This week, a major vibe shift took place in American politics. For the first time in an entire year, Democrats got up off the mat. Or maybe: they now have the wind at their backs. There are plenty of other metaphors to choose from, but the reality is that Democrats emerged stronger from the first major election since Donald Trump started his second term, and both Trump and his Republicans emerged weaker.

This sea-change isn't all-encompassing, of course. There just aren't that many offices up for grabs in the odd-numbered off-off-year elections which follow a presidential election. But next year there will be, as the midterms will determine the makeup of the entire House of Representatives and one-third of the United States Senate.

Of course, the standard caveat applies -- a year is an eternity in politics, especially in the Trumpian era. Anything could happen in the meantime. What next year's election hinges upon might be something that nobody sees coming right now.

But if things continue as they have been, then the economy is going to be the big issue that could determine how the midterms turn out -- and Democrats just proved that they've got a winning message while Republicans are stuck with nothing but gaslighting and other bald-faced lies.

Many have pointed out the irony, since Donald Trump now appears stuck in the same trap that ensnared Joe Biden. Biden strove to convince people that the economy wasn't really all that bad -- that things were getting better, according to the numbers. But people didn't feel it. They didn't feel it at the grocery store, they didn't feel it when paying their rent, and they didn't feel it when paying their energy bills. So Biden (and, later, Kamala Harris) lost the argument and appeared out of touch to the voters struggling to make ends meet.

Donald Trump won in large part because he made sweeping promises to fix all of that "on Day One." To be blunt: he hasn't. Almost everything he's done as president has actually made things worse -- and, just like with Biden, people are feeling the pain. And blaming Trump.

Much ink has been spilled over the ideological disparity between the biggest victors from Tuesday night. Two rather moderate Democrats won the governors' offices in New Jersey and Virginia, while a Democratic Socialist won the mayor's office in New York City. But what was striking to us was that all three ran on various flavors of the same issue: affordability. And they offered up (to a varying degree) some very solid ideas for how they were going to deal with the problem.

Which is what the big takeaway from the election was, in our humble opinion. It's not "progressive versus moderate" -- no matter how much that divide is hyped by the pundits. It's not even generational. It is instead boldness versus timidity. That is the real divide within the Democratic Party, and the sooner they realize it the better off they will be.

In New York City, Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani was demonized by his opponents -- some of them from within his own party. He was called every fearmongering name in the book. But the voters weighed all of that against his actual agenda, which was quite bold and forward-looking. Mamdani ran on four big ideas: a rent freeze for rent-controlled apartments. Free and faster bus service. Free child care for every child from six weeks of age up to five years old. And building government-run grocery stores (as a pilot program, which would be very limited at first). To pay for them all, Mamdani wants to (gasp!) tax rich people and corporations a wee bit more.

You can call those ideas "Socialist" or "Marxist" or "Communist" until you are red in the face, but the voters looked at them and weighed them and decided, "That doesn't sound like such a bad idea!" Because Mamdani didn't just promise some gauzy "I will fight for you every day!" future, he instead offered up concrete real-world ideas. He will be judged on the success or failure of those ideas, but they are tangible things that could (if implemented well) actually help people's lives out, in a big way.

Mamdani wasn't the only one. In New Jersey, Governor-Elect Mikie Sherrill promised to tackle high energy prices (which have skyrocketed in the state recently) by freezing the rate the utilities are allowed to charge. Will this work? It's hard to say. Will she even be able to make good on her campaign promise? That remains to be seen. But once again it is a genuine big idea. It is something concrete that she can be judged on later (depending on its success or failure), instead of just some vague politician-speak about "fighting to bring prices down."

That was the real lesson from this election. Part of the big problem the Democratic Party's brand is having right now is that most voters don't know what they stand for. Democrats have been defined by their opponents, and they have largely failed to counter the impression (of being too "woke," for instance) with their own solid political agenda full of big ideas that could help millions of people out right away.

Personally, we think Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin bear a lot of the blame for this. Democrats had a golden chance, during Biden's first two years in office, to implement the same sort of sweeping improvements to government programs that would have been a real sea-change for tens of millions of American families. Biden worked together with Bernie Sanders to come up with this plan, which would have guaranteed free (or affordable) child care and preschool for all of America's children, free college tuition (at least for two-year community colleges), free elder care, and a raft of other programs designed to make people's lives tangibly better. Manchin and Sinema balked, and so the bill had to be watered down (again and again, in fact) so that they'd vote for it. What Biden wound up with was still impressive -- but not nearly as far-reaching as it could have been.

