Democracy strikes back: or, how we're not cooked yet

Last week Tuesday, voters across the United States, from California to Virginia to Pennsylvania, and of course, New York City, sent a resounding message: they're furious.

A year since Donald Trump was narrowly returned to power, his approval rating is once again in the tank. According to the approval aggregator at FiftyPlusOne - a spiritual successor to the former data analytics website 538 - his approval sits at 40% as of writing, whereas his disapproval is just shy of 56%. It definitely showed last week.

As a record-breaking government shutdown trudged deeper into its 2nd month, Trump seemed to be mostly focused on his vainglorious White House ballroom and throwing lavish Great Gatsby-style parties for his sycophants. The actual business of government? That can be left to someone else, like Stephen Miller or Russell Vought. What, you expect the president to govern? That stinks of wokeness!

No, the president clearly exists to just generate social media content. Such are the times we live in. Somehow, Trump's posting of an AI-generated slop video of him dropping feces on No Kings protestors just a few weeks ago didn't help his party's candidates avoid electoral massacre. Yes, he really did this. I'd be remiss if I didn't note that the plane in this AI slop video is named "King Trump" - you know, the very concept that the protestors were protesting. Whatever small amount of subtlety this man had about his desires - and let's be honest, he never has really had much of that - is gone. He truly wants to be a dictator, as I stated in an article right after his second inauguration.

Millions of Americans feared for their ability to eat as a result of a lapse in SNAP benefits owing to the government shutdown, a lapse in food assistance that the administration sued in court to maintain. Even electoral humiliation cannot make this administration pretend toward decency. This is to say nothing of the lapse of Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) subsidies that the Republicans have been refusing to renew - resulting in a massive spike in insurance premiums for people.

As of writing, a few centrist Democrats in the Senate struck a deal with the Republicans to end the shutdown, resulting in the reopening of the government. This is despite the fact that the reported deal contains no solid commitments to fund the Affordable Care Act subsidies mentioned above, the central demand of the congressional Democrats in the shutdown fight. I won't spend the entirety of this piece on this development, but I will say: I think this is a bad deal. The 8 Senate Democrats who voted for it made a massive mistake which is being met with fury and resentment by an already-angry voting base. Trust me, I have a BlueSky account.

So while I could talk on and on about this administration's contempt for the people it governs, I'd much rather shift the discussion to what, exactly, happened last week on Tuesday, and what it means for democracy in the United States a year since Trump won again.

A blue tsunami washes over the coasts

The most notable statewide elections that drew attention last week were the governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia. Owing to quirks in their election cycles, New Jersey and Virginia hold their elections for chief executive in off years (i.e., years that don't line up with a presidential or midterm election).

After much ballyhooing about these races perhaps being competitive and the Republicans potentially having a puncher's chance, they ended up being... well, not that. Both Democratic candidates - women from battleground districts in their respective states - ended up winning handily. And with massive turnout in each to boot, especially considering the obscure nature of these elections.

Representative Abigail Spanberger won Virginia by 15 points against her Republican opponent, Winsome Earle-Sears, Virginia's current Lieutenant Governor. For reference: the last time any candidate won Virginia by double digits was when Joe Biden beat Donald Trump there by 10 points in 2020. And Mikie Sherrill, a former helicopter pilot in the US Navy, massively outperformed polling that showed her leading by just a few points - the FiftyPlusOne average had her leading by about 6 points. As of writing, she leads her Republican opponent 56% to 42% - a margin more than double that of the polling.

At the risk of tooting my own horn, I was deeply skeptical of the idea that Republicans had chances in these kinds of races. Why? A few reasons, really, but foremost was that these races were happening in states that Donald Trump, for all his lies about voter fraud and elections, never won in his 3 campaigns for president. There's also just the fact that Trump's numbers haven't been particularly good for months now, a dynamic that hurts any Republican seeking to accrue power in more liberal turf.

