Tuesday was a resounding victory for Democrats

It's foolish to take any one election night's results and call it a trend. That's something that pundits do, and you never, ever want to be lumped in with them. What would your mother think? How could you face her? "If all your friends jumped off a bridge into Pundit Lake, would you jump too?" That's what she would ask, when she heard. "Why didn't you jump into Leech Lake instead? Are you afraid of relationships?" she would ask, and that would be the start of a two hour argument.

And it'd be your fault, because you just had to try and cherrypick trends from one night's worth of election data.

Ahem. That said, there was a hell of a lot of good news for Democrats Tuesday night. Anti-Trump sentiment bent elections from coast to coast, almost without exception, and turnout was enormous. California's Prop 50, the state's in-kind response to Republican gerrymandering in Texas, won with crushing numbers. Colorado voted to fund universal school meals by limiting tax deductions for wealthy filers, something that people with basic decency call "basic decency" and which people without basic decency call "socialism."

Gubernatorial victories for Democrats in Virginia and New Jersey were expected, but were much stronger than expected. It turns out that large-scale and incompetently run purges of federal workers are not popular—who knew?—and that voters seem equally skeptical of everything else Donald Trump is doing.

Now that is a wave election. If you have pundit friends, first of all shame on you and second of all you might show them that chart because I've noticed that the higher pundits rise in stature and pay, the more unclear they become about what is or isn't a "wave election." Democrats also scored a string of upset wins in Georgia, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

What didn't show up last night was the frothing anti-trans base that Republicans like Virginia gubernatorial candidate Earle-Sears attempted to wish into being. Earle-Sears staked a good portion of her campaign on anti-trans rhetoric, and at least for this one night, it appears to have gotten her approximately nothing.

The capper of election night, of course, was Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral race. Turnout was massive, and Mamdani cruised to victory with over one million votes while topping 50% in the three-person race. It wasn't close.

And that is significant, because Republicans, some Democrats, and an extraordinarily hostile national media all claimed that Mamdani was everything Democrats could not possibly be. He is Muslim; he says "socialism" without sneering; worst, Mamdani campaigned on making life better for New Yorkers, a concept so foreign to American campaigns that moderate Democrats expressed scorn, chastising him for getting Americans' hopes up.

Mamdani's campaign and victory is so significant because it was a clear-cut test of conventional wisdoms and of the reach of media propaganda. There were three factions vying for power: Progressives, represented by Mamdani. Conservatives, represented by the appropriately bizarre Curtis Sliwa. And Andrew Cuomo, represented by Andrew Cuomo. Or more accurately, Cuomo represented ...

The Aristocrats.

I'm not even being glib. Cuomo's refusal to tolerate defeat in the Democratic primary and his subsequent launch of an independent candidacy was, in every form and detail, a test of oligarchic powers in America. Cuomo, a former New York governor who got that job by being the son of a previous New York governor, resigned in disgrace only a few years ago after being accused of a history of being a workplace sex pest. His independent campaign was funded by the wealthy and by unending slobbering media coverage, because it was exceedingly important to national oligarchs and powerbrokers that Zohran Mamdani's promises to improve American lives by giving regular Americans more and wealthy Americans less be buried, buried as deep as the owning classes could possibly dig.

The Cuomo campaign was an excellent test of whether Trumpism can be transferred to leader figures who are not Trump. He is a boorish but well-connected figure who embraced racism, showed no particular competence, and who was driven out of public life by Me Too testimonials. The argument of the wealthy and their owned media channels was that because Democratic voters had voted wrong, it was up to Cuomo's fellow disgraced power-hungry rich sex pests to put their man in office whether voters liked it or not, for America.

Didn't work. It did show that there was an appetite among a third of even New Yorkers to be ruled by whoever's name seemed most familiar, which is depressing, but the Cuomo campaign was a test of whether the American aristocracy could install an ass of their choosing using the Trump method of "because shut up, that's why" approach, and it didn't work.

That is a relief. The country is not quite as ready to embrace aristocratic sociopaths as Trump's own reelection may have suggested; there still seems to be something about Trump, in particular, that allows his voters to ignore scandals ranging from financial felonies to alleged sex trafficking and more-likely-than-not treason but which doesn't yet translate to a wider movement.

Mamdani's campaign was explicitly anti-Trump; Cuomo tried to play all sides. Mamdani was an aggressive defender of LGBTQ+ Americans; while other campaigns sought to demonize those Americans, Mamdani marched with them.

