What Do Democrats Do Now?

Observe the North American Dad, fifties, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana, and offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles, and says, "Dang, that's a good offer." The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle.

No one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on Car. Carvana.

dot com. Pick up fees may apply. A beautifully designed Squarespace website is the difference between thinking about photography school and selling your portraits online. It's the difference between giving away those cookies you just made for free and running your cookie empire. A beautifully designed Squarespace website is the difference between having a movie reviewing hobby and a movie reviewing career.

Squarespace, because no matter what you're into, a website makes it real. Use offer code Difference for 50% off select plans. Terms and conditions apply. Hi, I'm CBS News anchor Tony DiCoppo, and I wanted to tell you about my new podcast. It's called Great Question with Tony DiCoppo, and I'll put an episode right here so you can sample it.

New episodes come out every Monday and Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts, and you can follow and subscribe to Great Question with Tony DiCoppo. I hope you enjoy it. CBS News podcasts. It all comes around to the question: Is the Trump era over? I think the easy answer is yes.

I think you can tell a really compelling story where the history books will say 2026—that was the end of Trump. I'm Tony DeCobal, and this is Great Question. Today, my question is: What do the Democrats do now? First off, the big surprise of last night is not only that the Democrats won every battleground state we were tracking here at CBS, but even ones we were not tracking. They won both the Senate and the House, where they're going to have something like an 85-vote majority, and they won in places they haven't won in decades—places almost no one thought they could win.

They flipped a Kansas Senate seat where there hasn't been a Democratic senator since. The Great Depression. They flipped another in South Carolina, a state Trump won by nearly 18 points just two years ago. Georgia will now have two Democratic senators. The first black governor, also a Democrat, and that's not even as shocking as Texas, where James Taylor Rico beat Ken Paxton for the Senate seat, and Democrat Gina Nehosa unseated the three-term incumbent governor Greg Abbott.

Democrats also won statewide every race there in Texas, a state Trump won by more than a million and a half votes just two years ago. And then there's North Carolina, maybe my favorite story of the night. Tim Moore, who as a House Speaker there helped draw the map that was supposed to favor Republicans in Congress, he lost his seat to a first-time Democratic candidate. It was the Democrats' best election result in decades, is what I'm telling you.

So, what was it all about? Was it gas prices and the cost of living? Was it Trump and crony corruption, or was it a wholesale rejection of MAGA and Trumpism, and an indication that the Trump era is over? Or was it more like a big dose of the usual punishment every second-term president gets at the midterms? This morning, Vice President JD Vance offered his answer.

He says the reason Republicans lost was obvious: the war with Iran. Which, considering he is the vice president of the administration that started it, read to some almost like a resignation letter. Whoever's right in all of this, answering the question of what caused last night, matters because well, Democrats are already arguing over what their big win means. And they have only two years to figure it out before we do this all again. But before we get into what is next for the Democrats, let's look at what happened to the Republicans.

My first guest today is Lakshya Jane, host of the Argument Podcast. Lakshya Jane, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, Tony. Lakshya, what's the story of last night? Is it that voters stopped buying what Trump was selling, or was there a bigger story underneath that one?

I think, in a nutshell, that is the story of the election. It is a realignment and an abandonment of the Republican Party. It is one of the most shocking rebukes that any. Any electorate has delivered to an American president. It is a historic tsunami, especially given how polarized America is today.

The fact of the matter is that Democrats are going to win the national House vote by about 13 percentage points. That is nearly 15 percent bluer than 2024, and it really calls into question what the future of American politics is going to be like, especially in the near future. But We are now probably in a post-Trump era. Wow, a realignment, a post-Trump era. Was this in your models, or did this exceed the models?

This exceeded the prediction from any of the models. We said, like, this is like the tail case for an incredible Democratic night. Like, you know, there's like a five, seven percent chance that like this sort of thing could happen, and it did. But like, that doesn't mean I'm any less surprised by it. I'm shocked.

