Jamel Bouie

If Trump is just hideously unpopular, if they've done something terrible and egregious that got national attention, then I would very much agree that even if it's Cornyn and Crockett,

then I would say Jasmine Crockett has a decent chance of winning that race.

It's all national conditions.

You raised this question, Michelle, of whether this race might chart a post-Trump course forward.

And I've come to the view that, first, as long as Donald Trump is alive, there will not be a post-Trump Republican Party.

I think that he's like a gravity well, and there's no real escaping his influence in that way.

So I'm just not...

I'm not certain that there is any way for a Republican to truly distance themselves from Trump, even in the interest of trying to win elections.

And this gets back to our previous discussion, which is just what Republican primary voters seem to believe is necessary to win elections.

And they seem to believe that what is necessary—

is a level of kind of aggression and contempt for decency that really does advantage a guy like Paxton.

I don't think there's anything that can be done.

So after the 2024 election—

and after Trump more or less replicated George W. Bush's 2004 performance with Latinos and even Black Americans, right, to begin to reconstitute that Bush coalition.

There was a lot of, I would say, crowing among Republicans.

Like, oh, we are now this multiracial, working-class coalition.

But it's important to sort of distinguish between

an electoral coalition and a durable party coalition.

A durable party coalition is pieced together through all kinds of moves, through all kinds of actions over time.

So the Roosevelt-FDR New Deal coalition wasn't just the 1932 election or the 1936 election.