On Tuesday, Nov. 4, multiple major elections were held in several different states across the country. In Virginia, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger defeated Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears to become the state’s first female governor. Rep. Mikie Sherrill defeated businessman Jack Ciattarelli to become the next governor of New Jersey. In a race many people were following closely, State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa to become mayor of New York City. Democrats Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard retook two seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission in an upset victory. Voters in California passed Prop. 50, giving Gov. Gavin Newsom the ability to redraw the state’s congressional maps. Three Democratic justices won re-election to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. All around, it was a good day for Democrats. Here are some of my broader takeaways from this year’s elections:
Affordability wins:
All of the Democrats that won this cycle ran on an affordability platform. Zohran Mamdani campaigned on freezing the rent and making buses free. Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill both campaigned on lowering energy bills in their state. The two Democrats in Georgia campaigned on fighting to lower energy costs by building more green energy and taking on energy companies. While their opponents ran on issues like crime, immigration and tax cuts, none of those issues found anywhere near the same level of responsiveness from voters. Despite those in the media acting as if this is some shocking revelation, it should surprise nobody who has paid any attention to politics this century.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Barack Obama won the election with promises of affordable healthcare and rescuing the economy. Joe Biden won in 2020 by promising to cancel student debt and pause evictions during the COVID pandemic. Donald Trump won in 2024 by running against the high prices in the wake of the COVID pandemic under Biden. It should come as no surprise that running on making the country more affordable is a winning message. With Donald Trump imposing tariffs on everything and the Republican-controlled Congress about to let major parts of the Affordable Care Act expire, Democrats should have an easy time making the case that they are the ones who will make America affordable going into 2026 and 2028.
Republicans are really, really unpopular:
To anybody who looks at approval ratings polls in their free time, this was readily apparent. However, I’m sure that is not most people. Even for those of us who do look at the polls, Democrats truly exceeded expectations. Mikie Sherrill won by 14 percentage points, despite polling suggesting the race would be closer. Zohran Mamdani won a majority of the votes in a three-way race. Democrats had not won statewide office in Georgia since 2006, but won both Public Service Commission seats by more than 20 points. Prop. 50, which only a few months ago appeared likely to fail, passed by such a wide margin that media networks called the race literally the second the polls closed. Republicans’ unpopularity has not been limited to this one day of elections. Democrats have been overperforming in every special election held since Trump took office. MAGA is only a minority of the country, and that was readily apparent on election night.
Gavin Newsom is still not a good person:
This is less of a takeaway and more of a reminder. Gavin Newsom is at the height of popularity among the Democratic voter base right now, and with good reason: after months of trolling Donald Trump online, he just got a massive win on a matter of actual policy that he can tout to accompany his online antics. However, we need to look at the broader picture here. California is one of the most left-leaning states in the country. Prop. 50 is an effort to counter Republican efforts to gerrymander other states, such as Texas and Missouri. With California having twice as many Democrats as Republicans, Prop. 50’s passage should neither shock nor impress you, and Newsom’s ability to pass it should not be viewed as a demonstration of his ability to appeal to swing voters.
Newsom has for years been considered as a potential presidential candidate, an idea that he has made no effort to dispel. We need to keep in mind that Gavin Newsom is a man with no principles. Everything that he does is an attempt to increase his chances of winning the Democratic primary in 2028. As we laugh at his funny responses to the constant negativity coming from the White House, we must remember that he’d go back to hosting a podcast with Steve Bannon bashing trans people in an instant if he thought it would get him ahead. Also, if you are seriously considering supporting Gavin Newsom, ask yourself: is a man who acts like an internet troll really who this country needs right now?
The Democratic Party needs new leadership:
I plan to write an entire article about this for the next issue of The Hoot, but it’s time for Chuck Schumer to step down from leading the Democratic Party. While the party does not have a clear leader the way the Republicans do with Donald Trump, there are a few people that actually have leadership roles within the party. One of those people is Chuck Schumer, the New York Senator who currently serves as the Senate minority leader. I actually told a friend back in February that Chuck Schumer was not up to the job of leading during the new era of politics, after Schumer sent a “strongly worded letter” to the Trump administration when Elon Musk and his DOGE team illegally fired thousands of workers. My friend told me that I should wait and see, and that maybe Schumer would beat my expectations. Well, it’s now been a full year since Donald Trump was re-elected, and I can confidently stand by my initial assessment that Chuck Schumer is not the man to lead the fight against this administration’s abuses. This month’s elections only reinforced my beliefs.
Part of the job of a party leader is to recruit quality candidates. Another part of their job is to help the party’s nominee win the election once the primary is over, regardless of who they supported in the primary. In both of these areas, Chuck Schumer failed badly. While Schumer was not involved in most of the races on the ballot this year (something we can’t really blame him for; after all, they weren’t Senate races), he was involved in—or, more accurately, notably absent from—one specific mayor’s race. Schumer’s call for Andrew Cuomo to resign after his sexual harassment scandal in 2021 is one of the factors that pushed the disgraced former governor out of office. Four years later, Schumer and other prominent Democrats stayed silent about Cuomo, while harshly criticizing Mamdani, giving the man who once sued his victims for access to their gynecological records a real shot to re-enter public life as mayor of America’s largest city. By staying silent on this, Schumer failed at the first part of his job: make sure the party is running qualified candidates.
