Harris for indulging the Israeli government more than I would like to see, because I think that the domestic political costs of breaking with Israel are so high.

I think that will change because the Jewish community itself is changing so much, and younger Jews are aghast, not universally, but much more so than older Jews at what Israel has become and about the aggression of the Netanyahu government, the complete disinterest and contempt for American attempts to push forward a two-state solution. I think that there’s going to be increasingly an understanding that even if the two-state solution is ideal, and I think it is, to some degree, inasmuch as it’s an impossibility, it’s a way of avoiding the one-state solution that exists right now.

Yeah. Well, this also seems like a place where the decoupling of what public opinion is kind of broadly from the price that politicians pay for taking particular stances feels just incredibly vast. And there are politicians, I think, who have taken pro-Palestine stances, who are also very good at constituent services and things like that, who’ve managed to fend off challenges to them. But you’ve also, Michelle, written about politicians like Jamaal Bowman, who had other issues, but clearly was someone that was seen as quite vulnerable.

Well, part of it was that he was genuinely at odds with such a big part of his constituency. AIPAC, and for that matter, the crypto industry, which we’re going to talk about in a minute, dropped just an unbelievable amount of money on his head. But he had already alienated so many of his voters. I mean, his district is not typical because it has so many highly-engaged Jewish Democrats.

But, in general, while it’s true that there’s a big gap between public opinion and public incentives on Israel-Palestine, part of it is just public opinion doesn’t necessarily measure how important an issue is to you. So a ton of people out there might say that they support limitations on aid to Israel or an end to aid to Israel. But the number of people who are voting on that issue — there’s this very intense pool of voters for whom support for Israel is nonnegotiable.

It’s a similar situation to Republicans and guns, basically.

That’s a really good way to put it, yeah.

That there’s obviously a broad number of Americans who support lots of different kinds of gun reform. But most Americans don’t vote on gun reform. The people who do vote on gun reform do not want gun reform. And they’re a pretty critical part of the Republican coalition. And so I would say that where Democrats are heading on Israel is similar to where Republicans are on the question of guns.

No, I don’t think that that’s right because I don’t think Democrats are radicalizing on Israel. I think —

That’s not the nature of the analogy I’m making. The analogy I’m making is the difficulty of trying to be more in line with public opinion here is simply that there’s strong preference intensity amongst a number of Democratic voters, and that they will vote on that in a way that similar to how, if you are a suburban Republican in Northern Virginia, you probably have a bunch of voters who would support common sense gun reform, but you also have voters who will do everything they can to defeat you if you support common sense gun reform. And so you you’re kind of boxed in by the existence of this group of people with strong preference intensity.

Yeah, and highly motivated by those sets of beliefs. One last thing on the matter of foreign policy — I feel like I can’t let go of the party touting the endorsement of Dick Cheney. He’s just such a Darth Vader figure and so dark and part of such a dark chapter of American history. And so his reemergence just really sets off a lot of alarm bells for me around the kind of neocon march to war after 9/11. That was a period that really led us so directly to where we are now.

And the idea that holding up Dick Cheney as this guy is now with us, coupled with the fact that Kamala Harris, in an interview on 60 Minutes this week, when she was asked who do you see as the biggest threat or the United States’ biggest adversary, she said Iran. And I don’t know, my head went into my hands, and I just thought, are we back in 2003 again?

That answer about Iran upsets me more than the Dick Cheney thing, that a lot of people — that really set them off. It didn’t to me, even though I mean, it’s funny, I remember covering that George W. Bush campaign in 2004, and there would be a lot of “even Reagan would never”— “even Reagan would have never.” And I actually remember saying to someone, can you imagine if we’re someday talking about George W Bush like that? And, of course, now we are.

I mean, now everyone done in that George W. Bush administration seems, to me, preferable to everyone around Donald Trump. And that’s not an endorsement of them. It’s just a kind of way of talking about Donald Trump’s unlimited depravity. And so I don’t know, it doesn’t bother. I’m just such a big believer that the threat of Donald Trump requires a popular front.

And if you want to send a message to Republican defectors who you need in states like Arizona that they’re welcome in this party — I mean, there was just this poll, The New York Times poll that just came out, that shows Kamala Harris ahead for the first time in a couple of these polls, also shows a pretty significant number of Republicans voting for her far more than Democrats who are going in the other direction. So I think that this Republican outreach — I mean, we’ll see. But there’s reason to believe right now, based on the data we have, that that is an effective strategy.