Can we determine at this hour whether it was an incredibly good night for the Democrats because people chose them, or just an incredibly bad night for Donald Trump and the Republicans because they made big promises and didn't deliver? Oh, it's both. It's both. Firstly, there was a Republican catastrophe in turnout in places like North Carolina. Um, in places like New Jersey, you're going to see representatives from seats that were supposed to be safe, like in North Carolina.

Frankly, three or four Republicans may just end up going down completely. Um, in seats that were drawn specifically for them to be safe, they were gerrymandered for that to pick up as many seats as possible. That is a turnout-driven catastrophe. But I tell people that look, there was a lot of votes switching here as well. Like some of these candidates just got more raw votes than Kamala Harris did across the country.

And frankly, from our polling, I can't really guarantee for you that if these voters showed up, they would have picked the Republican Party. In fact, take it from the Vice President himself, who said like. Actually, a lot of voters did show up, but they're all voting for the other guys. Lakshya, you mentioned realignment—the beginning of the end for Trump—and that this was not only a rejection of Republicans but a win and a choosing of Democrats. But what is the evidence that this was an active choice to go to the Democrats, not just that they were the other option, but that they were the preferred and desired option?

I mean, what's behind that idea? The idea here is that parties have agency; they can make the choice on what to do and what not to do. The Republican Party controlled the levers of government, regardless of whether voters were sold on the the vision that Democrats had or not. And there's some places where they were, like data centers, for example. Voters are way more aligned with Democrats than Republicans.

But regardless of what the Democrats wanted to do, voters looked at the Republican Party and said, "We can't give these guys another two years of control of." The government, you know, even if we get some gridlock in, so that Trump is president, but things can't get worse. That's good enough, and that's in some ways part of what made the wave so big. Was that this was both a rejection of the Republican Party's policy and a desire to have balance in government.

So Trump made huge gains in 2024 with young voters, Hispanic voters, Black voters, working class voters, and he gave back a whole lot of that. The Republican Party did in these midterm elections. Is the economy the issue that drove it the most? Is it the war? Is it immigration?

Is there one issue that cuts across all four of those voting blocks? The economy cuts across everything. And what I would say is that we saw an inverse relationship between Donald Trump's approval and gas prices. And at the start of 2026, this was trending to be like a D plus six year, but then the war in Iran happened. And it threw a wrench into the whole Republican Party coalition beyond what anyone could have dreamed of.

At the end of the day, because of that, Democrats took what would have been a wave and turned it into a tsunami of biblical proportions. And the immigration stuff is a disaster for Republicans with Hispanics right now. It's going to cost them a lot of seats in California and in Texas, actually, where Democrats have gained a ton of votes in. Exceeding Clinton's 2016 high water marks in some of these places. These policies sound great in theory because they think, you know, like, oh well, they're gonna get the bad guys.

They're not gonna go get the good guys. But the fact of the matter is, the Trump admin treated everyone as a bad guy, and this is why, you know, Maria Elvira Salazar in South Florida cut an ad direct to camera that said, "Mr. President, you're wrong. You're being led astray by your advisors. This is not the way that people want immigration in." Enforcement done.

Immigration enforcement. Plays very well with white white voters, relative to everything else. But with Hispanic voters, it is like the single most catastrophic thing they could have done to lose those voters. What's the lesson for Democrats here? Is it that progressives can win anywhere, and that's the direction of the party, or is it that moderates are the direction of the party?

What is the lesson for twenty twenty eight? I would say that you know, on balance, we see moderates in both parties outperform even. Today, but the real lesson the Democrats are going to take from this is that voters are much more pliable, and many more things can happen than you believe. The Democratic president in twenty eight is going to almost certainly have a Democratic Senate, you know, provided the Democrat wins in twenty eight, and it changes the scope of what Democrats are going to want to propose and do based on policy. Yes, we see that moderates continue to overperform today in these elections.

