A Democratic Sweep
On the one hand, when voters in Virginia and New Jersey were asked by exit pollsters for their views of the Democratic Party, they weren’t exactly effusive. In New Jersey, 47 percent said they had a favorable impression; 50 percent said their impression was unfavorable. In Virginia, it was 45 percent favorable and 52 percent unfavorable.
And yet—and yet—Tuesday was a great day for Democrats, and more important, a great day for America, or at least, an America that hopes to overcome the rule of a tin-pot megalomaniac.
Those Virginia voters elected Democrat Abigail Spanberger to be their governor by a 14-point margin over her Republican opponent. They elected a full slate of down-ticket Democrats, too, including their attorney general candidate whose years-old tweets would have defeated him had state voters not been furious at the presumptuous misrule of Donald Trump.
Those New Jersey voters elected Democrat Mikie Sherrill to be their governor by a 13-point margin over her Republican opponent. Pennsylvania voters returned all three Democratic state Supreme Court justices—who’d rejected Trump’s machinations to skew their state toward MAGA injustices—by 20-point margins. Georgia voters ousted two Republican members of the state’s Public Service Commission in favor of two Democrats—the first Democrats to win statewide nonfederal offices in decades. In California, voters passed by a nearly 2-to-1 margin Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Democratic redistricting map, which would offset the Republican one enacted in Texas. And in New York City, voters gave majority support to a democratic socialist Democrat and a tribune for a struggling, largely immigrant working class to be their next mayor.
The results dispelled fears that the drift of Black and Latino voters into the Republican column that characterized the 2024 presidential election would continue. Spanberger carried Virginia Latinos by a 64 percent to 35 percent margin, and she won the vote of the state’s nonwhite working class (that is, voters without college degrees) by a 56-percentage-point margin. Sherrill won New Jersey’s Latino voters by a 2-to-1 (64 percent to 32 percent) margin, and carried the state’s nonwhite working class by a 48-percentage-point margin.
What all this meant, first, was that Democrats connected with broad public discontent over Trump and the Republicans’ mishandling of the economy and ignoring the public’s resulting discontent. Compare, for instance, the difference between the salience in the public’s mind of Trump’s signature issues and the issues that actually mattered to them. When Virginia voters were asked what issue mattered most to them, 47 percent said the economy, 21 percent said health care, 12 percent said immigration, 10 percent said education, and 6 percent said crime. In New Jersey, 36 percent said taxes, 32 percent said the economy, 16 percent said health care, 7 percent said immigration, and 3 percent said crime. In New York City, 55 percent said the cost of living, 24 percent said crime, 9 percent said immigration, and 6 percent said health care. (And Mamdani voters ranked immigration much higher than the other voters; clearly, they were referring to ICE sweeps against law-abiding immigrants.)
So where’s the “emergency” that Trump claims is besetting his fellow citizens? Crime? Immigration? Plainly, they don’t see it.
What, then, were those “unfavorability” ratings that voters were giving the Democrats about, on the very day they were sweeping Democrats into office? They were the sum total of Republicans’ sentiment and the sentiments of many Democrats who believed that their party wasn’t doing enough to protect the Republic from the greatest threat it’s seen in 250 years: Donald Trump and his confederacy of goons. They voted Democrats into office in the hope that they could stop him, and they particularly elevated Democrats who’d shown a willingness to fight.
Even the evening’s moderates recognized that, though subtly and quietly. Both Spanberger and Sherrill made clear that they’d welcome coalition and comity to their statehouses, which was intended both as a declaration of outreach and as a clear contrast to Trump’s and MAGA’s rule. (Sherrill offered a soft-shoe critique of Trump’s deportation sweeps by quoting at length Emma Lazarus’s “Give me your tired, your poor” ode to immigrants, engraved on the Statue of Liberty.)
But the throwing down of gauntlets at our president belonged to Zohran Mamdani and Gavin Newsom, the biggest winners of the night. Mamdani made clear that his was also a victory over the bipartisan neoliberal capitalism of the past 40 years, both quoting the iconic socialist Eugene Debs and harking back to Debs’s rhetoric that extolled manual laborers and excoriated the Social Darwinist capitalists of Debs’s day and ours. Some pundits have objected to the class-based, generation-based, and pro-immigrant perspectives that Mamdani forcefully presented, but those were actually the most traditional passages in his speech. Having successfully weathered the past two weeks of Islamophobic attacks, Mamdani echoed the Irish mayors of Boston, New York, and many American cities when they first ousted the Yankee regimes that had vilified them for decades. Check out William Kennedy’s great novels about the Irish machine that ran Albany for most of the 20th century, or John Ford’s film of The Last Hurrah, in which Spencer Tracy played a composite of Boston’s Irish mayors, to see a combination of ethnocentric and social democratic politics comparable to what Mamdani was saying last night. As for his new-generation-sweeps-clean passages, well, check out John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address (which also alluded to Irish roots and democratic values):
[T]he torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
To be sure, calling out the class enemies of the American working class hasn’t been standard fare for American pols for a very long time, though if you go back to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 campaign speeches, you’ll find plenty of that. You do have to go back to Debs, though, to find so detailed, and moving, a testament to a range of just-hanging-on workers, and so resounding a declaration of their ascension to political power.
Last night, it seemed as if Mamdani and Newsom were vying to see who could take on Trump more forcefully. It’s precisely that standing athwart Trump that Democratic and independent voters were seeking when they voted yesterday; it was the failure of many Democrats to do that that had led to rank-and-file Democratic disapproval of their own party. (By successfully claiming the leadership of Trump’s real-world opposition, Newsom has managed to win, for now, the pole position in the party’s 2028 presidential contest in a way that has uniquely enabled him to avoid being boxed into the moderate or leftist camps.) If every Democrat on the ballot yesterday was in touch with the public’s anxiety about the economy, a number of them—Newsom and Mamdani loudly, Spanberger and Sherrill quietly—were also in touch with the Democrats’ fury at the ICE sweeps and Trump’s attempted assumption of monarchial power. Those two themes powered the Democrats to victory yesterday; they should power them to victory next year as well.
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