It’s difficult, at this stage, to say what kind of consequence these things are going to have. In the 1980 campaign. Reagan, I’m sure, touted some Democratic endorsements. In the end, it didn’t really — I mean, Reagan, ideological conservative, had an ideologically conservative administration, worked with Democrats because Democrats did control the House at that point. But there was a large faction of conservative Democrats who he could easily work with.

I mean, the emergence of the Reagan Democrats was transformative and transformed the kind of nature of our political coalitions.

Right, but the point I’m making is less about the voters and more about the administration. The existence of Democrats who voted for Reagan didn’t, all of a sudden, make the Reagan administration less hostile to the social insurance thing. It just was sort of like, oh, we can win elections —

With these people.

— with these people. And, in the same way, it’s unclear to me, at this stage, if there is a big Republican [INAUDIBLE], if there are going to be all these Harris Republicans, what difference that actually makes when it comes to governing. If that translates to trimming the sails of a political program, then that’s significant. But if what it means is basically the president uses some Republican-friendly language and then appoints the same cast of characters who ran Biden agencies, then it’s just sort of like, OK.

And a lot of those people — I mean, a lot of those former Republicans are now hardcore Democratic partisans. They’re kind of people who mainline MSNBC and are just kind of —

The Morning Joe addicts.

Right.

All right, we’re going to take a quick pause. And when we come back, we’re going to turn to the economy and all the Democratic divides on that issue. We’ll be right back.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

All right, let’s turn to the economy. What surprises you about the Democratic Party’s approach to economic policy, and where do you see the divides and contradictions?

One of the interesting things — I mean, actually, this is very interesting and I don’t think people really anticipated it — is that as we’ve had this education polarization in the electorate, as more college-educated voters are supporting Democrats, one of the theories is that the Democrats would become more moderate on an economic agenda. But actually, the reverse has happened. As the Democratic Party has become more reliant on college-educated voters, more reliant on affluent suburbanites, it’s become more ambitious about the kinds of economic programs it wants to pursue. And I honestly would expect that to continue, even if there are a bunch of Harris Republicans.

On the day we were recording this, Kamala Harris did two things. First, she had an interview on The View, where she’s like, I’ll put a Republican in my cabinet. And she announced an expansion to Medicare to cover home care and home assistants, which is a big program. That’s actually a major expansion of the program.

And a huge pain point for millions of American families. I mean, this is a big, big deal.

It’s interesting to me that the campaign did not see these two things as incompatible. Like, I don’t have to trim my sails when it comes to expanding a major government program if I’m going to appeal to Republicans. I think it’s interesting and maybe says something about the policy consequences or lack thereof of trying to attract Republican voters.

But I guess there are a couple of places where there does seem to be some real friction and incompatibility. So Mark Cuban, for example, the entrepreneur and tech company guy, who’s a vociferous supporter of Kamala Harris, has been saying, if it was up to me, I’d get rid of Lina Khan, who’s the head of the Federal Trade Commission and has been going after a handful of tech companies for wielding too much power.

And then, just in general, there’s this sense that mainstream Democrats have gotten a little too cozy over the years with Wall Street and big money.

But I think this is less about the affluent suburbanite, formally-Republican voters joining the Democratic coalition. And it is just about the gargantuan power of tech billionaires and the sinister role that they’re playing. I mean, I see their kind of power in our politics is, at once, a symptom and a cause of Democratic sclerosis. And the crypto industry specifically — there’s a really good piece about this in The New Yorker this week that everybody should read. We’ve never talked about crypto, so I don’t know how you guys feel about it. I mean, to me, the crypto industry seems so monumentally sinister.

It seems like a gigantic scam to me.

It’s a gigantic scam. I mean, it’s so telling to me that the one person they put forward as their moral exemplar was Sam Bankman-Fried. But they just have so much money that they are willing to spend so aggressively — I mean, like $30 million against Sherrod Brown, who is both a Democrat from a swing state, but also just kind of one of the best Democrats period, in terms of populist economic policies. And they’re just so willing to play this sort of smash mouth politics and intimidate politicians who have to be really, really committed to walk into this buzzsaw.

To me, this is less about of the reshaping of the Democratic coalition and more just about the unbelievable power of these technologists and monopolists.

It’s interesting to think of crypto as like a low-trust institution. The selling point for it is that you can move money without the government peeking in. And there is a contradiction there. If you are trying to attract the support of Mark Cuban and those like him, it’s hard to maintain that while taking a hard line on crypto, taking a hard line on crypto alienates the kind of low-trust people that you’re trying to attract with your Mark Cuban support. That is a real contradiction.

And honestly, that’s one of the unanswered questions of a Harris administration. How much are you going to listen to these people? Mark Cuban’s saying you should fire Lina Khan. Are you going to take that seriously?

