What Comes Next for the Democratic and Republican Parties

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

In their final pitches to voters, Donald Trump spent the week sowing doubt about election results, while Kamala Harris cast Trump as a threat to democracy. With Election Day less than a week away, panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic discuss one of the closest presidential races in memory, and what the election could mean for the future of the Democratic and Republican Parties.

Since 2015, the Republican Party has reached multiple points when they could have coalesced and taken a stance against Trump, McKay Coppins explained last night. But “they couldn’t muster the collective action,” he said. As a result, Trump has been able to remake the Republican Party into one that “has become a cult of personality where his lies, and distortions, and conspiracy theories are indulged by almost every elected official in his party.”

Where Republicans go from here is still an open question, Coppins continued. “The party that [Trump] has remade in his image is not going to change overnight, no matter what happens next week.”

Meanwhile, Harris has been running a carefully calibrated, centrist campaign. “If this improbable campaign that started only four months ago essentially works, what does it mean for the future of the Democratic Party?” Jeffrey Goldberg asked panelists. According to Eugene Daniels, unlike the ideological aspects of Harris’s 2019 campaign, which felt, in part, disingenuous to watch, “the person you’re watching now and the policies that she’s talking about … that’s who Kamala Harris is” and “that is how she wants to govern.”  

If elected, Harris will also likely have to contend with at least one Republican-controlled chamber of Congress. This means she “will be forced into governing as a centrist,” Daniels continued. “She’s going to have to bend and try to compromise in ways that a ‘San Francisco liberal’ wouldn’t want to and would fight more on.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Eugene Daniels, a White House correspondent at Politico; and Vivian Salama, a national politics reporter at The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.