You look at John Ossoff's margins compared to. To all say, yeah, it's a Roy Cooper or you know Susan Collins on the Republican side. Compare that to Lauren Boebert, but the question is about what can win. Period. Right now in the Democratic camp, and I think there's going to be elements of both coalitions that the winning candidate is going to try to marry, so that.

You know they get the policy they want without sacrificing the electability that the center tends to provide. What do Democrats need to do over the next two years so that the voters they just picked up don't go right back to the GOP? Oh boy, there's a few things.

So. Democrats are probably not going to pick up seats in twenty twenty eight. Right, this is like the high water mark for a Democratic House majority.

Some of these seats are frankly like impossible to believe. There's a whole lot of Democrats waking up, thinking, "I got elected to what?" And so, what they need to do is they need to first get in their districts and start doing everything they can with constituent service. That helps you build like a deep network. It helps you entrench yourself. It makes yourself a little bit.

Less vulnerable to unfriendly environments or less friendly environments. The second thing that needs to happen is, Democrats have to actually present a good plan for cost of living. That addresses the concerns that American voters have, and that starts from the top with the presidential candidates.

So that when voters are voting on it in 2028, not only are they voting for a competent representative who they think has served them well, but they think that competent representative will serve the vision that they want in America well. Because voters know a Democratic representative will work with a Democratic president if they get the chance, and so. They're like, all right.

Well, if you're going to do that, can I be confident you're going to fight for the right things? Can I be confident the party is going to fight for the right things? And that Democrats have to really find out what their message on economics and cost of living is really going to be. A competent cost of living plan. I think I have one in a drawer around here somewhere.

That's easy. Lakshya Jain, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Tony. And in a minute, we'll be back with Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, to answer today's great question: What's next for the Democrats? Stay with us, Governor Beshear.

Thank you very much for joining us. I am excited to be on with you. It is a good morning to be an American. It is a very good morning to be a Democrat in America. That is for sure.

You know, if you look at those maps that people produce after an election like this, and there are arrows that show the direction of the vote, the trend in different parts of the country. In 2024, everything trended red. In 2026, everything trended back in the other direction. What did Democrats get right this time that they got wrong two years ago?

Well, the map certainly looks good for Democratic governors. We are going to have 30 Democratic governors, the most we have had since 1992. We're going to have a Democratic governor in every traditional swing state, and we saw Democrats win in places like Iowa, Ohio, Texas, places that that people said that we couldn't compete. What Democrats got right was an intense focus on people's everyday needs. I mean, right now people are are struggling.

They might be. Pro this or pro that of of issues we normally talk about, but if they can't pay the bills, they don't get to that issue. And so what you see is is people suffering from paying forty five hundred dollars more this year for the same stuff they bought last year because of Donald Trump's tariffs, which are a tax on the American people. You see gas and diesel at all time highs because of his war in Iran. Where we did well, our candidates ran focused on people's everyday lives and making them just a little bit better.

So, Governor, if Democrats just won on lowering the cost of living, which is the very same thing Republicans won on two years ago and failed to deliver on. How do you guys do better? Yeah, it's a good point because now Democrats have to govern, and they need to govern well. And I think especially for Congress, they need to stay focused. If I was giving Congress advice, I'd say pass three bills on affordability, bills that that build affordable housing, bills that bring down the price of of pharmaceuticals.

Pass three of those bills for every hearing you hold on the Trump administration, because while people want accountability. For especially the corruption we've seen, there's a difference between accountability and retribution, and so Democrats need to get this right if they're going to be a party that people want to keep supporting. The big question is: What is that competent plan on cost of living? What are the details? You know, nobody, no governor, no senator ran on raising taxes, and so you're going to have to take something away if you're going to give something more.

What is the trade-off there? I mean, what's going to be taken away in order to run a program that's going to help people in their daily lives? Oh, I think that there are some immediate wins that that don't. Cost the federal government, in my opinion, anything. And first, it's it's removing tariffs, especially from things like groceries.