And a state like Virginia had been particularly targeted by the wrath of Trump and his toadies in the form of his reckless assault on the federal government and its mass firings of civil servants and federal workers. Indeed, Virginia has more federal workers per capita than almost any other state. The shutdown which went on for well over a month - the longest in American history - also hit Virginia especially hard. It was a double whammy of Republican malice and incompetence.

Now, perhaps you might think that Virginia's Republican gubernatorial candidate worked hard to distinguish herself from her counterparts at the federal level. To show that she'd be an independent voice for her constituents in a state where many had been feeling the harsh, cruel blows, of Trump's wanton government gutting.

Hardly. About 60% - yes, really, almost 60% - of Winsome Earle-Sears's campaign ads were fearmongering about trans children in sports. It's a shocker the race didn't end up being a nail-biter. I guess running a bitter, mean-spirited campaign targeting vulnerable kids doesn't endear you to a state that Trump has never won. Whoda thunk it?

Abigail Spanberger's campaign was fairly unremarkable: she focused mostly on the cost-of-living and other economic concerns, like the ongoing shutdown and Trump's mass layoffs of federal workers. I'm a pragmatist when it comes to campaigns. I believe that a campaign's structure should generally be about expanding your scope of support as much as you can, while not sacrificing essential principles. You have to win an election to actually do stuff.

So Spanberger's campaign got the job done, and I was impressed by how hard Virginia's core liberal areas came in for her. Take Loudoun County, for example: it is an extremely rich suburban area in the DC Metro in northern Virginia, and Trump doing relatively well there for a Republican last year was an early bad sign for Kamala Harris, with Harris winning it 56% to 40%, a much reduced margin than Biden had won it by in 2020. Spanberger, meanwhile, won it by 64% to 35%. That's a 13 point shift to the Democrats compared to 2024, and she even surpassed Biden's strong performance there in 2020.

Another area that "libbed out" was Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia and a place that suffered a vicious attack by a large group of Nazis 8 years ago. Last year, Kamala Harris won it by a massive margin, winning 83% of the vote there to Trump's 15%. How much bluer could it get? Well, it could definitely get bluer still, with Charlottesville coming in at a rock solid 89% for Abigail Spanberger.

Spanberger might not be a particularly progressive or left-wing Democrat, but it didn't stop Virginia's most liberal areas from showing up for her. You could tell from the numbers all across the state that there was a visceral desire to send a forceful message to the Republicans in DC.

I could go on and on like this about the Virginia governor's race alone, but the point stands: the Republicans got crushed in Virginia, a formerly red state. They also suffered devastating losses further down the ballot there - the Democratic House majority of 51 seats to the Republicans' 49 surged to 64 seats, flipping 13 Republican seats to Democratic control. To use a technical term: wowza.

In New Jersey, the story was broadly similar: a competent center-left candidate used to winning tough campaigns ran against a Republican who seemed to forget that they were running in a Harris-won state, not Missouri. Said candidate then gets clobbered.

Here's one thing I will observe from the New Jersey governor's race: Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican nominee for governor there, said in a debate when asked about President Donald Trump's second that he would give Trump a grade of an A, going on to say, "I think he's right about everything he's doing." When I heard about that remark, it affirmed to me that he was very likely cooked.

Now here's the thing - in a state like New Jersey, you need to win over some voters who aren't Trump superfans. That's just the political math. There are proportionally more Democratic voters in blue states than there are Republican voters. Simple, right?

Yet despite having every political incentive to at least create a measure of distance from himself and the president, this guy leaned in - hard. He said Trump isn't doing anything wrong. It's an assertion that is remarkably wrong on the merits - this presidency is even more of a landfill fire than his first one was - but it's also enlightening from a political perspective.

Think about this: this guy made the political decision to embrace an unpopular president in a state where said president has never won, presumably to avoid a late night ragestorm on TruthSocial from his leader... rather than show a measure of independence from him, however superficial in practice that would be.

