Trump Humiliation Worsens as Fresh
Info Reveals Scale of GOP Losses
The results showed that Democrats
don’t have to choose between attacking Trump and highlighting the economy. In
fact, they are often inseparable.
The
Democratic Party’s blowout wins on Tuesday night underscore a fundamental
reality about the Donald Trump era: Anti-Trump politics is affordability
politics, and affordability politics is anti-Trump politics.
It’s not just that there is no need to choose between attacking Trump’s
lawlessness and addressing the “price of eggs,” in the hackneyed shorthand for
costs and inflation. It’s that the two missions are inseparable from one another.
In
the weeks leading up to the elections—in which Democrats Abigail Spanberger and
Mikie Sherrill won the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races by 15 points and 13 points, respectively—a
strange, contrary media trope took hold. Various news analyses suggested that
Spanberger and Sherrill were erring by obsessing over Trump rather
than focusing on what actually matters to
voters. Some Democrats fretted that while
attacking Trump was “seductive,” an opportunity was being missed to offer a
substantive “alternative.”
Tuesday’s
results decisively refute that false-choice narrative.
Start
with this finding in the updated exit polls: Both Spanberger and Sherrill
entirely erased the GOP advantage with voters who lack a four-year degree.
Spanberger tied her Republican opponent among them, with each getting 50 percent, a
huge swing from four years earlier, when Glenn Youngkin won them by 59 percent to 40 percent.
Meanwhile, Sherrill also tied her GOP opponent among non-college voters
by 50 percent to 49 percent.
And
here’s a striking nuance: While both Democrats lost non-college white voters by
large amounts—a demographic the party continues to struggle with—Spanberger did
reduce that margin relative to 2021. Critically, both made up for that by
winning huge margins among non-college nonwhite voters: The
spreads were 85–15 for Spanberger and 75–23 for Sherrill. Given that Trump’s
2024 victory unleashed a hurricane of analysis about his inroads with the
nonwhite working class, those margins are heartening indeed.
True,
there are nuances and caveats here. Virginia and New Jersey are blue-leaning;
turnout differentials could help explain these shifts; they might not hold in a
higher-turnout presidential election; exit polls are not the final word; and so
forth. But still, such success for Democrats with non-college voters—relative
to recent performances in the same states—suggests they may be starting to
repair the damage Trump did to their coalition.
There’s
a bizarre tendency in our political discourse to treat criticism of
Trump—including his lawlessness and consolidation of authoritarian power—as
somehow evading the “real” issues that working-class voters actually care
about. Tuesday’s results sorely test this false dichotomy. On one front after
another, the Democrats’ attacks on Trump were directly linked to voters’
material concerns.
For
instance, many of Spanberger’s ads attacking Trump were also about
the economy. One ad ripped her GOP opponent as
a Trump stooge while decrying soaring costs and rising unemployment due to his
policies. Another ad labeled her GOP foe a
“MAGA Republican”—that’s just Resistance talk, right?—while decrying rising
grocery prices and health care costs under Trump. Yet another ad attacked MAGA while casting
Trump’s big budget bill as a giveaway to “billionaires.”
Meanwhile,
Sherrill’s labeling of her opponent the “Trump of Trenton” was sometimes treated as
little more than anti-Trump obsessiveness. But Democrats ran ads that tied her
GOP opponent to Trump while also blasting Trump’s massive Medicaid cuts and his tariffs for the economic harms they’re
inflicting. When Trump killed the tunnel project connecting New York and New
Jersey, in an authoritarian move designed to inflict pain on only Democrats,
the party’s ads blasted this as a job killer, and Sherrill also forthrightly called it
“illegal” and vowed to “fight” it.
Trump’s
tariffs, his killing of the tunnel project, 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.
“This
firewall that exists in the punditry between Trump and economic messaging—that
is not how working-class voters thought about these issues,” a Democratic
strategist familiar with strategic thinking in both gubernatorial races tells
me. Both candidates offered their own substantive economic and health care
agendas, as well.
Zohran
Mamdani’s stunning victory in the New York City mayoral race—in which he broke 50 percent against
two serious opponents—also illustrates the point. Mamdani’s campaign was
famously focused on affordability and costs.
But as I’ve detailed, he also
went hard at Trump’s authoritarian abuses of power while running the most
explicitly pro-immigrant and even pro-cosmopolitan campaign in memory,
connecting the two with dramatic denunciations of ICE and confrontations over
Trump’s lawless threats to deny federal funds deliberately to harm the city’s
poor and working class.
Relative
to the primary, Mamdani made big inroads into
working-class Black, Latino, and immigrant communities. Yes, it’s hard to
extrapolate national lessons from a New York race. But it’s clear that
Mamdani’s twin attacks on economic and authoritarian power; his fusion of
affordability, pro-immigrant, anti-Trump, and (yes) anti-fascist politics, have
working-class appeal—particularly among the new, diverse, immigrant-heavy
working class. Trump’s 2024 inroads into that demographic were accorded seismic
significance, so national Democrats should find a lot to learn here, as well.
As
Ron Brownstein writes for Bloomberg, this
was also the story in California, where nonwhite working-class voters helped
power victory on the Proposition 50 referendum allowing the state to redraw
House maps. In all these races, Brownstein notes, Democrats started reversing
their losses among Latinos, as well; that plus these other gains suggests it
was “premature” to see Trump’s inroads as a “durable realignment.”
Indeed,
the Spanberger-Sherrill-Mamdani axis, and the manner of their victories, hint
at the outlines of a broad, emerging Democratic coalition for the Trump 2.0
era. It can and should be organized around both anti-Trump and affordability
politics. Because they are often deeply complementary or even one and the same.
Trump
knows this was a major humiliation for his agenda: He angrily tweeted that
“TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT.” But of course he was: The results were a
referendum on his presidency, full stop, and the latest returns show it was a
truly dramatic repudiation.
In
the end, the bizarre idea that a choice must be made between Trump and the
economy reflects something deeper: a broad reluctance to accept that Trump is
really, really unpopular. As Jamelle Bouie notes, in
our discourse, Trump is often treated as the embodiment of a kind of submerged
volkish spirit of the American people. His 2024 victory is regularly cast as
akin to a moment of Revelation about that spirit, as an enduring, authentic
ideological shift toward Trumpism—never mind that his victory was incredibly
narrow and he remains widely disliked by popular majorities.
I
think that understanding also explains the persistent false-choice narrative:
In it, anti-Trump politics can only be understood as reflecting the delusions
of coastal Resistance-y elites who refuse to accept that Trump embodies the
American people’s true essence. But anti-Trump politics really is about his
policies, about the very concrete and very damaging things he is doing as
president to the economy, the country, the rule of law, and the constitutional
order daily. People really, really don’t like those things. Democrats won by
campaigning hard against them, and by promising a better alternative. Democrats
should say so, loudly and proudly.