It's passing bill after bill that would remove the United States from this war with Iran, which would open the Strait of Hormuz and give people immediate relief at the at the gas station.

Now, I do think that we need to make an aspirational investment in housing because the average age of first-time homeownership can't be 40 years old, or people give up. On that American dream, they need hope. If they're going to start a family, they want to raise their family in a home like they were, and so that's an area where you're looking at new costs. But you could you could do it for a fraction of what the war in Iran is currently costing us. One of the criticism I would often hear from voters of Republicans in the Trump era is that they had no principles.

They just supported whatever it was that Donald Trump was saying at any given time. Democrats have held themselves Out as being a party that sticks to principles, and so you mentioned focus on cost of living and people's everyday lives. But there's going to be a strong push to the launch investigations in the House, digging into potential corruption, pardon misuse and abuse. You name it, corporate misuse and abuse. What advice do you have for Democrats as they pursue all of that?

How do they do it without drawing the focus away from those kitchen? Table issues you mentioned. Yeah, I think it's important to be principled. I stand up for for my principles in Kentucky, even when they might be different than what people would think the majority of of my voters think. But I spend eighty percent of my time on those things that matter to a hundred percent of the American people.

That's that job, doctor's appointment, roads and bridges, public education, and public safety. And I would say the same. Especially for Congress.

Now, yes, you need to hold those hearings. Yes, we need to go after corruption and and money that people shouldn't have been making in these jobs. But make sure your ratio is right. Whether it's three bills on affordability for every one hearing, or whether it's eighty percent of your time on things that matter to a hundred percent of the American people. Because I've seen it firsthand.

You know, I've vetoed every anti-LGBTQ plus bill that's come to my desk. Yet I still have a sixty-plus percent approval. Rating in Kentucky.

Some people may disagree with me on on those issues or those vetoes, but if they see a better job, if I built a road that cuts 20 minutes each way off their commute, they can still support me. What do you do about the issue of data centers? Because the public opinion is hard against it. There were ballot measures regarding data centers and moratoriums, bans, blocking data centers. One forty-three times.

There's only one approval up and down the ballot across the country. People don't want them, and yet it seems like all of the stock market is leveraged on the side of these things. Better work, and we better build them.

So there is a point at which giving the people what they want could actually hurt the economics of their retirement accounts, also the job situation. There are unions that back data centers because of the work. It becomes a challenge to put a fine point on it. Can Democrats support something that's unpopular but good in the long run, like potentially data centers? Yeah, I think the American people don't want data centers forced upon them, and if a data center is going to be proposed in their community, they want a transparent conversation where they can judge the potential positives versus the negatives, and not feel like they are at a disadvantage at a negotiating table with a tech giant.

So I have an executive order that has tried to give bargaining power to our local governments and our communities. It says that data center is going to pay for all its own power, no matter what, or or we're not going to permit it.

So that's not a conversation the locals have to have. It says they're going to fix any of their environmental issues. They're going to pay their fair share of taxes, and they're going to have to get in and build community support. That's not how these projects started. We've got a couple in Kentucky where the community, once it learned enough, has accepted them.

Has said it's going to help our school system, maybe even double. The budget, and then there are other places that have said, you know, no thanks, not here. But we should empower our local communities to be able to have that transparent conversation and make a decision. Governor, you mentioned the need for Democrats in Washington to stay focused. I'm sure that's true for Democrats that are just one governor's mansions as well.

A key question around focus is what lesson Democrats take away from this big win. Is the lesson that moderation is what's going to win? The party power and keep it in power, or is the lesson that these DSA backed or DSA aligned candidates, these more progressive candidates who also won, are the future of the party? Which is it? I don't think the lesson is theoretical; it's practical.

You know, people aren't as partisan as we think they are. When they wake up in the morning, they're not thinking about the next election; they're thinking about their job and whether they can support their family, their next doctor's appointment, the roads and bridges they drive, the school they drop their kids off at, and whether they feel safe in their community. Donald Trump made all of those things harder. Democrats ran on making them easier, and so you can have different parts of the Democratic Party that have different potential solutions.

