Quote:
Originally Posted by WideReceiver
Should we be celebrating hard these election wins in such solidly Democratic states? Don’t we expect they’d win big?
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This wasn't just a solidly Democratic state thing. Pennsylvania is as purple as it comes, and the Supreme Court Dems that were up for retention won their votes by over
20 percentage points. There were two Superior Court seats open as well, and the Dem candidates won both of those. In my county (including Pittsburgh) there were 497 total races and Republicans won only
11 of them. Across the state, in Bucks County north of Philly, Dems now hold
every seat in the county for the first time in history. In Clearfield County (DEEP Pennsyltucky), the Dem candidate won a Court of Common Pleas race in a county Trump won by over 50 points last year.
In Mississippi - as far from a Democratic stronghold as you can get - Dems broke the GOP supermajority in their house for the first time since 2019.
Every single county in Virginia moved to the left (including Appalachia).
This wasn't just a defeat for the GOP, this was a demolishing. All manner of Dems won - Mamdani is the face and gets the most headlines, but along with his Dem Socialist platform, Spanberger and Sherrill are much more moderate but still cruised to easy victories.
I'm really, really hoping that the DNC takes a few messages from this:
1)
Youth. We're tired of seeing 75+ year olds running our government into the ground. We want to see our peers as the face of politics.
2) Running the correct candidate in the correct locales. Make no mistake, Mamdani isn't winning in the suburban Midwest. Kamala Harris was a radical liberal socialist to many of those people (I live and work here, I know these people). Mamdani is excellent for New York and can easily win there, but other places need to run more moderate candidates. There is no one perfect candidate for every district/city/state.
3) They cannot cave on the shutdown now. Clearly what Trump is doing is intensely unpopular, and across the board, Dems who were willing to battle back were victorious. People want candidates who will
fight regardless of just where exactly they land on the center-center left-left spectrum.
This is certainly not to say Dems are suddenly way better at campaigning and lots of this is typical buyer's remorse in the off year after a presidential election. Unfortunately a lot of this is just dumb people who voted for Trump (or just stayed home) last November, who are now realizing that when you touch the stove it's pretty damn hot. Sure would be nice if they'd figured that out a year ago, but at this point I'll take any good news I can get, and there was a lot of that yesterday, across a lot of states, and most with commanding margins. I don't think the GOP won a single big race yesterday.
