Democratic performance in off-year elections demonstrates Trump and MAGA's weakness
Description
Last week’s elections across multiple states were the first true measure of Republicans’ and Democrats’ relative political fortunes one year into the dismal era of Trump II. Against the expectations of many pundits, and likely against the hopes and fears of many of the candidates themselves, Democrats over-performed in contests throughout the country. From marquee gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey to school board contests in Pennsylvania and Colorado, Democratic candidates notched unexpected victories and more-than-respectable margins. The Washington Post gave a good sense of the momentousness:
In Georgia, Democrats ousted two Republicans on the Public Service Commission, the party’s first capture of a nonfederal statewide office in Georgia since 2006. In Connecticut, Democrats took control of 28 towns from the GOP. In New Jersey, Democrats won their biggest majority in the General Assembly since the Watergate era.
[. . .]
In the [Pennsylvania] race for Bucks County district attorney, Democrat Joe Khan ousted incumbent Republican Jennifer Schorn by 54 percent to 46 percent, becoming the first Democrat since the 19th century to win the office.
And according to polling expert G. Elliott Morris, there “was a directional shift toward Democrats in 99.8% of counties that held partisan elections” — a simply astounding move in the party’s favor following a 2024 election that showed widespread and dispiriting moves towards Trump even in Democratic strongholds.
The most important immediate consequence of these widespread Democratic wins is that they’ve re-calibrated the perspective of many political observers and millions of ordinary citizens regarding the popularity, influence, and power of the Trump administration. For the past year, Donald Trump has ruled in an increasingly lawless fashion, with he and his advisors barely hiding their intention to transform the president into a dictatorial and dominant figure not only over U.S. politics, but over the U.S. economy and society. The defeat of GOP candidates across the country represented a massively dour public judgment of the second Trump presidency to date. Never in our lifetimes has a party been so identified in the public imagination with its leader; never in our lifetimes has a president so thoroughly re-made an entire party in his own image. It strains credulity that many voters were not thinking of the president and his domination of the GOP, even when they voted in purely local elections.
Moreover, the election results jive with polling that had shown the president’s approval rating slipping to levels not seen since the January 6 insurrection; for instance, a recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll showed only 41% approval and a whopping 59% disapproval of Trump’s performance. And as Republicans would be quick to point out and Democrats hard-pressed to deny, this sweep is hardly due to a sudden resurgence of public faith in the Democratic Party, whose approval ratings are even lower than the president’s.
These results should dispatch the false notion that anything like a majority of Americans is on board with Trump’s lawlessness and corruption, or supports his handling of the economy. And they provide further validation that the 2024 election was no mass public endorsement of authoritarian politics, far-right conservatism, and white supremacy, but was what it seemed far likelier to be: a narrow victory propelled by a die-hard MAGA base, and augmented by voters enraged by inflation and disillusioned with a Democratic president who failed to bring economic stability to their lives (and who broke faith with them by concealing vital information about his physical and intellectual deterioration). In 2024, millions of Americans wanted life to return to a mythical pre-pandemic idyll, and ultimately enough of them did not believe Joe Biden’s own vice president could credibly deliver this.
But now, those who were overly credulous of a permanent new right-wing coalition that supposedly included substantial numbers of former Democratic voters, and who advised self-defeating policy changes for the party, have been left with egg on their faces. In state after state, demographics that had seen significant shifts in Trump’s direction in 2024 saw rapid shifts in the opposite direction: in particular, Latino voters and non-college minorities all demonstrated not long-term fealty to MAGA, but at least a willingness to change votes in response to their appraisals and feelings regarding political and economic reality. This is not to say that the Democrats can or should take these voters for granted — quite the opposite — but that there is a path forward for earning and retaining their loyalty in future elections.
The worst possible Democratic response to these off-year elections would be to conclude that passively letting Trump make mistakes and defeat himself has somehow been vindicated as the optimal policy, to double-down on talking only about kitchen table issues, and to de-emphasize Trump’s lawlessness. As Greg Sargent writes at New Republic, the economic mismanagement and authoritarianism simply can’t be separated from each other:
Trump’s tariffs, his killing of the tunnel project [between New Jersey and New York], his potentially illegal federal-worker firings, his DOGE bloodbath, and more show that the economic carnage he’s unleashed is inseparable from his consolidation of autocratic power. Democrats can say these things are bad because they’re both authoritarian abuses of power and have terrible economic consequences, while vowing to stand up to that lawlessness—and do well with the working class.
Crucially, politicos did not simply leave it to voters to intuit this connection on their own; as Sargent details, gubernatorial candidates Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey also made this case in advertisements and on the stump.
It also seems quite credible, on the level of basic common sense, that it wasn’t just economic issues that led Latino voters in particular to turn away from Trump and MAGA in last week’s elections. Donald Trump’s election-year vows to implement mass deportation programs have proven all too real — and their excesses have shown that the administration has little care for whether ICE agents violate the civil rights of Latino citizens in their sinister zeal to racially purify the nation. Before his election, voters could credibly believe that Trump would focus on high-priority undocumented immigrants like those with criminal records; the past year should have disabused them of this lie.
Those in the Democratic Party who have urged the party to keep its head down in the face of authoritarianism and to hope that Trump eventually somehow destroys himself, to focus on narrow “kitchen table issues,” or even to shift further towards a supposed “middle” to capture some of the supposed right-wing cultural swing of the electorate, have utterly misjudged our political situation. Americans have not missed the big picture of the Trump administration — the economic mayhem, the in-your-face corruption, the psychotic attempt to send troops into American cities — and when given a chance to make their voice heard,
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