Solutions to those, but you've got to stay focused on those core concerns and challenges that the American people are facing. It's interesting. Reminds me, Roy Cooper's campaign slogan down in North Carolina: "Make things cost less." Listen, Roy was a governor. He gets it. Like we have to be pragmatic as governors because we're problem solvers, and and we have the receipts.

You can see whether governors have created good new jobs. You know, the average wage for a new job in Kentucky thus far this year is over thirty-one dollars an hour, the highest it's ever been. And so, if you're doing this job right, you're not spending your time thinking about red or blue. You're spending your time thinking about how your people are doing. And how you can help them do better?

You know, last night I was on set here at CBS with Elise Stefanik, Congresswoman from New York. She'll be leaving her seat at the end of the year, and she said that last night was a reckoning and a reset for Republicans. Really bad night, but also the beginning of a potentially bad tomorrow for Democrats because there are divisions within the party, and they haven't figured out what they stand for. Do you see the Potential for a rupture between a moderate wing of the party and the more progressive DSA-aligned wing of the party. I know those are stories that that may get a lot of clicks, but.

To have an overwhelming victory and then to say it's problematic, I think we're just celebrating the victory. There's going to be fewer. There's going to be fewer DSA members of Congress than there are in the in the Freedom Caucus. You know, any party is going to have its divisions. We'll see how leadership is able to bring them together.

What I've always said is I can work with anyone who wants to find a solution, even if we might not agree on the solution. Like I believe, and I think members of the DSA. Believe that every child should have enough to eat before they go to school, and we can talk about solutions. But then I look at the Republican Party; they passed the big ugly bill that removed food assistance from 25,000 kids in Kentucky.

So I think we can talk among problem solvers as opposed to the problem causeurs. But Governor, what's interesting is that Republican Elise Stefanik made that point about you know the problems of tomorrow for Democrats. Tomorrow being today, Jasmine Crockett, outgoing Congresswoman in Texas, lost a primary to James Taylor Rico. She made the same point. She said Democrats should celebrate this is a huge win, but they should also remember we are not loved.

The Democratic Party's approval ratings are about as low as President Trump's.

Well, and part of that is when when people turn on cable news or sometimes broadcast news, what they see is Congress, and Congress has an all time low approval rating. I believe that the Democratic Party should put governors front and center, not just me, but so many other great governors that are out there, because we're practical, we're pragmatic. We we have to talk to and with our people each and every day, and we can show the American people what we've done to better their lives. Right now, people view Congress as a swamp, whether it's Democrat or Republican. And you saw a lot of members lose, and you saw us in governor's races beat a whole lot of Republican congressmen and women.

We knew when they won their primary that we were in a good position because of it. Second coming of Bill Clinton, popular Southern governor, Andy Beshear.

Well, we now have I now have company. Yeah, I was thinking how Southern Democrats had scrapped their way back to the table after being overlooked, left out, maybe even looked down upon. But I had Abigail Spanberger and Josh Stein, and now we've just added Gina Hinahosa as well as Kisha Lancebottom.

So very excited for Southern governors today. Does it make your win less special? Oh, listen. I'm I'm happy to have company at the table. In the end, this is about the American people, and and I worked hard as DGA chair for two years.

You know, I came in as DGA chair right after we lost the 2024 election, and we were wondering if we could hold Katie Hobbs in Arizona. And now we just had the best election night in our history, and and there's going to be 30 of us, so we're going to find a bigger table, and I'm looking forward to it. Governor Beshear, thank you very much. Thank you. All right, it's time now for a very special "Good to Know." We have 60 Minutes' own Ross Douthit with us today.

Ross, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Congratulations on the podcast. Thank you very much.

I know being a nightly news anchor it's a big deal, but podcasting is the real—it's the real zone of prestige in American life.

