That Was Better

 After a long year of soul searching and self-flagellation, Democrats finally racked up some huge wins across multiple elections last night. Electing Mamdani in NYC is getting the headlines, because New York, but the more significant elections happened elsewhere. Democrats romped not only in the Virginia governor's race, but in the House of Delegates. Mikie Sherrill was supposed to be in trouble in New Jersey, but she romped. In Georgia, Democrats won seats on the public utilities commission for the first time in decades. In Pennsylvania, three Democratic Supreme Court justices were retained with 60% of the vote. In California, Newsom's gambit of submitting Prop 50, which will create a partisan gerrymander in California to match that in Texas, passed with 63% of the vote. Even the Democrat running for Virginia Attorney General who had been hit with a scandal won easily.

If there are common threads that run through these elections it looks like the following.

People are upset with corruption. Some of this is local - Georgia, the NYC mayoral race - some of this is Trump - California. The general Trump fatigue with his self-dealing bullshit is getting noticed. Hispanics apparently swung back to Democrats because of the Gestapo shit that ICE and Border Patrol are doing to anyone browner than an Irishman in February.

People are upset with rising prices. Obviously this applies to Mamdani, but it also applies to Sherrill across the Hudson. It applies to the Georgia election. Most of the Democrats ran on some variation of the "abundance" agenda. Mamdani is going to make things free. Sherrill is going to declare an emergency over utility bills. Colorado voted to give school kids more free food.

People should pump the brakes on reading too much into one particular candidate or result. Mamdani is not a model for Democrats to win the Senate seat in Iowa next year, except to the degree that he is a very skilled politician, very charismatic and very attuned to people's concerns about affordability. Is it more important that Sherrill and Spanberger are women or that they are fairly moderate? Or that they won in pretty blue states?

Sadly, here in our town, we saw what factionalism can still do. We elected four of the nine members of the Town Council, and voters can vote for three candidates, with each party putting up three candidates. Republican one party rule has been the norm here for as long as I can remember, and the local GOP completely screwed up a water issue that is going to cost taxpayers $31 million to escape. Last night, the Republican candidates each won about 40% of the vote. 

However, we have an Independent Party as well as a Democratic Party. They each got around 30% of the vote for their slate of candidates. That means 60% of voters wanted to turn the GOP out of office but instead they will continue to run the town into the ground.

I voted for the Independents, because I didn't think people in our town would vote for Democrats. Because they wouldn't cross list/cross endorse, they blew it.

I still think that creating a Farm-Labor party in the Great Plains states to replace the Democrats is a smart move, but it obviously requires Democrats to stand down completely.

Still, the good news is that we saw about a 4% shift towards Democrats in NJ and VA. That trend is great for Senate candidates in Maine and North Carolina. It opens the door for candidate quality in Ohio and Texas and even Iowa. If things get worse, things get better.

Here's an immediate question: What does this mean for the shutdown? Will Republicans look at these results and begin to worry about how their voters will treat them next November? Especially if they don't address exploding health care costs?

Right now, Trump's position is that he is going to starve kids and grandparents until Democrats agree to let him strip health care from millions. That ain't a great message. Last night confirmed that.