Verdict Number One: America Has
Big-Time Buyer’s Remorse About Trump
Elections are the one opportunity we
have to see what the people think. And what they think is clear: Trump sucks.
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The
single most surprising election result on Tuesday night? For my money, and it
wasn’t even close: Democratic challenger Jay Jones’s thumping—yes, thumping—of
Republican incumbent Jason Miyares in the race for Virginia’s attorney general.
Jones was a two-term member of the state House of Delegates—nothing special. In
early October, news broke of text messages he’d sent a colleague in 2022, in which he said he’d
shoot a prominent state Republican ahead of killing either Adolf Hitler or Pol
Pot, and in which he apparently wished death on that Republican’s children.
When
I first read about this, I assumed that not only was Jones cooked—he was tied
or a little ahead in the polls at the time—but that he’d likely bring down
Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger as well unless
she called on him to leave the race. I mean—worse than Hitler. Death
to that other guys’ kids. You literally cannot get any crazier, any weirder,
any more appalling than that.
Jones
won by nearly 7 percent, or more than 300,000 raw votes.
Did
he win because Virginians found his pro-forma apology especially persuasive?
Did he win because people decided that saying a political foe was worse than
Hitler is now just fair game, or because voters agreed that that Republican’s
children seemed expendable? Highly unlikely.
He
won because people hate President Donald Trump and what he’s doing to this
country. And in an election that provided, as elections invariably do, a
jillion takeaways, let’s not lose of sight of what is obviously and toweringly
takeaway number one: Americans have developed a big-time case of buyer’s
remorse about Trump, and a very solid majority of them despise what Trump has
perpetrated against America.
Trump
and his MAGA world saunter forward in confidence. They live in a daydream; a
fantastical bubble where Trump can say that his polls are great, the economy is
the best ever, the tariffs are working miracles, energy prices are low, and his
ICE agents are following the law. All this is reinforced by the so-called
“media” that serves as Trump’s Soviet-style propaganda arm, and it’s swallowed
hook, line, and sinker by the brain-rinsed (to borrow Eugene McCarthy’s withering line about George Romney). They talk only among themselves
and are therefore able to pretend to themselves that we’re living through some
kind of American renaissance.
Elections
are the one opportunity we have to see what the people think. And what they
think is clear: Trump sucks. We saw the poll that came out the day before
Election Day. His disapproval rating was a record 63 percent. People are deeply sour about
nearly everything (reduced border crossings being the sole exception), and they
blame him for every single bit of it.
The
breadth and depth of the Democratic sweep was astounding. In the Spanberger
race, which she won by
15 points, every county in the state moved in the Democratic direction. Also in
Virginia, the Democrats picked up a staggering 13 seats in the House of Delegates, which will give them the
biggest majority for either party in a decade; in the Department of Small
Ironies, a Democratic challenger defeated the Republican incumbent to whom Jones had sent those odious text messages
(yes, he sent them to a Republican).
The
New Jersey governor’s race was more stunning. A lot of people were saying
Democrat Mikie Sherrill was going to lose to GOPer Jack Ciatterelli. I didn’t
quite think that, but I was guessing that Sherrill would eke out a three- or
four-point win. She won in a landslide—by 13 points. Nobody saw that coming.
Men
under 30, so chilly on Kamala Harris last year, voted for Spanberger and
Sherrill with 57 and 56 percent support, respectively. Latinos, assumed last
year by the media to have surrendered their wills to Trump on the basis of some
macho mystique that Mr. Bone Spurs has never in fact remotely possessed, went
68 percent for Sherill and 67 percent for Spanberger.
Finally,
there’s Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York—not surprising, given his large leads
in the polls, but obviously historic nevertheless. He endured Trump and his
craven Republican mimics and sycophants calling him a Communist and Marxist,
and he topped 50 percent, which denied his critics the one shot they had at trying
to delegitimize his mayoralty.
Toss
in California’s Prop 50, which gave voter approval to the aggressive
redistricting plan of Governor Gavin Newsom. It was supposed to win—but it
wasn’t supposed to win by nearly 2-to-1. Toss in Georgia, where Democrats won two seats on the state’s important Public Service Commission.
Toss in Pennsylvania too, where Republicans poured a lot of money into trying
to defeat three Democratic-leaning state Supreme Court justices and failed by massive margins in each case.
Why
did all these things happen? One reason. Well—one man, but many reasons.
Because food prices are still high. Because energy prices are up 11 percent.
Because soybean farmers have been getting screwed. Because this man and his
party have not passed a single law to try to make working people’s lives better
(15 years after Obamacare—still no health care plan!). Because it turns out
Americans don’t want masked and out-of-control quasi-vigilantes rounding up
brown people willy-nilly. Because they don’t want thousands of decent people to
lose their jobs just because those jobs happen to be in the federal workforce.
Because they don’t want transgender people to be persecuted (Spanberger’s
opponent went wild with anti-trans ads; they obviously failed). Because they don’t want a
gangster president to bulldoze the White House.
A
solid majority of Americans detest these things. And, while MAGA people can
tell themselves all the fairy tales they want, the plain truth is that they
detest Donald Trump.
Now:
Inside a normal White House, they’d read these tea leaves and say, “Geez, we’d
better cool it.” But this president will of course double down. Triple or
quadruple down. You think it’s in Stephen Miller’s nature to moderate? You
think it’s in Trump’s? Of course not—they’ll just get more extreme. Remember:
All that ICE spending that was in the big, ugly bill is just getting started,
and the masked agents are still arresting only around 1,200 people a
day—nowhere near Miller’s goal of 3,000. On this and many other matters, as the
clock ticks on them to check every Project 2025 box they can, they will get
more extreme.
And
they will also work overtime to rig next year’s
midterms. This is something to keep your eye
on—bills that will be proposed in state legislatures next year where there are
important races. We don’t know yet what they’ll propose, but we can anticipate
the general thrust: When fascists see an unfriendly election result, they never
look in the mirror and ask themselves what they could do differently. They look
at the people who voted against them and figure out ways to prevent them from
voting.
Where
does this leave the Democrats? Keep pressing on the gas pedal. This debate
about whether the Democrats should focus on economics or threats to democracy
is silly. I can do two things at once. So can you. And so should the Democrats.
Americans are mad about it all—so talk about it all. Aggressively and with
passion. They don’t have to agree yet on a specific agenda for the country.
That gets sorted out in the presidential primary. For the midterms, they just
need to agree in broad terms that they’re trying to help make working people’s
lives easier, and that Trump is (a) failing utterly at that and (b) posing a
daily threat to our democracy.
Last
night proved that Americans hate what Trump is doing to the country. It’s going
to get worse. Democrats can’t let voters forget it.
Michael Tomasky is the
editor of The New Republic and the author of five books,
including his latest and critically acclaimed The
Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity. With
extensive experience as an editor, columnist, progressive commentator, and
special correspondent for renowned publications such as The Guardian,
The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Daily Beast, and many others,
Tomasky has been a trusted voice in political journalism for more than three
decades.