So. That's exactly what my teenage son said when he found out I was podcasting. I like podcasting because we can make sense of things that are difficult to make sense of in a thirty-second soundbite. And one of those things I just witnessed—we are delayed in taping because I ran downstairs in a suit, full makeup, to do a possible special report with President Trump's first remarks since this blue tsunami, this massive wipeout for Republicans in the midterms. Not only did he not say anything substantive, he made these first remarks at a speech about the ballroom, which is an amazing bookend to the way he closed the campaign, which was a speech at the Reflecting Pool.

And when he was asked by Weijiang, our colleague here at CBS, whether anyone tried to talk him out of closing. His campaign message at the reflecting pool. He said, "No, why would they do that?" I think it was a great speech. It got great reviews. And if there's anything that makes any of this make sense, is that he he said he likes construction sites because they are relaxing for him.

So perhaps the ballroom speech is his way of coping with the loss. I mean. Maybe the lesson here is that if someone had just suggested that he build a ballroom in the aftermath of the twenty twenty election, there would have been no January sixth, no Stop the Steal movement. If you know, if he had just been given one little piece of DC real estate to work on while processing that defeat, all of all of recent American history would have been different. I think it's been very clear throughout the second Trump administration that.

The thing he is most passionate about is renovating the built landscape of Washington D.C., and it's absurd and bizarre, but also seems totally unsurprising that the only maybe the only two options after a midterm defeat were some kind of you know wild wild response, some kind of furious rant, or let's let's pivot, let's talk about the ballroom. You know, last night we had a an election law expert on and an expert on the process of voting. We were prepared for fury, for misinformation, for allegations of a stolen election, all of that. Instead, the president is saying he's going to work with Democrats. He's going to have a call with them, and he didn't even seem a little bit upset about things today.

It's like he doesn't care anymore. Yeah, I mean, we don't know how long that will last, right? Like there's sort of phases of Trump, waves of Trump. You don't know what you know. You don't know what he'll wake up tomorrow and post about on Truth Social.

I do think the scale of the defeat. Mattered, right? Like if you imagine a world where you know the Democrats had 50 Senate seats and the Republicans had 48, and the last two races to be called were a red state with you know a close margin and Alaska, where you know the Democrats arguably did some shady business getting another Dan Sullivan on the ticket, I think feel like in that world you might have had a different Trump response, right? There would have been much. More focus on election law and claims of a stolen election and these kind of things.

But I come back to the to the spent quality and the low energeteness of the conversation around the ballroom. I mean, he was excited about the beam, but he was also just an amusing, languid state of posture and mind. Thoughts going here or there, and and I think I think back to I've been to Trump rallies and Trump events in every election cycle, including midterms. Going all the way back to to 2016, and I didn't go this time around. But from the appearances, they were smaller.

And his speeches, if you just look at a side by side video, there's a change. He he doesn't have command of the audience the way he he used to. The weave doesn't quite work the same way. It all comes around to the question: Is the Trump era over? I think the easy answer is yes.

Ten years is a long time in American politics. He is not going. He, you know, he has no power to pass legislation anymore. He's going to exist under, you know, a haze of congressional scrutiny for the next two years. I think there is a real chance that part of his base.

Maybe doesn't abandon him, but stops treating him as the decisive figure in Republican politics going forward, and that this creates an opening for power centers to really form outside of Trump world in a way that they haven't at all. You know, there was sort of the moment. There was a moment after twenty twenty and twenty twenty two when it seemed like Ron DeSantis was forming such a power center, but it didn't happen.

So it could happen now.

So yeah, I. I think you can tell a really compelling story where the history books will say 2026 that was the end of Trump.

However, we have said this is the end of Trump many times before. He is still the president of the United States. There is a big range of issues facing the world where presidential power. You know, exists basically independent of Congress and independent of domestic politics. What happens in Iran?

What happens with Russia and Ukraine? Those are in his hands still for the next two years.