And I just want to say, if Harris were to fire Lina Khan, which I think would be kind of catastrophic, both for her other parts of her agenda, which run through the —

Antitrust.

Right, which run through antitrust. I mean, if she really wants to take on price gouging, Lina Khan is going to be —

Shoulder to shoulder.

Yeah, right. And so my understanding — and we should check this — is that if she were to fire Lina Khan, it would be extraordinarily difficult for her to get a replacement through a Republican Senate, which is one reason why I think Lina Khan’s job is safe, besides the fact that she’s so beloved by an important part of the Democratic base.

I’m more worried about Gary Gensler, the head of the SEC, who’s been very aggressive in trying to regulate crypto, as he should be, and who they hate with such a fiery passion that isn’t really matched with any kind of pro-Gary Gensler movement out there. I mean, that just seems like a really easy head for her to serve up.

I think it’s meaningful that none of the pressure to fire Gensler or fire Khan is coming from within the Democratic coalition. That’s one reason I think that it probably isn’t going to happen. There aren’t that many prominent Democrats being like, you’ve got to get rid of these people. It’s Silicon Valley billionaires who have been wishy-washy about supporting Democrats, who half of them are, like, we’re all for Trump right now.

Well, not half. I mean, Harris has very deep support in Silicon Valley. I mean, this is —

The big names —

There are some big names, yeah.

— are lining up behind Trump. And so, I don’t know, part of the unanswered questions here is that we’ve never actually seen Kamala Harris have to negotiate these kinds of coalitional conflicts. And so we don’t really have a basis for saying what she would do. She’s never had to do this kind of thing.

And one of the truisms of presidential politics is that things actually do look different when you’re in that office. When you’re sitting in that office, what might seem like, yeah, I’ll fire this person as a thank you to this part of my donor base or this part of my coalition looks very different when you’re actually sort of like, oh, I have this job now and I’m thinking about A, B, C, and D in addition to X, Y, and Z.

And, to Michelle’s point, I have to get my cabinet through a very hostile Senate, and I’m going to pick my shots and just keep people who I don’t have to put up again.

We’ve all been talking about a Harris-Walz administration. If, god forbid, Harris doesn’t win, do you think any of these factions are likely to be part of the story? Are any of these divisions likely to play into her defeat? Or is it simply about whether there are enough of those voters?

It depends on what states. Like, if she ends up losing Michigan because she alienated a critical mass of Arab-American voters, then we will obviously look back on this and say that Israel and the Democratic Party’s support for Netanyahu was part of that story, which doesn’t necessarily mean that she wouldn’t have lost even more voters if she had taken a more hard-line position on Netanyahu, as much as I think that’s the right thing to do for its own sake.

And also, if Donald Trump wins, people are going to credit some of his phenomenal support from Elon Musk and figures like that, although my guess is that parts of the Democratic Party will say we have to be even more friendly to crypto and do even more outreach. But I would imagine that at least part of the Democratic Party will polarize against the tech industry, which it increasingly is just — it makes things that make everyone’s life worse and plays such a monstrous role in our politics that you would hope — I would hope — that there would be some kind of populist reaction against that.

Jamelle?

I’ve been thinking about how the Democratic Party might fracture if Harris loses because so far, if Biden were still in the front seat and he loses, very easy to see how the Democratic Party fractures. It’s sort of like, well, there are a bunch of us said Biden should drop out, and he didn’t, and look what happened. And that’s sort of like — that’s the dividing line.

But if Harris loses, depends on the nature of the loss. It depends on the extent of the loss. I think one thing you’ll see are at least some Democrats resign themselves to this. They’ll say Trump obviously represents some segment of the American population, that when they come out, we cannot win an election. So we have to figure out how to appeal to them. And you’ll likely see the Democratic Party become even — it’s already moved to the right on immigration. It will become even more draconian on immigration. I would expect them also to become much more friendlier to crypto. I would expect that the kind of economic management that defined the Biden pandemic response to fall out of favor because one of the things people point to is inflation killed —

Yeah, you’re like never escaping austerity for basically a generation after that.

Which, by the way, is where Europe is right now. I feel like Europe is locked in a really toxic combination of anti-immigrant politics and austerity that sort of feed on one another in this very ugly loop. And America — the idea that we. You would go down that path — I mean, this was the moment that JD Vance was talking about, immigration as not being linked to prosperity, and said we would be the most prosperous nation in the world. And it’s like, what, do you think Hungary is the most prosperous? I mean —

It was very funny. It was frightening, but also very funny that that moment — he was on CNBC or something, right?