The pundits (and the Republicans) keep insisting that attempting to do these things is somehow "radical" and "far-left" and "too progressive." And the Democratic Party establishment buys into this framing and cowers. Which is precisely what the voters hate -- timidity in the face of big problems. Incremental plans that take forever to be implemented and don't really solve the problem but merely tinker around the edges of it.

In fact, the Democratic establishment -- which is so timid it balked at even supporting their own party's nominee for mayor in New York City -- now resembles nothing so much as what the Republican Party looked like right before Trump launched his hostile takeover. They are floundering around trying to figure out why voters don't like them any more, but they keep retreating into timidity and thoughts of "maybe we should move to the right -- to the center -- and become Republican-lite... maybe that will fix our problems!" They focus-group every single thing that comes out of an establishment Democrat's mouth to the point where they become experts at saying absolutely nothing while turning people off with their stilted mealymouthed vagueness.

Then along comes someone with genuine authenticity and shows them politics is supposed to be done. Like Mamdani.

If Bernie Sanders were perhaps 20 years younger, he might be in a prime position to effectuate the same sort of takeover of the Democratic Party that Donald Trump managed on the other side. Nobody's more authentic than Bernie, after all. But even he realizes he's now too old to be the standard-bearer in 2028.

But the Democrats seem ripe for somebody to achieve this. They are largely rudderless and in dire need of a leader to follow, and that doesn't necessarily mean someone with similar politics as Bernie. But ideally it should be someone with authenticity. Someone who can speak like a normal person, instead of endlessly regurgitating focus-group-speak and platitudes. Someone with a concrete platform that promises: "These are the things that I will get done! Maybe not all of them will work perfectly, but it's certainly worth trying something new, don't you think?"

Such an agenda should be centered around affordability. This is a new way of saying what "It's the economy, stupid" meant, back in the 1990s. The cost of living is crushing American families, and neither party seems all that interested in doing much of anything about it. Donald Trump made sweeping promises, but once he got into office he forgot all about them. While on the campaign trail, Trump promised to lower energy costs by half during his first year in office. While gas prices have recently come down very slightly (after spending the first half of the year almost exactly where they were when Trump took office), the same is not true for electricity prices. Meanwhile, Trump just lies about it. He either confidently tells people that gas is selling for two bucks a gallon in multiple states (spoiler: it isn't), or that we'll all be paying that magic price real soon now.

On grocery prices, Trump is completely incoherent. He apparently just learned the word "groceries" last year, during his campaign, which is astonishing enough -- but not for someone who has lived his entire life in the lap of luxury. He still insists (he repeated it this week) that you have to show a photo I.D. to buy a loaf of bread in a grocery store (spoiler: this is not true and never was). He is, in a word, completely clueless about the process of buying food in a grocery store, likely because he has never actually done so for himself in his entire life. And now he is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of even his own supporters who complain about high prices. Here he is on Fox News, answering a woman who voted for Trump three times and who wrote in a letter stating: "[S]omething has to be done fast. I don't see the best economy right now. Wall Street numbers do not reflect my Main Street money. Please do something, President Trump."

Trump responded by flat-out lying to the woman:

[Donald] Trump, who campaigned on lowering the cost of groceries and called "affordability" a new word earlier in the interview, rejected his supporter's remarks, claiming, "We've got prices way down."

"I do say this. Beef we have to get down. I think of groceries. It's an old-fashioned word, but it's a beautiful word. Beef we have to get down, but we've got prices way down," Trump said, further claiming that energy costs are also already down and "all-encompassing."

"Think of this, energy. [The letter-writer] drives a car, probably, and her energy prices are way down, and energy is so all-encompassing, it's so big that when energy comes down, everything comes down. Everything follows it," he continued.

Here is Trump attempting the same gaslighting, from an interview aired last weekend:

In some ways, Mr. Trump is in the unenviable position that Democrats were in a year ago, urging voters not to believe their own eyes -- or wallets -- when it comes to the economy.

"We have no inflation," Mr. Trump insisted on 60 Minutes on Sunday. (There is inflation.)

"Our groceries are down," he said. (Grocery prices are up.)

