About Last Night

Somebody said: "Americans will always do the right thing - once they've tried everything else."

That was a wipeout yesterday. That was not a simple rejection, or even a big-ass repudiation of this Trumpian GOP Fuckery thing. That was a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, inside a total ass-kickin', all wrapped up tight with a Fuck You And The horse You Rode In On.

First, all politics is local.

And when it works locally, you can apply it generally, tailoring it to suit the needs of a given area, or city, or constituency. But the message for 'small d' democrats is that we are not all that divided. We've allowed some very bad-faith assholes to convince us we need to split ourselves off from everybody else, and fear each other - to the point where we're in real danger of believing we have nothing in common with anyone but the few people who think and believe and behave exactly the way we do.

"For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures."

-- JFK

Like the lady said: "When we fight, we win."

The only way we can't win is if we don't show up to fight.

Across the country Tuesday, state and local elections served as the first major test of how the public feels about President Donald Trump’s second term ahead of major national elections next year for control of Congress.

It didn’t go well for him.

Here are winners and losers from these elections.

Winners

Democrats: They took back a governor’s mansion in a critical swing state, Virginia, and kept control of another in New Jersey, while winning a mayoral race in New York City and holding onto three critical state Supreme Court seats in Pennsylvania. Voters in California agreed to allow Democrats to redraw their congressional districts to match Republicans doing the same in other states. Democrats also won in state and local elections in Georgia and Mississippi and expanded their majorities in the Virginia state legislature.

These were exactly the results Democrats wanted a year before the next big referendum on Trump, which will be nationwide elections where control of Congress is up for grabs. On Democrats’ big night, turnout in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City was up.

“Tonight we sent a message, ” Abigail Spanberger, the next governor of Virginia — and the state’s first woman to win the office — said in her victory speech. She won almost every coveted voter group: women, independents, younger voters and voters who said the economy was their main concern, according to network exit polls reported by CNN.

Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill (D) speaks alongside her family at her election night watch party in East Brunswick, New Jersey, on Tuesday. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images)
In New Jersey, Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill’s win suggests real momentum for Democrats. She won in a state where Black and Hispanic voters have become more open to Trumpism — and overcame history as well: For the first time in 50 years, New Jersey Democrats have won the governor’s mansion for three straight terms.

There are caveats to Democratic wins. Virginia, with its large federal employee workforce, has been uniquely hurt by the government shutdown and Trump’s mass firings of federal workers.

“I tend to think we overrate the impact of these off-year elections,” said Doug Heye, a veteran Republican strategist. “New Jersey and Virginia are more blue than purple.” Democrats I talked to agreed with him.

The poles of the Democratic Party: Virginia and New Jersey elected moderate Democrats with national security backgrounds — Spanberger served in the CIA and Sherrill was a Navy pilot.

After losing to Trump twice, many Democrats approve of this direction as the 2028 presidential election comes into view. “At the end of the day, Democratic voters get really pragmatic about who can win,” one veteran Democratic strategist told me.

But the liberal wing of the party had a great night, too. America’s largest city elected a democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, who supports redistributing wealth to provide free bus fare and child care in the city, among many other services.

Republican attack ads for the next year: In Mamdani, Trump and Republicans feel they’ve found the perfect foil for next year’s midterm elections. He’s so far to the left that the top two Democrats in Congress, also from New York, hesitated to endorse him or just didn’t.

“Many people are petrified by the Radical Left,” Trump said on social media, “but I’m not, they keep getting me, and other Republicans, elected!”

Some Democrats say they’re worried about the socialist label sticking, especially in the wake of successful “woke” attacks the past few elections that framed their party as too concerned about special classes of Americans over others.

Stop being afraid of their words, Democrats. You won by (finally) smackin' the other guy right in his fat smug face.

"Oh - you say I'm a socialist? So what? You don't like it? Fuck you - make me stop."

You lose because you're timid. You've developed a bad habit of buckling under the slightest pressure. Knock that shit off. Be bold. Be assertive.

 

And point out the truth:

"We've put together several 'socialist' things in this country that we all know and love."

• The US military's a good socialist thing
• Every local cop shop is a good socialist thing
• Streets and highways and dams and sewer systems are good socialist things
• Public schools are good socialist things
• and and and

Free and fair elections: In the days before the election, Trump floated an allegation without evidence that Democrats were somehow “shipping” votes, and his Justice Department sent monitors to polling locations, in a move that some Democrats viewed as menacing. Despite that tension, millions of voters from New York to California had their say in elections run by states and municipalities. Tuesday night underscored what election experts have been saying for years amid Trump’s fraud claims: It’s very hard to rig an election, especially because they are so decentralized.

Losers

Trump: This election was about Trump. He endorsed major Republican candidates and tied all of these elections to his efforts to lower the cost of living: “If affordability is your issue, VOTE REPUBLICAN!” he posted on social media. But prices are up, Trump is broadly unpopular, and Democratic candidates welcomed making their elections about Trump. Network exit polls showed that most voters in Virginia and New Jersey voters disapproved of Trump.

Republican hopes of keeping control of Congress next year: House Republicans have one of the smallest House majorities ever, and history suggests that whatever party controls the White House tends to lose the midterms. Tuesday did little to dispel that trend: Since the 1970s, when one party has swept these off-year elections — as Democrats did Tuesday — that party has done well in the next year’s congressional elections.

The Senate, which Republicans also control, is a higher reach for Democrats, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Senate Democrats are holding the line against reopening the government without assurances that programs such as food assistance will be restored. As the shutdown becomes the longest ever on Wednesday, Trump is expressing concerns his party will get blamed for it if they don’t make drastic moves to end it. “The Democrats are far more likely to win the Midterms, and the next Presidential Election,” he warned his party Tuesday.

Nothing’s a done deal. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that while voters broadly disapprove of Trump, they’re more open to voting for Republicans in Congress. But to the extent you can read into these elections, analysts say you’d rather be a Democrat than a Republican going into next year.

“There’s a lot of anger on the left,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) warned his party recently. “And elections can be dangerous when one side is mobilized, is angry.”