Yeah.

And he said, if immigration made you rich, America would be the most prosperous nation in the world.

Which, in fact, it is.

I’m looking here on ChatGPT.

But I just think that, to me, is like, if we end up with two parties trying to outcompete for the dead end that is the European present, lord help us all. But I’m curious, where do you guys hope that the Democratic Party can move post-2024 election, this sort of motley coalition of the willing, to use a very unfortunate but unfortunate and redolent phrase that stinks of Dick Cheney?

What is the coalition that you would like to see to actually really move the Democratic Party forward into a powerhouse because, I mean, if the Republicans lose and Donald Trump, hopefully, is done, they’re going to have a long period of rebuilding. So what is the Democratic Party that you’d like to see? Michelle, you go first.

So a lot of people have been contemptuous of the kind of politics of “joy” that Kamala Harris represents or talks about. And I understand that can seem sort of vapid and without content. But I actually think that a politics, if not of joy, of optimism is really connected to what you were talking about earlier, which is a politics that is open to the world, that sees engagement with the world and immigration and globalization, if not of manufacturing, at least interdependence, that sees all those things as additive rather than —

Zero-sum?

Rather than zero-sum. And that’s something that I feel — we’re roughly the same age — that I feel nostalgic for from when I was younger. There was a sense that the world was only becoming more integrated, and there was a huge amount of excitement about the ideas that we could find all these — I mean, I’m going to use a word that I hate — find all these synergies and ways to collaborate. And so there are the various kind of downstream policy ramifications for that. But I do think that an America that is not such in a defensive crouch, where we don’t constantly feel like we’re just trying to fend off something apocalyptic —

You’re searching through the grab-bag of discredited words of our youth, which I so deeply identify with — synergy, like barf. We’re just so scarred by it. But I think, point in the direction that you’re talking about and that I very much share, which is some sort of new language and new way to talk about human progress. But I think there’s also some way to talk about dynamism, this sense that that’s not just like globalization, all boats rising, completely, coupled to a kind of libertarian idea about capitalism, but is more based in some sort of interdependence.

And my hope is that the future Democratic Party can, through a combination of unearthing and invention, come up with a new set of ideas about human progress that we could all get excited about and look forward to. Jamelle, what about you?

When I think about the question what do I hope to see in the Democratic Party, I’m going to take this very literal and mean in terms of what do I want the literal institutional Democratic Party to be because I think what the Trump era has revealed is the extent to which the Democratic Party still lacks the deep connections to communities of voters that helped make it more resilient in the face of opposition and help it muster the kinds of majorities necessary to actually do anything.

There’s a lot of ambition among Democrats. There’s a lot of ambition to do bigger things. And I sense that there hasn’t been this kind of ambition among rank-and-file Democrats to really try to pursue big aims in a long time. But the only way you’re going to do those things is if you can win elections and persuade voters to trust you. And building that trust is a long and difficult thing.

And so I would like to see a Democratic Party that takes some of this money it’s raising, and if they win, and really begin to do the kinds of investments in actual communities, like building up a real party organization that gets that has a presence beyond election years as when it comes to Democratic lawmakers, I would like to see a Democratic Party that recognizes that part of the challenge of moving on from the Trump years has to be institutional reform. It has to be. What we’ve witnessed is the extent to which broken institutions or ones that have been hijacked for ill purpose have facilitated Trump every step of the way.

And so I would like to see the Democratic Party that takes that kind of stuff more seriously, whether that’s court reform, whether that’s electoral college reform, whether that’s thinking seriously about proposing constitutional amendments that address some of, I think, kind of the big issues that come out of the Trump years, like is the president criminally liable is the thing that probably needs to be addressed constitutionally at this point.

And the extent to which the party has become very small c, I think, makes this difficult. It makes it difficult simultaneously to say we are the party of normalcy and status quo but, also, there are these major constitutional problems that have been revealed by the Trump years that we have to address.

But that’s the direction I would like to see national Democrats go towards. I think it’s necessary. I think if we don’t kind of work on these things now, we’re just setting ourselves up for this again.

Yeah, well, I am all for almost spiritual renewal in the Democratic Party. That would — amen to that. Well, Michelle, Jamelle, thank you so much for coming by to chat with me.

Thank you.

My pleasure. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Thanks for joining the conversation today. Send us your questions about the election by calling 212-556-7440 or emailing them to us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.

Matter of Opinion is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett, and Andrea Betanzos. It is edited by Jordana Hochman. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro, Carole Sabouraud, Sonia Herrero, and Pat McCusker. Engineering by Maddy Masiello. Mixing by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.