During a time of great stress for New York, Mamdani's campaign became a beacon for activists looking to put themselves into the anti-Trump, anti-authoritarian fight. And he made it fun, because the whole of his campaign was based on love for the city, and love for its people, and a promise to defend it all from the gaudy assholes trying to take it away.

It will be interesting to see what exit polling shows, after the numbers have been made presentable, but it's hard to find counterarguments to the theory that last night was not predominantly a nationwide anti-Trump, anti-Republican referendum.

That, too, makes perfect sense. Before Trump's reelection, voters either had no idea what his campaign promises were or simply didn't believe that he'd do those things. Americans tend to vote for strong perceived leaders rather than for particular policies, which is why attempts to micromanage policy positions that most voters will never hear of is both goofy and damaging.

Trump voters turned out to vote for him when national media and wealth was manipulating the information environment so brazenly that it was impossible to tell what the "Trump" agenda was. Now that they have seen what the Trump and Republican agenda is, and it turns out to be a string of batshit crazy things that's harming them in multiple nasty ways, not even wealth and a pro-fascist media can cover it up. There is a limit.

It's difficult to get voters to care about promises for what the future might hold. Voters don't always know what they might like, but when something bad happens to them, personally, they're pretty sure they don't like that.

Whether that will carry over to next year's midterm elections is unknown, because we don't know how far the economy will have crashed. But tonight's results might have a more immediate benefit: Faced with all the signs of a wave election, Republican-dominated states may now balk at further gerrymandering efforts meant to capture House control in 2026 no matter how badly Trump has screwed things up.

The problem with gerrymandering is that there's risk to it. In trying to invent new Republican congressional districts, Republicans have to shove more Republican voters into those districts by moving those voters out of "safe" Republican seats. That turns a once swing district into a captured partisan one—but weakens party control over whichever districts those partisans were moved from.

Typically, that doesn't cause much concern. If you move enough Republican voters out of a district to cause it to drop from a 15 point Republican win to a 12 point one, during any average election, that's still a safe Republican seat and the "excess" Republican votes can be safely shoved somewhere else.

Current Republican gerrymanders throughout the states, however, are largely premised on taking those previous gerrymanders and squeezing down the margins of "excess" votes more dangerously. Perhaps the now 12-point Republican district gets bled into becoming a 7-point one: That frees up a lot of Republican votes that can then be used to stuff a once-Democratic or once-swing seat.

But what happens in a wave election? What happens during an 8-point Republican-to-Democrat national shift? All of those newly bled districts with Republican incumbents get wiped out, that's what happens. And that's how Congress might flip from a bare Republican majority to a crushing Democratic one: Republican gerrymandering attempts are premised on finding "safe" districts to pull votes out of, and if incumbents suddenly have reason to believe their districts aren't nearly as "safe" as they thought they were a week ago, they're going to chicken out. They're going to chicken out hard.

So we'll see. But there's potential upsides here for Democrats; that, in turn, likely means that Trump and his pro-sedition anti-democracy fascist ratbastard minions are going to crank up attempts to nullify Democratic votes outright and otherwise lawsuit their way into victories no matter how Americans vote.

There are some warning flags for Democrats in last night's results as well, though it's unclear if it's due to the vagaries of local politics or bodes something more dire. Even as Mamdani was painting New York City with the tears of his opponents, Democrats got themselves squished in nearby locales:

Ouch.

The background there is instructive. First, the New York Democratic Party remains an absolute garbage fire; the party seems more bent on electing Republicans than Republicans themselves are. Jay Jacobs has presided over attempts to sell the party on "moderate" values, following the playbook of every centrist pundit who insists that Americans don't want "anti-Trump" leaders, they want centrists who will work with Republicans to do reasonable centrist things that mostly amount to not pissing off the wealthy and not promising anything in particular to anyone else.

That's the approach many Democratic strategists have been insisting the party follow. Well, New York Democrats leaned into it hard, and they got plastered. Absolutely wrecked, even as Mamdani was celebrating his victory just next door.

So then: What can we take from that? Is it just a New York thing? Is it dangerous to read too much into this, when we know there are pockets of the Northeast that think Trumpism's promise of American aristocracy sounds damn good?

It's hard to say, but there sure seems to be a lesson inherent in a "democratic socialist" cleaning the clock of his aristocratic opponent while moderate, focused-grouped campaigns collapse. Probably.

All in all, though, tonight was a spectacular denunciation of Trumpism and of Republican fecklessness and enablement. We can't say it means a damn thing for the election still 12 months off, but at least for the moment it looks like American voters want leaders who will fight Trump tooth and nail, not ones that go hide in a corner while the man knocks down a third of the White House to build a tacky golden ballroom.