So both Winsome Earle-Sears and Jack Ciattarelli ran campaigns that never really even tried to create the impression of independence from Trump, despite the turf they were running in. This is one of many, many instances that prove the point: the contemporary Republican Party operates less like a political party in a healthy democracy, and more like a party in a dictatorial country. Independence and integrity are sneered at and result in punishment and political exile, whereas demonstrations of unquestioning loyalty to the party leader are rewarded.

It is yet another show of how the Republicans truly are the party of Trump, and how fiercely even the perception of disloyalty to him is punished by him and his inner circle. Say "cult of personality" five times fast.

Oh yeah, and that other race people were talking about...

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the New York City mayoral race, since that's gotten the lion's share of the press.

I was impressed with Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who won New York City's mayoral race, once I started to pay attention to him earlier this year. For me, he's what I've wanted to see from larger segments of the progressive left: a deep focus on the mechanics of power and how to win it. Too often, I get the sense that progressives view concerning ourselves with the actual process of winning to be somehow beneath us, the political equivalent of selling out. But with Mamdani, I could tell he took that kind of thing seriously, and understood that political campaigns aren't just about flattering those who already agree with you.

I have also found that progressives tend to moan about our lack of power, though this doesn't always come with self-examination about why progressives can struggle to win. Often greater forces are cited as the invariable reason for failure: mountains of corporate cash, a hostile political establishment, apathy among would-be supporters, etc. It's a pretty defeatist mindset that promotes a sort of learned helplessness, even if it contains elements of truth.

Zohran Mamdani clearly wanted to forge a fresh path, to show what was actually possible, and good on him for it. His energetic, optimistic campaign against an entitled washout in the form of Andrew Cuomo was a breath of fresh air, akin to a salt-washed ocean breeze sweeping across your face on an August day. He mobilized thousands of new voters while understanding the importance of winning already solid Democratic voters; too often, progressives focus so much on mobilizing the unmobilized that they forget about those who are already mobilized.

Mamdani also cleverly used social media to get out his message, projecting an image of a cheery optimist that cared about the substance of the issues, but who was also willing to have a little fun. He was, to borrow a term, a happy warrior.

Mamdani did not really run as any sort of radical, despite the frenzied media depictions of him as one, not to mention Cuomo's racist attacks against him as some sort of Islamic fanatic. In some respects, Mamdani's campaign had similarities to the more center-left Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey that I talked about above, such as a relentless focus on the cost of living and affordability. He was very much on message about this, to the point where I, a casual observer of this election, can tell you that one of his major proposals was making universal childcare a reality in New York City.

He also made clear that Andrew Cuomo did not respect New York City and its voters, and that Cuomo viewed the mayoralty of the city as a way to mount a political comeback after his sexual harassment and COVID-19 scandals. It wasn't about an agenda or something bigger, it was just about Andrew Cuomo. Whatever else you can say about Mamdani, I truly believe the guy cares down to his bones about the people of New York City. I'd extend that to be a little more broad: this is a man who clearly cares about people, whether they are in the five boroughs of New York City or in Palestine.

We need more Mamdani-type candidates in this moment - not necessarily in the sense that they run on identical issues to him, but in the sense that they are willing to boldly experiment with new things, new ways of reaching people, and new thinking. That, above all else, is what this moment needs - new thinking.

Too often in politics, people stick to tired truisms, like "people mainly care about the economy" or "the reason candidates lose is because they run bad campaigns," or "Democrats lose because they are insufficiently progressive/centrist/woke/unwoke etc." I believe an honest accounting of the era of Trump's second presidency challenges a lot of long-held assumptions about political life in this country, and does so in ways that should make anyone opining about politics humble. I include myself in that.

And don't forget California

This article is not meant to be a comprehensive recap of every major election result that happened last week, but one final note I'd make is this that these surges of voter enthusiasm weren't limited to elections that had been getting tons of press. California, for example, turned out strongly to vote for Proposition 50 - a similar number of voters voted for this singular ballot proposition as voted in the 2022 governor's election in California. I find it slightly insane, in an impressive way, that a similar number of voters turned out to vote for a singular ballot question about redistricting as did in the 2022 midterms there.

