America gave Donald Trump a bloody nose.
In the first election night since Trump returned to power, the results were better than the Democrats had hoped for.
Zohran Mamdani started a convincing victory against Trump-endors Andrew Cuomo in the race for Mayor of New York, America’s largest city.
Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger won the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia by double the percentage points, outpacing Kamala Harris’s Act last year. This marks the first time that Democrats have won three consecutive New Jersey gubernatorial elections since 1961.
The blue wave keeps coming. California voters approved new district boundaries in California as Democrats look to fight back against Republican efforts in next year’s House of Representatives.
Democrats retain three key seats on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In the Virginia state legislature, House Democrats flipped 13 seats for their largest majority in nearly 40 years. “Tonight is an earthquake election in Virginia,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Caucus Legislative Campaign.
The results are part of a referendum on Trump, whose approval rating has never been lower. His authoritarian aday is a show of weakness instead of strength. From the ice attacks and tariffs to his $300m bottle house in the White House, his presidency has never been popular. Are you better than you were a year ago? The voters said no.
Tuesday’s election also showed that without the ballot — but his record is — voters won’t work for him. Republicans like Virginia’s Winsome Earle-Sears, who tried to copy Trump’s anti-trans attacks on his opponent, found the president inflexible.
It likes the democrats at night when they get back to business. It has been an absolutely miserable year for a leaderless party struggling to outmaneuver a man who is constantly throwing the chessboard in the air. Morale is at rock bottom. The Party is out of action.
But while losing an election is bad, the wrong consequences can be worse. If the Democrats lost the house of representatives in 2022 but the experformed expectations, they took it as a sign that all is well with the status quo. Instead of challenging Joe Biden, they let him run for a second presidential term and paid the price.
Democrats did well not to over-interpret Tuesday’s outburst. A Party that is locked in power is always meant to be strengthened. Trump lost New Jersey and Virginia three times. In New York, Mamdani could not have chosen a tougher opponent than the scandal-plagued Cuomo. In Virginia, the searing in Virginia is not Glenn Calf, the Republican who kept Trump at arm’s length without opening up to him four years ago.
And even though Democrats have done well in special elections throughout the year, the Party’s brand is underwater. In July the approval rating hit the 30-year mark. Last week a Washington Post-ABC News-ips opinion poll It found that 68% of Americans think Democrats are out of touch — more than the 63% who see Trump the same way.
These are the mixed signals of the party as it demands a way out of the wilderness. Will 2024 be a cataclysmic transition that requires a total overhaul of the Party, or a coin toss for the wrong candidate with 107 days of campaigning? Should the Democrats reinvent the wheel or pump fresh air into the tire?
Tuesday alone will never solve the riddle. In New York the Charismatic Mamdani, a 34-year-old Democratic Socialist, the damaged young advances to be the first Muslim mayor of the city and given the left victories in years. But in New Jersey and Virginia it was Sherrill and Spanberger, two fearless horses with security credentials, who prevailed.
Progressives and moderates have been given fodder to make a case that they have a cure for Trumpism. The reality, of course, in a fierce country of 50 states and 34 million people, is not one or the other, but all of the above. The most that all politics is local has been destroyed in recent years, but not completely dead.
The Democratic Party is a glorious melee of diverse constitutions and views as opposed to the lordly monoculture of the Trump Cult. What unites them ahead of next year’s midterms is a desire for fighters rather than folders and for a relentless focus on the president’s power and wealth.
Asking whether Mamdani or Spanberger is the future of the Party, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told the MSNBC network: “At the end of the day I don’t think our party should have one face. Our country doesn’t have one face. It’s all a team, and we all understand the task.
“Our assignment everywhere is to send the strongest fighters for the working class wherever possible. Like Virginia Spanberger. For Virginia Spanberger. In places Abigail, unfairly it is Zohran Mamdani.”
And for the White House in 2028? That’s another story.