This week’s election results should terrify Republicans

It’s been a real treat to sit back and take in all the reactions, commentary and general sense of joy on the left after last week’s trouncing of Republicans in off-year elections around the country. The GOP got, as former President Obama once said about his own midterm losses, “a shellacking.”

Prop. 50, California’s play to neuter President Trump’s attempts to advantage his party in the midterms next year? Passed in a landslide. A Democratic woman for New Jersey governor? Mikie Sherrill won by more than 13 points. And in Virginia? Abigail Spanberger won by more than 14 points.

And how about New York City, which swept democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani into the mayor’s mansion? Fear-mongering and Islamophobia from Republicans, and even fellow Democrats like the vanquished former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, did not stop 1 million New Yorkers from embracing Mamdani’s left-wing politics and promise of a more equitable, affordable future.

“I finally feel like there is light at the end of this horrible tunnel,” my very Democratic stepdaughter texted me after Tuesday’s results came in.

It’s not as if what voters say they want has changed. Trump earned a second term vowing to whip inflation and lower the cost of living. Voters still want that; Trump has simply failed to deliver. And the backlash is happening in places you’d least expect it.

“We’re getting calls about polls being closed,” Kentucky’s Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams posted Tuesday on X. “They are closed because we do not have elections today. Kentucky votes next year. You cannot vote today in Kentucky for the mayor of New York City or the Governor of Virginia. Sorry.” (In a subsequent post, he mused about the importance of civics education.)

Trump promised to deport criminals who are here illegally, but has instead unleashed a reign of terror on brown-skinned working-class people. He promised to lower grocery prices and instead has allowed SNAP benefits to end for the poorest Americans, while destroying the East Wing to make way for a grandiose ballroom, tarting up the White House with gold flourishes in the style of Louis XVI and throwing a Great Gatsby Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, complete with scantily clad women frolicking in oversize champagne coupes. Let them eat well-done steak!

Tuesday night also delivered a spanking to House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose channeling of TV’s Sgt. Schultz (“I see nothing, I know nothing”), has transcended the absurd and now verges on abdication. Johnson’s continuing refusal to seat newly elected Democratic Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva, who can provide the final vote needed to release the Epstein files, reeks of obstruction. As Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear put it: “There’s not a political advantage to not doing your job. And the people of the United States are watching.”

As the government shutdown grinds on with no end in sight, it’s worth reminding Republicans that if they can’t keep the government open without the votes of at least five more Democratic senators to overcome the filibuster, then perhaps it is time to sit down and negotiate over the Obamacare subsidies that Democrats want to extend. Republicans thought they could refuse to negotiate with Democrats, then watch them fold under public pressure. But that ain’t happening. Most Americans blame the president’s party for the current state of affairs.

Perhaps Trump should take his own advice. As he once told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.”

The week’s most exhilarating news — for some of us, anyway — is that the new mayor-elect of New York is a Uganda-born, Muslim democratic socialist who has promised to freeze rents, provide free childcare, free city bus service and create city-run grocery stores, none of which is particularly revolutionary and all of which have been tried in different cities. To pay for those things, he has proposed raising taxes on millionaires by 2%.

Mamdani, a 34-year-old millennial whose striking orange-and-blue campaign logo would not look out of place on the cover of a superhero comic book, has made the word “affordability” his own. Gen Z voters flocked to him — 78% according to exit polls — galvanized by his politics and moved by his Obamaesque rhetoric.

Wall Street’s moguls campaigned hard against him, including hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who spent more than $2 million in vain to elect Cuomo. “He’s spending more money against me than I would even tax him,” Mamdani noted on a recent episode of the “Flagrant” podcast hosted by Andrew Schulz.

But the billionaires’ campaign against Mamdani backfired, and they are now changing their tune. As a New York Times reader wrote in a letter to the editor, “The hostility of elites became his momentum.”

Republicans have struggled, sometimes comically, to find a silver lining in their losses this week.

Republican U.S. Rep Lisa McClain of Michigan told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Republican turnout was low because Republican voters are so happy with the status quo.

“Using that argument,” Tapper replied, “your voters could be so happy that the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives next year.”

Fingers crossed.

Bluesky: @rabcarian
Threads: @rabcarian