It’s my first effort at a Substack video post. Please let me know in the comments what you think. In the future, I’ll probably keep the videos a little shorter but there is a lot to say today. (Note: The audio quality isn’t good here and I suspect that the system switched to the microphone on my camera rather than my studio mic and I’ll try to make sure the audio is better next time.)
Below are some more thoughts and detail of my analysis of Tuesday’s elections. It’s not a transcript of the video though obviously some of the material is the same.
—
In elections yesterday, the big races went for Dems…but so did the small races.
In New Jersey, Mikei Sherrill won by 13 points in a race where the Real Clear Politics polling average had her up by just over 3 points and no poll in the past month had her up by more than 7 over Republican Jack Ciattarelli who did 5 points worse this time than he did four years ago.
In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger won by 14 points where the polling average had her up by 10.
A communist anti-Semite will be the next mayor of New York, Proposition 50, which was entirely a referendum on Donald Trump, won by a massive margin, roughly 64% to 36%.
A truly disgusting and unaccomplished nepo baby named Jay Jones unseated the Republican incumbent in the Virginia attorney general race despite the unearthing of texts in which he daydreamed about killing a Republican legislator and about that Republican’s children dying in their mother’s arms. He also wished that more police officers would get killed…and this is a guy running for the state’s top law enforcement job. And he won by 6.5 points, far more than the polling suggested.
And in the Virginia House of Delegates, Democrats took a significant majority, defending all their vulnerable incumbents and taking out a bunch of vulnerable Republicans. To understand the scale here, Democrats currently have a 51-48 majority but after this election will have something close to 65 seats.
Virginia is a slightly special case, being more impacted than any other state except possibly Maryland by the government shutdown and DOGE cuts. Also, only once in the last 50 years has Virginia elected a governor of the same party as the president, so now that record is 12 out of the past 13. And as far as I can tell, every single county in Virginia moved at least 5 percentage points toward Democrats as compared to 2024 presidential results.
Here in Colorado, it was a blue tsunami…again. Republicans got swept away in the Aurora city council and union-backed candidates won every school board race that I’ve looked at so far, including Denver, Douglas County, and Cherry Creek. And the ridiculous propositions LL and MM won easily, further raising taxes to support an insane program to give “free” school lunches to middle-class and rich kids, because low-income kids already got free school lunch. The proposed overturning of Denver’s ban on flavored tobacco and vape products failed so the ban will stay in place. I have yet to find an election in Colorado where a Republican candidate in a truly contested race or limited government position on a ballot measure succeeded. It was an utter wipeout in a state that has precious few Republican office holders remaining outside of rural areas and a couple of conservative suburban pockets.
In Georgia for the first time in 25 years, a Democrat – actually two Democrats – won seats on that state’s Public Utilities Commission. That’s a much bigger message than you may think for a race you probably think is nearly irrelevant.
In Pennsylvania, three Democratic State Supreme Court justices whose retention in office was being challenged each held office with 61% of the vote.
In California, Proposition 50 which was entirely a referendum about President Trump won with almost 64% of the vote, much more than prior polling suggested even though did already look likely to pass easily.
There are a few takeaways here but they all end up at the same place: Democratic voters and others who are willing to vote for Democrats are angry and motivated. Republican enthusiasm is down. MAGA voters do not turn out for anyone other than Donald Trump. Unaffiliated voters are disappointed in Trump. Trump drives all elections which shows why it’s such a big risk for Republicans to run in a general election by tying themselves to Trump; it’s a tough spot, though because they may need to do just that to win a primary. Meanwhile, Trump’s favorability numbers are the worst they’ve been during this term of his presidency as are the right-track/wrong-track numbers, now about a net negative 19 in the Real Clear Politics average.
If you are looking for a glimmer of good news for Republicans this morning, I’d point you to one, and only one, and it’s a thin reed for Republicans but here goes:
At the moment, the Democratic Party overall is polling as even more unpopular than Republicans. By quite a lot actually. And the big elections from yesterday were in blue states and one of the bluest cities. So it’s not as if the Democratic brand is strong. And yet, everywhere I can see Democrats not only won but outperformed all the polling.
Why? Sure, lots of people despise Donald Trump but I think we’re getting to more than that now. Trump ran on two main issues: the open border and the cost of living. He’s succeeded tremendously on controlling the border but much of the public outside of the Trump base has serious concerns about how aggressive the government is being deporting illegal aliens who appear not to have committed crimes while in the country. Deporting landscapers and restaurant workers and guys looking for work out front of Home Depot. I’m not looking to debate whether those people should be deported; just talking about the political impact of those images.
But more importantly by far is the cost of living. It’s not just that Trump has not reduced it; it’s not even that it keeps going up, though that’s a big deal. It’s that he seems entirely focused on everything else, whether immigration or political retribution or foreign policy, the latter of which is important but mostly not why people voted for him and certainly not what the quasi-isolationist MAGA base voted for. Part of the reason Democrats lost so badly in 2024 is that they continually lied about inflation and told us to believe them rather than what we saw for ourselves at the supermarket or when buying a car or trying to afford housing. We know how much things cost and it’s glaringly obvious when politicians tell us something we know isn’t true. Yet Trump is making the same mistake, constantly saying that grocery prices are coming down when they absolutely aren’t. They keep going higher. We see it, we know it, we feel it.
To be clear, there’s not a lot a president can do about getting grocery prices down but that’s what makes it dangerous to campaign on saying you will and doubly dangerous to say you actually did.
And beyond grocery prices, there’s the price of so many other things…imported things…that Trump has imposed tariffs on. Illegally, in my opinion, and the Supreme Court is actually taking up that case today. But separate from the legality, many voters understand that tariffs are just a form of sales tax and that, despite Trump’s non-stop lies, they’re paid by Americans not by foreigners. So in Trump’s most public economic policy, he is explicitly raising the cost of living. People won’t care that Trump claims that there are beneficial results of this with bringing back American jobs, whatever that means in a nation that already has low unemployment, if they can’t afford Christmas presents or new tools or food or to buy a new house that costs so much more due to metal and lumber tariffs.
Tuesday’s election results should have Republicans very very afraid and Democrats overjoyed. I don’t care much about either party but to the extent that I support policies of limited government intrusion into our lives and limited government spending and removing the malign influence of unions, especially teachers unions, Tuesday was a disaster. And, frankly, it’s hard to see it getting much better for Republicans. This is a wakeup call for the GOP but Trump is a guy who never hears that phone ring and I don’t expect him to change anything he does or says. The question now becomes whether Republican candidates, in an effort to save their own political skins, start distancing themselves, at least a little, from him. After all, the Republican candidates for governor in both New Jersey and Virginia both ran explicitly tying themselves to Trump and they both got stomped. There’s a lot of soul-searching going on among Republicans right now and a lot of dancing and celebrating for Democrats.
