The elections on Tuesday, Nov. 4 were predictably successful for Democrats. One year ago, America elected a president who has shown his wild unpopularity hundreds of times in his first months in office, and when people were teed with the chance to spell out their anger, they did.
The democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won in New York City, and Democrats won again in Virginia and New Jersey. No, these wins are not dismissable. All three places voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, but their priorities are wildly different from one to the other. Affordability will always be front and center; that’s just the color of our political moment. But the science behind victory everywhere, and the strategies to achieve it, did not match so cleanly.
A New York City winner must appeal culturally, and ought to be versed in whatever medium of communication people use, way more so than any other candidate for any other race. They shouldn’t have some kind of demographic sweet-spot; the city is so diverse that a campaign will drown without some appeal to everyone. Young renters have to be on their side, knocking doors with single moms and suburb-to-city bus commuters. The campaign needs the flash and brim of a TikTok influencer and the old-school podium fire of a Kennedy. Mamdani had both.
To win in Virginia, someone has to figure out how to appeal to a rural sect while not slashing the careful suburbanites and, oh, right, stopping an authoritarian government from crashing into them as it has in Illinois and Washington. The best person for the job would be a middle-aged white woman — someone with fighting spirit who won’t, in her immediate impression, move too far, someone who doesn’t tend to fire unless fired upon. Some strategists must have drummed up a similar idea, run some numbers and produced Abigail Spanberger, as though she were machine-made. She won by double digits.
New Jersey is more complicated, though a more steadfast Democratic stronghold. It’s diverse, but slower-moving than New York and with more contrarian conservatives to be worried about. They should run a solid, mocs-on-the-ground candidate, someone with decent experience — you know where this is going. Mikie Sherrill defeated her Republican opponent with a Gulf of America–sized lead.
The point that I am trying to make is that these races are wildly dissimilar, but in all of them, the Democrat won, and there is one common factor that can help to teach why. President Donald Trump endorsed all three of their opponents. (He did not endorse the Republican, he endorsed the Democrat’s opponent: in New York City, the president endorsed Andrew Cuomo — a Democrat! — because he hates Mamdani so much.)
This blessed the Democrats. They didn’t just have to run against an opposing candidate, whose ideas may be too complicated to explain and then refute in the same soundbite, but against Trump. It isn’t even as complicated as that. They ran against the idea of the president, the idea that some Americans deserve prosperity while others don’t, and that anyone so bold as to dispute that is either stupid, a rot in our country or both. They ran against Trumpism.
And Americans hate Trumpism.
If we want to wonder why Republicans have gerrymandered the daylights out of their congressional maps, why they have prodded and teased about the president running for a third term, why they have sought to leave a lasting Trump emblem everywhere in the government, it is because they know that Trump is the host of the Make America Great Again movement, and that when he goes away, so will it, and the people who have risen with him will face some very awkward questions from voters.
No, populism and anti-establishment sentiment won’t die from the earth like drought at the end of “The Lion King,” but Mamdani proves that there is another magnetic brand of those politics around, and it is not on the right.
Once Trump is gone, the Republicans will be a falcon who cannot hear their falconer, as William Butler Yeats would tell it, a wandering band of idealogues and slimy tech billionaires in the desert without any hope of their prophet resurrecting. This will, I am sure, tempt Democrats to return to life before Trump of baby-steps and a cautious, almost cataplexic strategy. This might even win, once or twice. But it will not work, not after people get over Trump and remember how miserable such tiny motions have made them.
On Tuesday, Democrats learned from Spanberger and Sherill, as they already knew, that toughness and vision are north stars against the brief but wild MAGA storm.
And from Mamdani, they learned that orthodoxy ought to be taken down and looked at, that people can root a campaign if it motivates them. People have to have something clear to run to when they flee Trump, and righteous rambling over why the president is bad multiplies the power that a campaign already has — it is not its own power. And it certainly will not bring home victories.
Republicans, meanwhile, learned that their new paint job only lasts as long as the artist; it’s garish, obnoxious, and soon to go out of style.
Mamdani’s speech on Monday night was not to a black-tie ballroom or a crowd of donors. He spoke to a cluster of door knockers. With all his usual force, he thanked them for their contribution and made them promise that they would work so hard on Wednesday that they would never have to ask what if?
Democrats kept asking that after 2024, and I wonder if it won’t take people barely old enough to vote, people who were born into an establishment at war with their livelihoods, people in Mamdani’s crowd, to stop them from asking it again.
anonymous • Nov 5, 2025 at 5:11 pm
well said