There Are So Many Ways to Shut Down a Country

Frank Bruni: Greetings, Bret. I’m especially eager to hear your thoughts this week because this is our last conversation before Tuesday’s elections, the results of which will be read like rune stones. We’ll see in them the fortunes of President Trump and of the Democratic Party in — and beyond — the 2026 midterms. What do you think these contests will (or won’t) reliably tell us? And while we can’t know who’ll win, which of the races do you find especially significant?

Bret Stephens: Hi, Frank. My concern is that a blowout victory for Zohran Mamdani in New York’s mayoral race and tight governors’s races, or even a loss, for Abigail Spanberger in Virginia or Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey will send a misleading signal that voters want more progressive Democrats, not more moderate ones. And I think that’s the worst possible lesson if Democrats want to take back Congress and win nationally.

Frank: I don’t worry too much that a Mamdani victory in the city — which is its own political ecosphere and the very antonym of a national bellwether — will be seen for very long as an instruction manual for the Democratic Party writ large. Whether Mamdani is dangerous baggage for the party, in terms of being a convenient foil for President Trump, is another matter.

Bret: We’ll get to that in a minute. Go on …

Frank: But in terms of election postmortems, it’s the New Jersey results that I think will resonate most profoundly. Jersey isn’t purple; it’s light blue. If Sherrill loses to or only squeaks past Jack Ciattarelli — a Republican who, in his third bid for the job, is aligning himself with President Trump and the MAGA movement as never before — Democrats will have great reason to sweat, but not about whether they need more progressive candidates. About the fact that after the madness and melodrama of Trump’s presidency so far, association with him isn’t toxic to swing voters, which means that campaigning against him won’t be nearly enough in 2026.

Bret: You’re right that it isn’t enough for Democrats to be the un- and anti-Trumps; that was probably the biggest lesson of the Kamala Harris disaster last year. Where I think you’re mistaken is that a Mamdani win, which, as I’ve written before, I think will be terrible for New York on its own terms, will also scramble Democratic brains. The argument will be that Democrats win big when they move to the left and generate fresh enthusiasm among young voters and minorities, but lose, or struggle, when they choose moderates who appeal to the center. And, as the late, great John McLaughlin might have said: WRONG! Republicans will have a field day in the midterms if they can run against the “Mamdani Democrats.”

Frank: So many friendly quibbles, such limited space. For starters, Democratic brains don’t get scrambled; they get poached.

Bret: Or fried.

Frank: Also, while I agree wholeheartedly that the Democratic path to a House majority is with — for lack of a more nuanced adjective — moderate candidates and stances, I’m not sure “Mamdani Democrats” will fly. Look at Democratic members of Congress from New York: They’re already making it clear that they are not Mamdani.

Bret: Er, like the House minority leader. Hakeem Jeffries, who, uh, just endorsed Mamdani? Or the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, whose last name, in Hebrew, means “Remaining Uncharacteristically Mum In Order to Protect Myself From a Primary Challenge from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”?

Frank: Well, I don’t know Hebrew, but I know that Jeffries and others held out for a long while — and that tells you how they’ll be massaging their words about Mamdani going forward. In any case, there’s another way, beyond left-right, to look at whatever these elections reveal and at what they suggest about the best strategy for Democrats: Mamdani is talking (and talking) about affordability. Ditto Sherrill. Ditto Spanberger. If that prevails, maybe Democrats will get the message that while the culture wars can be exciting in their all-consuming, tediously identitarian ways, the economy — and/or perceptions about the economy — rules the day. The key to midterm success for Democrats won’t be the tags of moderate or progressive; it will be a disciplined focus on Trump’s failure to deliver on his promise to lower the cost of living.

Bret: The Hebrew was not exactly literal.

Frank: Fear not, Bret, I never take you literally. Or too, too seriously.

Bret: Nor should you! The affordability issue is, of course, key. And Trump is doing Democrats a political favor with his stupid tariffs and his efforts to bully the Federal Reserve into lowering interest rates, which won’t make inflation any better.

Frank: While I can’t translate your Hebrew, your Trump is fluent, even eloquent.

Bret: As someone once said: “I know words. I have the best word. But there’s no better word than stupid.”

On the other hand, Democrats need to be wary of top-down solutions like Mamdani’s promise to freeze rent increases on rent-stabilized housing, which all-but guarantees that landlords will simply jack up rents on non-stabilized apartments in order to make up for the lost income. Ditto for Mikie Sherrill promising to freeze utility rates, which is legally questionable and does nothing to increase New Jersey’s energy supply. Haven’t these Democrats heard that what we need is more, well, abundance, not more mandates and constraints?

