Copyright The Philadelphia Inquirer
Exactly one year ago this week, most Democrats were shell-shocked and uncomfortably numb. A plurality of U.S. voters had just given Donald Trump a return ticket to the White House, despite his four criminal indictments. Where had their party gone wrong? Could focus groups and overpriced consultants fix their toxic brand? Only one man — an obscure, then-33-year-old New York state assemblyman from Queens, Zohran Mamdani — seemed to know what to do. Mamdani, along with a videographer and some aides, hopped on a subway and went to two gritty locations where a lot of mostly Black, brown and Asian American working-class voters had just swung to Trump: Fordham Road in the Bronx and Hillside Avenue in Queens. Mamdani held up a handmade sign: “Let’s talk election.” Many Trump voters were more than happy to talk. As the camera created a viral Instagram post, they told Mamdani how they’d deserted the Democrats over their frustration in meeting the rent despite working two or three jobs, or even just affording the bus, or with how a Democratic president had sent the bombs killing Palestinians in Gaza. “The swing is because people want lower prices,” one Black voter told Mamdani. “They probably think Trump is going to give it to them.” A lot has happened in one year. Mamdani’s campaign for New York mayor, tied to the affordability crisis he heard about that November 2024 day, took him from near anonymity to one of the most talked-about pols in America. Trump, meanwhile, has failed to deliver those lower grocery prices he promised his native Queens and the rest of America. On Tuesday night, an ocean-blue political tsunami swamped much of America from Maine to Mississippi, and from New Jersey to California. Mamdani’s big majority win in New York City — over both a Republican and an independent former governor backed heavily by billionaires — was only the top storyline in a Democratic wave election that swept in Democratic governors in Virginia and the Garden State, ensured a continued Democratic majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and won everywhere else. I’ve been covering elections since 1982 and watching them even longer than that, and I’ve seen my share of partisan landslides. Usually, the pundits can say, “there was one bright spot for the GOP in blah blah blah.” But no, there was not a single bright spot for the Republican Party on Tuesday. None. Nada. Zilch. That’s because the Democratic wave wasn’t confined to a geographic area, or to one or two charismatic candidates like Mamdani. One top election analyst looked at four diverse states that held contested elections on Tuesday — Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Georgia — and found that 99.8% of counties shifted toward the Democrats from 2024. 99.8%! Even Vladimir Putin doesn’t rack up numbers like that! That means that when top Republicans like House Speaker Mike Johnson tried to pretend Tuesday was no big deal — “these are all blue states,” he said on the day after — he is attempting to gaslight you. The reality: Democrats captured two key seats on the utility commission in Georgia, a state that Trump won just last year, and even won three legislative special elections in blood-red Mississippi. Voters ousted right-wing, Moms for Liberty-type school board members in Bucks County, Pa., but also the far-right city council member in Aurora, Colo. whose exaggerated claims about Venezuelan gang violence became a 2024 presidential race issue. If there was a race for town dog catcher somewhere in West Virginia and a Republican was on the ballot, he probably lost, or had the scare of a lifetime. Because Tuesday proved there is one political party in America whose brand is truly toxic right now, and despite a yearlong onslaught of TV talking heads saying the opposite, it clearly is not the Democrats. This was massive retaliation. The only common bond between Mamdani’s bustling New York and rural counties in Mississippi is that their voters think America is way off track, and they blame both the man at the top — an imperial Trump throwing a lavish Great Gatsby-themed party as food aid expires — and a Republican Party that marches in lockstep. How else to explain how New Jersey’s Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill, whose tepid media campaign leaned heavily on her past as a military helicopter pilot while she weathered blistering attack ads, won on Tuesday by 56.3%-43.6%, a margin that political experts consider a landslide? The Democrats won everything everywhere on Tuesday by stressing two core principles: Their opposition to authoritarian rule by Trump, and an emphasis on actually caring about families’ struggles to pay the rent or rising healthcare costs — issues that have little interested Trump since he returned to the Oval Office. But when it comes to specifics, candidates adapted to their locale, so that democratic socialist Mamdani’s ideas about “affordability” aren’t