"No, we're in great shape," Mr. Trump pushed back at another point in the interview. "This country is in great shape. We're ready to really rock."

Polls show voters feel otherwise.

"People aren't dumb," Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said in an interview. "They know prices aren't going down."

Two years ago, polling showed Republicans with a 20-point edge on the economy. Now they are tied with Democrats on the issue. For Trump, the problem is even worse:

Only 30 percent of voters believe Mr. Trump has lived up to their expectations for tackling inflation and the cost of living, according to a recent NBC News poll, his lowest mark for any issue asked. And a meager 27 percent of voters in a CNN poll in late October said Mr. Trump's policies had improved the country's economic conditions -- less than half of those who thought he had made matters worse.

Trump is vulnerable on the issue, since he has either done nothing or made things worse (with his trade war tariffs). He is underwater in the polls, according to Nate Silver, by an average of over 17 points on both the economy and trade. And he is down a whopping 30 points on inflation. The polling on inflation is all pretty close to being 2-to-1 against Trump on the issue. That is an enormous vulnerability, and that is precisely why Democrats concentrating on affordability is so potent right now. And Trump is so tone-deaf and out of touch on the issue it's almost cartoonish:

[Donald] Trump's own meandering focus on the economy has given plenty of fodder to Democrats. He tore down the East Wing for a new ballroom, lavishly remodeled the Lincoln bathroom, paved over the Rose Garden for a patio like the one at Mar-a-Lago and threw a Great Gatsby-esque Halloween party with the theme "a little party never killed nobody" during a government shutdown and on the eve of cuts to food assistance.

Today, Trump filed an emergency appeal so that he could go ahead with his plan to starve over 40 million poor Americans who get SNAP food aid -- because a judge ruled that he had to pay the benefits in full, even with the government shutdown. As we said, this is all so blatant it is downright cartoonish -- all Trump needs is a thin little villain's mustache to twirl, really.

Some Republicans, after Tuesday night's Democratic blowout, are beginning to realize the pickle Trump has now put them in. By all rights, we should be reading headlines screaming "Republicans In Disarray!" (but of course, we aren't). Trump is either ignoring affordability issues or actively making them worse, while living in a delusional fantasyland where "groceries" is some old-fashioned word that nobody ever uses anymore and prices have gone way, way down (just because he is president). He's never going to admit he was wrong (about his tariffs, for instance), and he's never going to face the reality of life for millions of his own supporters. Republicans have to somehow thread the needle of addressing the biggest issue Democrats have right now without angering Trump or coming up with any policies that contradict what he's been doing. That's a pretty tough needle to thread, you have to admit. Here's an immediate example, from today's news:

Rep. Elise Stefanik, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump and a member of House Republican leadership, announced Friday that she is running for New York governor, pledging in a video to make the state "affordable and safe."

The narrator of the video attacks New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) as "the worst governor in America" and says Stefanik is "a courageous leader ready for the fight" to turn the state around.

The video makes no mention of Trump, whom Stefanik has fiercely championed in recent years. Both in the video and in a subsequent interview on Fox News, Stefanik focused heavily on the issue of affordability -- a theme for Democrats who prevailed in elections Tuesday in New York City, New Jersey and Virginia.

So look for Republicans to start echoing the word "affordability" -- without offering anything tangible that could possibly contradict Donald Trump. Good luck with that!

And hopefully (oh, please, please, please... hopefully!) Democrats will counter with not just "I will fight for you every day" nonsense, but with actual, concrete, and very bold plans to improve daily life for millions of Americans. Because, as we just saw Tuesday night, that is the winning ticket for them, period.

 

We have two Honorable Mention awards to hand out before we get to the main one this week.

Representative and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi announced this week that she would not be seeking re-election next year. This was monumental news in San Francisco, since Pelosi has been an institution there for over four decades now. But after being instrumental in convincing Joe Biden to abandon his bid for re-election due to his advanced age, it would have been hypocritical of Pelosi to follow in the footsteps of Senator Dianne Feinstein, who stayed in office long past when she should have, and never stepped down at all (she died while in office). Pelosi, who is 85 years old, would have been 88 by the time the next congressional term ended, so it was definitely time for her to think about retirement.

Pelosi will be missed, of course, and will go down in American political history as one of the strongest and most effective speakers of the House ever. The only question remaining is whether her daughter Christine will attempt to run for her mother's seat, which would not just continue the Pelosi dynasty, but continue a political dynasty that reaches back to her father, Thomas D'Alesandro in Baltimore, Maryland. But whomever takes Pelosi's seat will have some awfully big stiletto heels to step into (so to speak).