Frank: I agree that Democrats have the emphasis right, affordability-wise, but need to do a whole lot of work on the prescriptions. Mamdani’s are fantastical, and that may well come back to bite him. He’s all smoke and social media, and while you can perhaps TikTok your way to Gracie Mansion, memes and mirth won’t plow the streets, keep subway riders safe or make the Big Apple a working-class utopia. I grant you all that. But he’s not the Democratic death knell.

Bret: Just New York’s. In the meantime, Frank, we’re now nearly a month into the government shutdown. So far, I don’t think the effects have been felt too widely outside of the government, but that’s about to change as tens of millions of poorer Americans lose access to federal food assistance, as Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican, wrote in a recent guest essay in The Times. How do we get ourselves out of this mess? Or put more crudely, who folds first?

Frank: I hate making predictions — or, more honestly, I’m terrible at them — so instead I’ll note that the same aching-for-the-little-guy Hawley, he of the raised Jan. 6 fist, wrote a previous guest essay saying “no Medicaid cuts!” before, um, voting for Medicaid cuts. So I doubt many voters find him persuasive. But your larger point, Bret, is correct: We will soon be into the unignorable-hurt phase of this shameful shutdown. And that will scramble or poach or hard boil the political equation.

Bret: OK, but hard-boiled into what? Historically, the party that forces a government shutdown winds up being the biggest loser, politically. The person to listen to on this subject is Jared Golden, the Maine moderate, who makes the point that his fellow Democrats have closed the government — and all the pain that entails for the poor — in order to extend health care subsidies that were supposed to sunset this year for people making $300,000 a year. It reinforces the point that Democrats have become what Republicans once were: the party of the moneyed class.

Frank: Um, “people making $300,000 a year” is not the whole of the affected population. Far from it. But I take Golden’s questions about the wisdom of the shutdown seriously. That said, you can’t bring up Maine — or, as I often think of it, America’s Strategic Lobster Roll Reserve — and not have me ask you for your reflections on a certain oyster farmer by the name of Graham Platner and Democrats’ reactions to his … body art and all that it signifies.

Bret: Hey, we all make mistakes. What’s a little Nazi tattoo between friends? I myself used to have a Confederate flag tattooed on my neck. But I had it covered up with a tasteful Edelweiss flower.

Frank: You’re a paragon of personal growth — and epidermal horticulture.

Bret: Seriously, though, I don’t understand how Platner’s tattoo isn’t instantly disqualifying. I’ve spent the last decade listening to my liberal friends lament how Republicans have failed to police their own when it came to the normalization of political hate and extremism. But here are people like Bernie Sanders doing exactly that when it comes to a so-called progressive. The Maine Senate race is more than a year away. Plenty of time for Democrats to get a better candidate.

Frank: Agreed. In fact they have one, Janet Mills. And on that happy note (for those of us wishing for a Democratic Senate majority), what, Bret, have you read, watched or listened to lately that lifted you up?

Bret: Frank, sometimes a news story in The Times is so good I actually read it aloud to friends and family. That was the case with Neil Vigdor’s wonderful Oct. 25 report on the midday heist at the Louvre museum in Paris, in which he interviewed two former jewel thieves, Larry Lawton and Joan Hannington, to get their expert opinion on how that job went down. We’ll soon know more because at least two suspects have reportedly been apprehended, but you have to love how Vigdor relays George Clooney’s, aka Danny Ocean of “Ocean’s 11” fame, insight: “‘It was cool, though,” Clooney said. “I mean, it’s terrible. But if you’re a professional thief like I am, I was very proud of those guys.’” Gold.

Frank: I loved the last sentences of a terrific essay in The Times by Jesse Green about the new movie “Blue Moon,” which stars Ethan Hawke as the renowned lyricist Lorenz Hart, who wrote all those classic songs with Richard Rodgers. Green noted that too often, Hollywood portrays great American songwriters as “lucky burghers sailing on happy clouds of easy inspiration and ambient romance,” but that “Blue Moon” shows the “endless brain work and bullheadedness of craft, fighting to stay afloat on a sea of mediocrity.” In an age of artifice and disintegrating standards, a plug for that — a plea for that — seems apt.

Bret: Nothing harder than making it look easy.