the same as Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, one of the new national security Democrats. » READ MORE: Then they fight you: How the ‘No Kings’ protests are winning America That’s not rocket science, just basic Political Science 101. “It’s not just that there is no need to choose between attacking Trump’s lawlessness and addressing the ‘price of eggs,’ in the hackneyed shorthand for costs and inflation,” the ever-incisive Greg Sargent wrote in the New Republic as the extent of the Democratic blowout became clear. “It’s that the two missions are inseparable from one another.” Tuesday’s results are why I, and many others, fumed last month over the elite media’s determination to downplay or write-off the roughly 7 million Americans who took to the streets for the latest “No Kings” event, in the second-largest one-day protest in U.S. history. The protests proved the widespread unpopularity of Trump’s non-stop assaults on democracy, while Tuesday’s large turnout of voters proved the true value of “No Kings,” which is keeping hope alive. Still, they’d strip my license to practice political punditry (OK, that’s not really a thing... but maybe it should be?) if I published a column of unvarnished celebration without a giant “but...” sticking out. And actually I have a couple. The first concern is about the leading Democrats on Capitol Hill. At the same time that voters were heading out to the polls on Tuesday, there were reports that centrist Dems in the Senate were eying “a deal” that would reopen the government on largely the GOP’s terms, with just a token promise for a vote on affordable healthcare that guaranteed nothing. Such a cave-in, especially with polls showing most voters blaming Republicans for the shutdown, and after the electorate made its views pretty clear on Tuesday, would be a disgrace. Hopefully, this fear of continued cravenness from the Democratic leadership is unfounded. “I think it would be very strange if on the heels of the American people having rewarded Democrats for standing up and fighting, we surrendered without getting anything for the people we’ve been fighting for,” Connecticut‘s Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy told Axios. What’s more, Thursday’s end-of-2026 retirement announcement from Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi is a sign that perhaps the Mamdani big win also sent a message to the gerontocracy. But the bigger worry still stands. Voters can send a message to Trump, but they can’t likely get rid of him for another 38 months. The president couldn’t control Tuesday’s outcome, but he still controls a military larger than the next nine or 10 nations combined, is still hiring loyalists for a masked secret police force, and still believes his 48.5% share of the 2024 vote was a mandate for dictatorship. You will be shocked to learn that the 47th and possibly last American president is not taking Tuesday’s results well. On Wednesday, the commander-in-chief let loose with a barrage of some 30 posts on his Truth Social site — everything from book recommendations to bizarre rants that looked AI-generated — and threatened to invade Nigeria, a nation that Trump might struggle to locate on a map. To be sure, signs that Trump’s political capital is plunging are everywhere. Senate Republicans seem to see the president’s bluster about ending the filibuster as no more than that, and it looks likely the Supreme Court — which is better at reading political tea leaves than calling balls and strikes — is ready to put the kibosh on Trump’s ambitious tariff plan. The White House is already working to counteract Tuesday’s clear message that the Republicans would lose control of Congress if the 2026 midterms were held today. Look for stepped-up efforts to gerrymander more red states as Texas has done, as well as a Trump-driven push to pass voter suppression laws on the state level and do whatever he can on the federal level. With the filibuster locked down in the Senate, that probably means sending troops into Democratic areas ahead of the election. Trumps and all the little Steves surrounding him like Miller and Bannon still think that the only election that mattered was in 2024, which means the die has been cast — alea iacta est — to remain a “red Caesar,” crossing the Rubicon to crush “woke” liberalism. No wonder Trump continues to pay the troops and hold his rallies on military bases, as the loyalty of the military is his last line of defense. Trump’s murders on the high seas — blowing up boats in the Caribbean or Pacific that may or may not be drug smugglers — remains a test run for which military operation, from Greenland or Nigeria or wherever, the president will command from his bunker underneath his gold-spray-painted $350 million ballroom where the East Wing used to stand. Democracy’s big night on Tuesday all but ensures that Trump will try to double down on dictatorship. The blue tsunami is about to collide with a big, ugly wall.
