Copyright MassLive
If one thing was clear about the Democratic wins up and down the ballot on Tuesday night, it’s that Americans had grown tired of waiting for President Donald Trump to fulfill his promises to bring down prices and to reduce inflation. So they took matters into their own hands, embracing candidates from New York City and Trenton and from Richmond to Boston who made making life more affordable the animating principle of their campaigns. And it wasn’t an abstraction. Rather, it was grounded in the reality of the working lives of millions of Americans who are paying more for just about everything. And it came against the backdrop of a seemingly endless government shutdown that also has made everyday life more difficult. “I’m hopeful,” a Brooklyn Heights voter told the local Brooklyn Eagle newspaper as she cast her ballot on Tuesday. “I feel like there’s excitement in the air, and people are hoping for a change.” During his victory speech on Tuesday night, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani told the story of Wesley, a union organizer he met outside Elmhurst Hospital. He’s a “New Yorker who lives elsewhere, who commutes two hours each way from Pennsylvania because rent is too expensive in this city,” Mamdani said. In a radio interview on Wednesday, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, who sits on the other side of the Democratic spectrum from Mamdani, an avowed Democratic Socialist, made a similar argument. She pointed to the twin pains of rising health insurance costs and the lapse in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, which sent thousands of Bay State residents scrambling for help and overwhelmed local food pantries as they did so. Those health care costs, meanwhile, could soon rise even more if lawmakers on Capitol Hill can’t get a deal on Affordable Care Act tax subsidies set to expire at year’s end. “Donald Trump is continuing to make life harder and more expensive for Americans,” Healey (who has affordability challenges of her own) told GBH-FM’s “Boston Public Radio” program. “And [on Tuesday]. night, the voters, I think, sent a resounding message rejecting that, and that they need to see something different.” In even more pointed remarks, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu — who coasted to victory without opposition — pointed straight at Trump’s battles with the city over immigration and crime as a motivator for voters. “Right now, our city is being targeted because we refuse to stop doing what they say is impossible: take care of our people, take care of everyone,” Wu said during an election night party in the city’s Seaport neighborhood on Tuesday. “Wannabe dictators don’t like seeing proof that democracy works. Proof that we don’t have to choose between progress and prosperity, competence and compassion, cities and safety, common sense and community.” Exit polling bad news for Trump If you’re inclined to reject both Healey and Wu as partisans intent on scoring political points (which they undoubtedly are), exit polling on Tuesday also put Trump and his policies front and center. Clear majorities of voters in California (59%), New Jersey (53%) and Virginia (54%) said Trump was a factor in their vote, according to CBS News exit polling. Only in New York City, where the race was deeply personality-driven, was the trend reversed: 57% of respondents said Trump was not a factor in their vote. But nearly 8 in 10 voters (78%) aged 30 and younger, and nearly 6 in 10 renters (59%) said they were backing Mamdani, who ran on affordability, over his competitors, according to that same CBS News exit polling. On Tuesday night, Trump issued a cryptic warning, without further elaboration, on his Truth Social site: “AND SO IT BEGINS!” It’s a reasonable inference that the Republican president is talking about the 2026 midterms. There, like Tuesday, Trump won’t be on the ballot, but his policies absolutely will be once again. A new game plan The prize is control of Capitol Hill for the back two years of Trump’s second term. And now that they’ve found a message that hits Trump in his populist wheelhouse, Democrats have a game plan. “In a big-tent party like this, we’re going to have lots of different ideas, lots of different ways to accomplish the same goal, and that’s where we’re unified,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin told Politico in a pre-Election Day interview. What are Zohran Mamdani, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger running on that’s similar? Affordability.” On Wednesday, in a social media post celebrating his 2024 victory, Trump paid some lip service to the issue, arguing that “our Economy is BOOMING, and Costs are coming way down. Affordability is our goal.” Writing for The Contrarian, commentator Jennifer Rubin observed that the results across those key states “collectively indicate that a bold repudiation of MAGA politics has taken hold.” But if Trump has proven anything over the last decade, it’s that maybe only Keith Richards comes close to rivaling his survival skills. Tuesday was significant, no doubt, but there’s still plenty of game left to play. Democrats, at least, now appear to have a winning playbook.