After Mamdani beat Cuomo in the primary, Schumer failed his second task by refusing to endorse the Democratic nominee, as Cuomo grew closer to the same billionaire donors that funded Donald Trump and even sought endorsements from Trump and Musk. Any party leader worth anything would be horrified by someone like Cuomo returning to a prominent position within the party. Clearly, that doesn’t apply to Chuck Schumer. This is just one example of why Schumer is unfit. For even more reasons to hate the current Senate minority leader, check out my article on the Maine Senate race in this edition, and check back in our next edition for the full list of reasons.
Social media is the most important part of campaigning:
When Zohran Mamdani was polling around one percent, nobody in the mainstream media was covering him. By the time of the Democratic primary in June, he was considered Cuomo’s main opponent and had received the endorsement of countless influential people in the world of New York politics. How did his campaign grow so rapidly? Social media. Every day, Mamdani would post a bunch of TikTok videos and Instagram reels where he would speak directly to the voters about issues that mattered to him. People heard his message; he didn’t have to wait for some reporter to decide that his campaign was worth covering or that a specific speech of his was worth writing about. Mamdani also reached an audience that was traditionally detached from politics, with the majority of his support coming from young voters.
When Cuomo was asked during the general election debate what his biggest lesson from the primary was, he said that he needed to be better about using social media. While Mamdani seized on his answer by pointing out that he hadn’t mentioned affordability throughout the hour and a half of the debate up to that point and painted him as out of touch, Cuomo did have a point. During the primary, his social media usage was almost exclusively Twitter, with the occasional Instagram and Facebook post. He wasn’t even on TikTok. The result was that Mamdani’s voter base never even heard Cuomo’s message, just what influencers or Mamdani himself had to say about him. The result was a shocking upset victory that can be used as a roadmap by insurgent campaigns, whether they’re left-wing like Mamdani or more focused on the center.
The reason Harris lost in 2024 was not racism or sexism:
After the 2024 elections, I saw a lot of takes from random people on social media, actual party strategists and former elected officials that claimed that the reason why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election was that the country was just too sexist to vote for a woman or too racist to vote for a Black woman. Some of the people touting this explanation were racists who wanted to see the party run more white candidates in future elections. Some of them just have extremely low opinions of the average American voter. To me, this explanation was nothing more than a way to escape any actual accountability for the broader failures of Harris as a candidate and the party as a whole. Now, I have the election results to prove it. If the voters were too sexist to vote for a woman, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger wouldn’t have outperformed Harris by double digits.
Both Virginia and New Jersey are traditionally blue states where Donald Trump made massive inroads during the 2024 election. Those gains were reversed tonight, and the candidates that reversed them were both women. The wins weren’t just limited to wider margins in blue states. Democrats won in states where Harris lost. In Pennsylvania, the deciding state of the 2024 election, Justice Christine Donohue kept her seat. In Georgia, another decisive state that went for Trump in 2024, Alicia Johnson won by 25 points. Johnson, just like Harris, is a Black woman. So people that wish to blame Harris’ loss on her race or gender should start looking for a better explanation.
The centrist-progressive divide is not real:
This one may shock some people. You’re probably wondering how I can possibly reach that conclusion, when just two paragraphs ago, I was talking about Zohran Mamdani versus Andrew Cuomo. People have spent the last year since Harris lost debating whether the party should move to the left or try to appeal to voters in the center (with most people arguing that the best direction is their own personal politics). I’m not delusional enough to think that the Democratic Party is fully united and does not have internal disagreements, which can at times be large; nor am I a proponent of horseshoe theory or some other argument that all sides are the same. However, the Democratic party’s divide is not based on any policy disagreement.
At the end of the day, Zohran Mamdani, probably the most prominent leftist in the party right now, and Abigail Spanberger, a centrist who touted her bipartisan record in Congress during her campaign, were both running nearly identical campaigns. Both spent the vast majority of their time talking about affordability, while also saying that their opponents would fail to stand up to Trump, heavily criticizing large corporations and using grassroots campaign funding instead of traditional large donors. While climate change has for years been seen as the issue primarily of the far-left, the Centrist Democrats of America now highlight “sensible energy” as one of their main priorities.
Instead, the divide in the party is generational. Younger Democrats are willing to fight Trump to protect our democracy and stop Republicans from taking away millions of people’s healthcare. A number of older, more established Democrats are afraid of being blamed by the voters for things like a government shutdown or just being obstructionist. They are content to send “strongly worded letters” begging Donald Trump to stop unconstitutionally taking away millions of people’s food benefits or health coverage. They either don’t understand or don’t care that the American people actually want a fight, that the people are actually on their side. They’ve fallen for Republican propaganda about Trump’s huge electoral mandate, when really he didn’t even reach 50% of the vote. The true divide in the Democratic Party is between those who are willing to fight and those who are content to do nothing. This is a reckoning that the party will deal with in 2026, whether it figures it out by then or not.
