Jindal argues that President Trump has managed to win voters skeptical of both parties by casting himself as a fellow “populist patriot”:

De­moc­rats alien­ate pop­ulist pa­tri­ots with their cul­tural lib­er­al­ism and at­tacks on Amer­i­can iden­tity and sym­bols; Re­pub­li­cans drive them away with their em­brace of free trade and rhetor­i­cal em­pha­sis on cor­po­rate earn­ings. Mr. Trump has won their al­le­giance by pi­o­neer­ing a pop­ulist mes­sage that melds cul­tural and eco­nomic com­po­nents. It is the rea­son he has been able to attract for­mer Sanders and Obama sup­port­ers — a feat con­ventional Re­pub­li­cans would strug­gle to achieve.

Jindal leaves out many parts of the story, including Fox News, Trump’s racism and the disconnect between Trump’s populist rhetoric and his elitist policies. But I do think Jindal is onto something. Most voters lean left on economic policy but they are also patriotic and worried about political correctness. Democratic presidential candidates need to find a way to appeal to those voters in ways that they have so far failed to do.

[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]

Jindal’s op-ed reminded me of a point that Nate Cohn, The Times’s polling expert, has recently been making: Most of the voters who swung from supporting Trump in 2016 to a congressional Democrat in 2018 seem likely to vote for Trump again in 2020. And because they are overrepresented in swing states like Wisconsin, Trump has a chance to win re-election despite a weak national approval rating. These voters evidently see him as different from — and more appealing than — most other Republicans.

Regular readers know that I believe they’re making a mistake. But simply lamenting their choice doesn’t do any good. Somebody other than Trump needs to figure out how to win their support.

For more …

Michael Brendan Dougherty, writing in National Review, has made a related argument:

Democrats are no more willing than social-conservative Trump supporters to lay down their culture-war objectives and enmities in order to save the constitution from the president. As Ross Douthat and others have pointed out, if liberals really believed that Trump was a threat to the constitutional order or a harbinger of fascism, they would begin doing what many liberals did after the 2004 election: making rhetorical and political gestures toward conservative churchgoers in order to mollify them and win the next election. This strategy paid dividends back then — Democrats, you’ll recall won big in 2006 and 2008 — but no Democrat of note is advocating it now…. Progressives believe they are just vindicating human rights when they pursue their culture-war goals relentlessly. And like Evangelicals, they don’t think Donald Trump’s depredations — however appalling — are a reason to lay down their arms in the fight.

The Argument

Speaking of Ross Douthat: In the latest episode of our podcast, Ross, Michelle Goldberg and I debated Pete Buttigieg’s recent criticism of free college. And Anna Louie Sussman joined us to talk about her recent essay on the global fertility slump, “The End of Babies.” I tried to persuade the others that the trends reflects a triumph of individualism over community values.

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