Also worth an Honorable Mention is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who has done a fairly admirable job of holding his caucus together throughout the government shutdown, and today countered Republicans with an offer to solve the crisis with his own plan (which would extend the Obamacare subsidies for another year, among other things). Schumer isn't the most animated politician around, but he has done a good job leading the Democrats through this whole crisis and deserves recognition for that alone.

But our Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week goes to all the big winners of this week's off-off-year elections: New Jersey Governor-Elect Mikie Sherrill (who beat expectations that it would be a close race and won by an impressive 13 points), Virginia Governor-Elect Abigail Spanberger (who also chalked up a better-than-expected 14-point victory), and of course New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani (who got just over 50 percent, so he can claim a solid mandate from the voters). California Governor Gavin Newsom wasn't on the ballot himself in the Golden State, but his brainchild ballot initiative to redistrict the state to counter Texas doing so mid-decade passed in an absolute landslide, so he deserves the award for taking the political risk (and for levelling the playing field in a big way for the midterm House races).

Democrats had a great night Tuesday. It was a blowout all around. They improved their margins from past elections (both the 2024 presidential election and the past gubernatorial elections) in dramatic ways -- especially (in New Jersey) among Latinos. This is what is putting the wind at all other Democrats' backs, heading into the midterm campaign season.

Well done all around, with a shoutout to every voter everywhere who was part of such a spectacular Election Day for Democrats. For the first time in a year, a shining ray of optimism is beaming down on the Democratic Party once again. It's hard to even overstate how meaningful that is and is going to be for the next year.

[It'd probably be best to wait until all of these folks are sworn into office, so you can congratulate them on their new official webpages, to let them know you appreciate their efforts. Or you can look up their campaign sites (which we do not link to as a general rule here, sorry).]

 

We have to hand out two Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week awards this week, both for exactly the same reason.

Neither one of New York's senators -- Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand -- wound up endorsing Zohran Mamdani. That is pathetic. Mamdani won the Democratic primary and by doing so routed the comeback attempt of another political dynasty, as he soundly defeated Andrew Cuomo. Then Mamdani went ahead and soundly defeated Cuomo again in the general election.

In doing so, Mamdani energized young voters and disaffected voters and progressive voters in a huge way. He won two-thirds of voters under 45, for example. His campaign centered on some very blue-collar issues, as is evidenced by the impressive victory speech he gave (where he talked about their concerns almost exclusively).

Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are exactly the demographic groups that Democrats need to do better with, if they want to regain power in Washington. So it was indeed pathetic that neither Gillibrand nor Schumer could bring themselves to endorse the nominee of their own party for New York City mayor.

[Contact Senator Chuck Schumer on his Senate contact page, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand on her Senate contact page, to let them know what you think of their actions.]

 

Volume 819 (11/7/25)

Some of these talking points are directed not so much at the public as at Democratic politicians. Because with a blowout election at their backs, perhaps a few of them can be convinced that being bold is a lot more effective than being timid. Hey, it's worth a try, right?

 

   It's going to happen anyway...

Sound advice for all Democrats, really.

"You know what? Far too many Democrats are far too afraid of being called a 'socialist' or 'Marxist' or whatever rightwingers use as their go-to demonization word. But it really doesn't matter what Democrats stand for or run on because they are going to do this anyway. You can be timid and hope that the mean ol' Republicans don't call you a name, or you can be bold and support new and creative ideas to help people out, but either way they're still going to call you the same names. So here's an idea -- stop being so afraid of it! If you give voters solid ideas to vote for, they're not going to care what labels the opposition uses, they're going to support you at the ballot box. That's a key takeaway from Tuesday's election."

 

   Universal free child care sounds pretty good

Case in point...

"Democrats should be championing bold ideas that actually help average Americans, and they shouldn't do so in some half-assed incrementalist fashion. Run on universal free child care! It not only worked for Zohran Mamdani, but the entire state of New Mexico just implemented free child care for everyone -- and you know what? The sky did not fall! This is an enormous financial burden for parents everywhere, and lifting that burden will change tens of millions of families' lives for the better. Republicans will say it's too expensive, but they never seem to say that when offering trillions of dollars in tax cuts to rich people, do they? It's just a matter of getting your priorities straight, and for Democrats, removing the burden of having to pay enormous amounts for child care from struggling parents is a much higher priority than saving rich folks some tax money."