Some big decisions or big moves are going to be made, and then something like artificial intelligence. The Democrats are coming in, running a pretty anti-artificial intelligence campaign. When I Interviewed Abdul El-Sayed, who just won election to the Senate from Michigan. I interviewed him for sixty minutes, and sort of to my surprise, he wanted to start with AI and data centers before healthcare, before anything else. He said, "That's what voters are talking about." So, so there is going to be a kind of anti-AI sentiment in Washington D.C.

But then, you know, the White House and the administrative state—that that's still the zone of like. And response, and you know, long before you pass anything legislatively, if you get a wave of crazy new AI models, it's going to be up to Trump what happens with those.

So I would just hesitate. I think it's. I think you can say yes. The the era when he is the dominant force in American politics seems to have ended or be ending. But his historical his historical record is not finished.

Not at all. He is still president. All those powers and decisions are his.

However, there is the beginning of what feels like an after for Republicans. Last night, at least Stefanik on our air called it a reckoning and a reset for the Republican Party. Do you imagine this next phase of the Republican Party is born of MAGA or comes from outside of MAGA and eats it? I think that it is what you're going to see is an extended argument about which parts of Trumpism you keep and which parts you discard.

So I do I don't think you are going to have a Republican Party in 2028 that repudiates Trumpism. At all, like the the idea that you would get some sort of, you know, Jeb Bush or even Nikki Haley type figure who comes in and you know sort of says Trump was terrible, it was all a mistake, and you know Chris Christie, I don't know who that that's that's not what's going to happen. You are going to have someone who says Trump did a ton of big things right, but he lost his way, and so then the debate becomes what. Where did he lose his way? Right.

So you've already seen the Vice President of the United States in a pretty remarkable social media post today, coming out and saying, "Look, we lost because of the Iran War," which you know the Trump administration, of which JD Vance is a pretty important member, was responsible for the Iran War. It wasn't something that happened to them; it was something they did.

So Vance, just on day one after the midterms, went pretty far for a vice president in terms of criticizing his own. On the Iran War, but note that that argument then will be met by other Republicans who want to say, you know, no. The only problem with the Iran War was we didn't finish the job, and the real problem was tariffs. Or you know immigration deportations Minneapolis and so on policies advanced would might be more associated with, right?

So each faction is going to say one piece of Trumpism was good and another piece was bad or failed, and that's that's what the battle lines are going to look like. DeSantis, right? I mentioned DeSantis already. DeSantis is down in Florida, making a case. That the vice president can't make really because he's part of the administration.

That the problem with the Trump era in the second term is corruption, Iran, and also that there too that the administration has been too kind to the AI industry. DeSantis has been a big skeptic and critic of AI. Let's linger for a second on the AI industry because and the sort of the. Power of the the tech world. One of the things that came out of the town hall conversation with JD Vance is I asked him if tech billionaires have too much power, and he said absolutely, distancing himself from that group.

You say a sub theme of this election was the kind of bad vibes of the AI industry and how that became the emblem of. The the tech bros instead of cool rockets and military hardware. But what what do you mean by bad vibes? You just mean the the data center issue, or do you mean the uncertainty of what this AI future is? I mean, it's just a very weird scenario.

I think it's worth stressing. The most important industry in the American economy at the moment is run by people who consistently say first. The thing they're building carries existential risks on par with the atomic bomb, and second, say that you know in the good scenario where this technology works really well, it could totally change how we relate to work. And you know, I mean, Elon Musk, right? Musk is going around saying AI is going to be great because it's going to make us all rich, and we're all going to have a universal high income.

Now, you know there's a word for an economic system in which the government gives everyone a universal income and. That that word traditionally on the American right was was socialism or communism, and that that's again it's just a weird place to be in. Where leading American capitalists are sketching out a a future where Americans don't have to work. Do Americans want that future? Anyway, that's that's what I mean by bad vibes, right?

