New York Times columnist David Brooks detailed in a column published Wednesday how former President Trump could win the 2024 election and how the Democratic Party and Vice President Kamala Harris could lose.
Brooks listed five reasons and ways Trump could be victorious. One way, he wrote, was if voters choose the red model, which he wrote, “gives you low housing costs, lower taxes and business vitality” over the blue model, which “gives you high housing costs, high taxes and high inequality.”
The New York Times also published a column on Tuesday on how Trump and the Republicans could lose the election, which was written by columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat largely attributed a potential Harris victory to a “minimalist” campaign message.
Another “turbine” Brooks described was that the Democrats “are the party of the ruling class,” which he argued boiled down to the “diploma divide” in America.
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“Highly educated Democrats like Harris see themselves as increasing the size of government to help the downtrodden. But many Americans look at those efforts and they just see affluent people amassing more power for themselves in Washington. They conclude: This is what the educated elites always do. They promise to do stuff for us, but they end up serving only themselves,” he wrote.
He said “social and moral cohesion” would be another element that would aid a Trump victory and added, “When Republicans talk about immigration, crime, faith, family and flag, they are talking about ways to preserve the social and moral order. Democrats are great at talking about economic solidarity, but not moral and cultural solidarity.”
General dissatisfaction, high levels of distrust, and what Brooks described as the “Blue Bubble problem” were the final turbines on his list of ways the former president could win the White House.
Brooks pointed to Harris’ decision to “to run a campaign that gave something to each wing of the party,” and her choice in running mate, noting that Gov. Josh Shapiro, a moderate, would have given her a boost in his home state, Pennsylvania.
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“The progressive wing lobbied against him. So Harris went with a guy who helped her win a state she was always going to win anyway,” Brooks said.
Brooks made it clear at the end of his column that he wanted Harris to win.
“I know who I fervently wanted to win — Harris. But many Democrats were always a little over-ebullient about her. A Trump victory has never come down to running a brilliant campaign. It comes down to those five turbines driving enough support in enough key places in his direction,” he wrote.
Douthat argued that Harris, who was not initially perceived as the best option to replace Biden on the Democratic ticket, would win through her offering of “progressive minimalism.”
He wrote that she reduced “a cluttered agenda to a few popular promises” and left the rest of it out. This in turn hurt Trump’s chances, he wrote, as Harris’ “minimalism” would have prevented the former president from identifying a “unifying threat.”
“Winning on the most limited agenda and by the narrowest of margins is still winning. The 2024 campaign didn’t permanently bury Trumpism or populism, fix progressivism’s internal problems or claim a mandate for sweeping change of any sort. It merely won the tens of thousands of swing votes required to carry the handful of swing states that decided the election. A minimalist message yielded a minimalist victory — and that was, for Kamala Harris and her supporters, quite enough,” Douthat concluded.