 

   Welcome back, Latino voters!

This is already making some Republicans quake in their boots -- and it should.

"You know what the biggest demographic shift was in Tuesday's elections? Latino voters coming back to the Democratic Party. Donald Trump managed to convince a lot of Latinos to vote for him last time around, but a whole bunch of them are disgusted with what he's done in office. Trump said he'd fix inflation and price hikes -- and he has only made things worse. He said he'd only deport murderers and rapists and violent criminals, but instead he is rounding up every brown person he can find -- including abuelas and school children and gardeners and mechanics and construction workers who are not criminals at all. And now Latino voters are saying to themselves: 'This is not what we voted for!' Latino voters may very well be the key to winning next year's midterms, so as a Democrat I'd like to say: 'Welcome back!' The Republicans from Trump on down have shown how little they care for you and your families, and how every brown person they see equals some sort of criminal to them. Democrats don't see Latinos this way, which is why so many of them are now having second thoughts."

 

   Trump is making electricity prices soar

Hit this one hard.

"As you and your family see your electricity prices keep going up and up and up, think to yourself which would be the smarter thing to do: build more electricity-generating facilities or build fewer? Because Donald Trump is waging a war on solar and wind energy projects and cancelling them left and right. Why? I have no idea. But you better believe that this is only going to make things worse in the future, because all that generating capacity will not be coming online to help get prices back down. Trump is aiding and abetting a shortage of electrical production for no reason at all. It's really the stupidest possible thing he could do, and you should remember that every time you look at your monthly power bill. Instead of making things better, Trump is actively making the situation worse."

 

   Clueless!

Again, hit Trump hard, because he deserves it so much.

"Donald Trump is trying the old 'Who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?' bit, when it comes to inflation. He keeps insisting that prices have come way down, just like he promised. But he's lying to you! How would he know what paying grocery bills is like? He only learned the word 'groceries' about a year ago, and he still has no clue -- the man has probably never been in a grocery store in his entire life! He has no idea what all his tariffs and trade wars are doing to the price of coffee... or beef... or anything else families have to buy to survive. Every time he swears that prices are way, way down he just proves how clueless and out of touch he truly is. So you know what? I'm going to believe my own eyes at the checkout stand instead of listening to Trump's lies -- because he either just does not know what the reality is for people like you and me, or he just doesn't care."

 

   Trump sinking in the polls

This one is specifically designed to make other Republicans worry.

"It's no wonder that Donald Trump is sinking in the polls. His job approval rating is dipping below 40 percent in poll after poll, and that's not even the worst of his numbers. He's below water on just about every individual issue there is -- even immigration. And now fully two-thirds of Americans disapprove of how he is making inflation worse. Trump keeps insisting that the fantasyland in his head is true -- where his poll numbers are 'higher than ever' -- but in the real world more and more people are turning away from him in disgust. Sooner or later other Republican politicians are going to have a choice to make: either tie yourself to Trump's sinking approval ratings, or flee the sinking ship and start standing up to Trump -- for their own political survival."

 

   Point-blank range!

And we saved the best one for last....

"Did you see that the 'sandwich guy' was found not guilty this week? Trump's Justice Department is being run by people who play lawyers on television, and that's going about as well as you'd expect it to. A man protesting the militarization of the streets of Washington D.C. by throwing his salami sandwich at one of the full-battle-gear federal agents had his trial this week. The Justice Department raided his apartment with a huge 20-person goon squad -- which was totally unnecessary and only happened to make a video so Trump could brag about it -- and then the made-for-teevee federal attorney tried to convince a grand jury to bring him up on felony assault charges. They refused to. So they brought him up on misdemeanor charges instead. During his trial the Justice Department laughably said they were prosecuting him because 'he was recorded throwing a sandwich at a federal officer at point-blank range.' A sandwich! I had no idea there was such a thing as 'point-blank range' for a sandwich, did you? Thankfully, the jury in the trail quickly brought back a strong 'not guilty' verdict, and the sandwich guy went free. The entire episode was nothing more than a bad episode of the Keystone Kops, folks. And a gigantic waste of your tax dollars, to boot."

-- Chris Weigant

 

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Cross-posted at: Democratic Underground