Like to the extent that people AI has not yet delivered. You know the cures for cancer, any of the things that have been promised. It it may it may deliver all kinds of amazing things. It certainly is going to deliver some important scientific breakthroughs. But the vibes around it are bad.

So Democrats have some candidates that were good picks for their state, who were good political athletes, who won and who won in a big way. And yet it would appear like no party can. Create a durable coalition and keep on winning. Why is that? Why can't either party create a lasting coalition?

I think the the simplest answer is that once you have parties that are really ideologically consistent, where. The Republicans are just the conservative party, the Democrats are just the progressive party, and you don't have conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans anymore the way the way you used to. That just creates a really strong gravitational pull in both parties towards the ideological core, towards the base, and that. Pull is strongest in presidential primaries, and in the first year of a victorious presidency, it's weaker when you've lost a bunch of elections and you're just trying to find someone to win a senate seat, right?

So it's it's easier to put to sort of find and nominate a moderate in a state you haven't won in a long time, like Kansas, let's say, if you're the Democrats, right? Then it is to Nominate a moderate or centrist through a long presidential primary process, and then, yeah, the first year of an administration, what we've seen repeatedly, we certainly saw it, I think, with Joe Biden, and now we saw it in spades with Donald Trump. Is people just come into power and think this is it, this is our chance to do everything that we wanted, and when you come into power like that, you lose swing voters, you lose the middle of the country. Pretty quickly, and it seems like it's a challenge that you should be able to escape, right? But I think it requires, certainly, I would say it requires a strong president who is really aware of the problem, and isn't just carried along by his party.

Like if Joe Biden had been younger when he became president, if he had been the kind of self conscious. Moderate of his earlier days, and also a strong figure capable of putting his stamp on the administration. Maybe his White House would have turned out differently. But in the event, he just sort of let his staff, who were mostly more left wing than him, sort of carry him along and ultimately carry his party to defeat. And with Trump, there was just this sense, you know, this kind of sense among.

The president himself, but the people around him—that this was this kind of once-in-a-generation chance to, you know, shift American politics fundamentally to the right. And the truth is, if you want to shift American politics fundamentally in either direction, left or right, the best way to do that is to win a presidential election and then win the next one, and then ideally you win the one after that. That's what FDR did. That's what Ronald Reagan did. That's why they're remembered as president who actually realigned the country, and that's you know if it happens in the future, that's how it will happen.

If the next Democrat comes in and governs in a way that lets them win again, or the next Republican does the same, maybe this pattern gets broken. But right now, we're in a world of yeah, we're in a world where there's a lot of Americans who aren't happy with either party, and they put parties back and forth in power, and neither party gives them what they want. Ross, thank you very much. Thank you, Tony. It was a pleasure.

Great question. Is produced by Samara Lipton and Candice Kahn, with additional production help from Martin Finn and Julia Doyle. Pat Murphy edits the show. Technical production from Alan Peng, Justin Sherman, and Kobe Quenu. The editorial directors of podcasts for CBS News are Poppy Damon and Mike Pesca.

If you have a burning, urgent, or even quirky question you're not hearing properly asked and answered anywhere else, email us at greatquestion@cbsnews.com. Your question could be the next great question. I'll see you tonight on the CBS Evening News. Until then, that's another podcast in America. Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude.

Anthropic is a research company first, built to make sure the transition to powerful AI goes well. When they launched Claude in 2023, its first users were businesses. Since then, it's been tested inside leading startups and enterprises. At DoorDash, a code migration that would have taken four engineers months to complete took one person three weeks. At Carvana, one team used to hunt through old tickets and code to answer a question.

With Claude, they get answers 65 faster. And at Rakuten, engineers have achieved 99.9 accuracy on tough coding jobs using Claude. Today, nine Fortune 10 companies run on Claude for the work they want to get right. And these businesses are helping Anthropic shape what comes next. Build your business with support from Claude at Claude.

AI slash Odyssey.