Proposition 50 is a proposal backed by Governor Gavin Newsom to gerrymander California's congressional map to be more favorable to the Democrats, though it does retain California's independent redistricting commission. At last count, the "yes" vote was winning against "no" about 65-35, or about a 2:1 ratio.

I'd be not doing my job if I didn't note that I oppose gerrymandering, a fancy way to refer to map-rigging. I live in a state that has been gerrymandered for almost all of my adult life, and only recently did that rigged map go away. With that said, Texas and other red states have been rigging new maps - in some cases, making their current gerrymandered maps even more rigged in their favor - in response to an explicit request by Trump to rig the 2026 midterms for the Republicans.

So Proposition 50 arose in this context as a form of fighting fire with fire. Proposition 50 also does not keep the newly-drawn gerrymander forever - California's independent commission will return to drawing the map in 2030, which I believe is how every state should draw its maps in an ideal world. A world which we very much do not live in right now.

So do I think it's a great development that states are racing to rig their maps right before a major election cycle? In one sense, no, I think it's yet another example of how democracy in America is backsliding. Do I think it's an important way to counter Republican efforts to fix the 2026 midterms? I do, because it creates some parity in the process, since Republicans will rig the maps whether or not the Democrats do it. The Republicans answer to Trump's beck and call, so why would they resist him on this? It also helps their own political careers by enabling them to draw better seats for them. Ultimately, though, we need a nationwide ban on gerrymandering to stop this kind of arms race from happening.

One final thought on this: there was a concern expressed by some that because Democratic voters tend to place a higher value on things like opposition to gerrymandering, Democratic voters would balk at voting for Proposition 50. That obviously proved unfounded. The results show that Democratic voters are ready to fight fire with fire, and to not just unilaterally disarm as the Republicans aggressively try to consolidate more and more power. The core voting base for the Democratic Party, to summarize, is pissed off and ready to fight - to hell with norms.

Final thoughts

The victories of pro-democracy forces across the United States last week affirm a central point that was already shown by elections like Wisconsin's supreme court race back in the spring: democracy is not dead yet. We should not behave or act as if it is. Besieged by powerful forces in both Washington and outside it? Undoubtedly. Hopelessly cooked? Hardly.

I wrote in October of last year in a piece right before the presidential election that I was of the increasing view that cynicism is our enemy. Here's an excerpt, which I think holds up well:

But it's absolutely critical to realize that political nihilism creates a gaping maw for fascism to step right into. Cynicism is not defiance. A cynical, alienated voter is just as likely to vote for a fascist candidate than they are to latch onto any sort of hopeful, empowering message.

The fascists in this country want you to be cynical, to think that their triumph is inevitable, and that resisting them is a lost cause. They rely on your perception of their strength to hide their lack of it. We should give them no quarter on that!

I believe that Trump and his ilk are now operating from a place of fear. This is in stark contrast to the first few months of his second administration, when the spirit was one of triumphant cruelty. Stories regarding Trump's close ties with sex trafficker and rapist Jeffrey Epstein are increasing in volume - such as Trump potentially having had Epstein visit him at Mar-a-Lago on Thanksgiving 2017, when Trump was already president. Trump's paling around with a rapist and a pedophile is a massive story - and his ham-fisted attempts to sweep his association with Epstein under the rug have been ineffective. Even some Trump supporters, normally quick with rationalizations for Trump's malice and incompetence, are struggling to cook up a defense for this.

On the back of this and some major electoral defeats, I expect some level of discord within the ranks of the Republicans to arise. That is great news for pro-democracy forces in America. This does not mean we are out of the woods yet, paraphrasing Taylor Swift. We are far from it. But maybe we are starting to see the hints of a path out of this nightmare, some faint glimpses of light. That is cause for celebration.