Victory Lap: Lessons From Tuesday's Blue Tsunami

Democrats absolutely crushed on Election Day 2025, winning every major race and most of the minor ones, too. It’s a desperately needed injection of hope and newfound confidence for Democrats plus an opportunity to celebrate for the first time since that dark day last November — and there are a lot of lessons to be learned from last night’s overwhelming sweep.

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Lesson 1: It’s The Economy, Stupid

Frankly, it’s hard to overstate how incredibly fucking stupid Republicans are. Trump won last November largely because people were mad that President Biden’s economic recovery was taking too long and Harris didn’t do enough to distance herself from the policies that people blamed for their economic woes.

All Trump had to do was sit back and play golf while Biden’s efforts to combat inflation continued to do their job. Instead, he decided to start implementing a completely senseless 18th-century protectionist tariff regime that sent the economy into a tailspin and sent prices skyrocketing.

Combine that with laying off half of northern Virginia and denying millions of people their SNAP benefits because you want their healthcare premiums to skyrocket, and it’s easy to see why people were angry.

In New York City, socialist Zohran Mamdani ran a campaign that was laser-focused on kitchen-table economics — he once famously responded to a question about his opinion on the Kendrick Lamar / Drake rap beef by talking about affordability — and was not only able to survive relentless and deeply hysterical smear campaigns by terrified billionaires by staying on message, he inspired the biggest voter turnout in decades with more than twice the voters from four years ago.

In New Jersey and Virginia, both Mikie Sherill and Abigail Spanberger ran dual-focused campaigns centered on affordability and opposing Trump, each winning by 13 and 15 percent respectively in states that Kamala Harris won by less the six points. Democrats hadn’t won local-level statewide races in Georgia for TWO DECADES. On Tuesday, they won two races by 20+ points, propelled by frustration with the GOP and sky-high electricity prices.

Those two issues are the key to building a winning coalition for the future. That’s because…

Trump and his band of sadistic freaks have WAY overplayed their hand

The president can pass off the blame as much as he wants — which of course, he began doing immediately by posting that Republicans were losing BECAUSE he wasn’t on the ticket — but the numbers show that people are furious at Donald Trump.

A Fox News poll of Mikie Sherill voters found that 71% of them said they were motivated to vote to oppose Donald Trump. His disapproval rating is at an all-time high, at 63%, and that’s not changing anytime soon. In New Jersey and Virginia, Democratic candidates won over 90% of Trump disapprovers.

Inexplicably, Trump and his team decided that a 1.5% or so popular vote victory margin in an election that was largely about economics meant they had a national mandate to impose Full Hitlerism With Ku Klux Karacteristics, and began doing so with terrifying speed and horrifying cruelty.

It’s pretty clear now that at least some people voted for Trump because they believed he could wave a magic wand and make prices go down. Not only did that not happen, he made things SO MUCH worse, and now people have sky-high prices AND they have to watch daycare teachers being dragged out of preschools and thrown into vans by masked goons.

@nowthisimpact

NowThis Impact on Instagram: "These kids were traumatized — ICE…

The Republican Party at all levels has bowed, scraped, and engaged in ritualistic self-castration in order to rubber-stamp, excuse, justify, and cheerlead every single thing Trump does, which means their party brand is now intimately and irreversibly associated with the depravities, excesses, and flagrant criminality of the Trump administration, and that was shown across the board in Tuesday’s bloodbath.

Unfortunately for our short-term, but very good for our long-term prospects, this won’t be changing any time soon, because…

Trump and his GOP will not learn the right lessons from this

In Trumpworld, any kind of course correction, self-reflection, or strategic reassessment is considered an unacceptable admission of failure that might impugn the infallibility of Great Leader. This much is obvious from Trump and the GOP’s response to last night’s rout, which ranges from “it doesn’t matter” to “we need voter reform” to the distressingly popular take that “we need to take the right to vote away from women.”

In fact, Trump appears intent on throwing himself into the same trap that the Biden team did and try to browbeat the public into accepting that their lying eyes are lying to them about their personal finances and how much is being squeezed out of them by an economy designed to funnel money into the pockets of the ultrawealthy.

Last night, Bret Baier relayed a question to the president from a three-time Trump voter who was furious about prices continuing to rise instead of dropping like he promised. Trump’s response was to tell her that:

“I think of groceries. You know, 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. And think of this. Energy. She drives a car, probably, and her energy prices are way down. And energy is so all-encompassing. It’s so big that when energy goes down, everything comes out, everything follows it, and I have energy down to five, six, year lows now. Prices are coming down from this, that you know, I think they’re coming down, but I think that they’re already — I think the biggest problem is Republicans don’t talk about it, they don’t talk about the word affordability and the Democrats lie about it.”

Trump has tweeted about “affordability” multiple times since Tuesday, indicating that Republicans recognize that they need to start *talking* about affordability. But that only digs them into a deeper hole without embracing policy decisions that are explicitly anathema to the Republican ideological project. Their continued insistence that prices are going down when they very clearly aren’t is only going to make people angrier and angrier.

Democrats, on the other hand, do not have that problem, especially since…

It’s a whole new ballgame out there

These wins were not only hugely significant for what they represent for Republicans but also what they represent for the future of the Democratic Party, a future that seemed extremely bleak just a year ago. Hell, a few days ago!

We learned that if Democrats show a spine, stick to their principles and tune out the flood of bullshit, we can win, and we can win big, no matter what the attack ads say and no matter how much dark money gets spent against us.

Zohran Mamdani endured one of the most hysterical and disgustingly racist smear campaigns ever thrown against a candidate, with an Election Day finale of GOP Rep. Ogles literally posting videos of the planes hitting the World Trade Center with the caption “WAKE UP NEW YORK.” And he won on a platform of unashamedly progressive policies.

Attorney General candidate Jay Jones in Virginia was hit with an utterly bizarre out-of-context leaked texts scandal that led to Republicans all across the mediasphere screaming, crying, throwing up about how Jay Jones literally wanted to kill all Republicans and their children, and voters largely didn’t care; somehow, he even won 9% of the voters who said that the comments were “disqualifying.” On the flipside, the Republican legislator who leaked the comments in the first place LOST her seat.

Republicans poured tens of millions of dollars into psychotic attack ads about Abigail Spanberger’s support for trans rights and she cruised to victory.

This is not to say that it’s anything goes and we can just run whomever, wherever, whenever, but it shows that we can stop being scared about standing up for our ideals and principles — and contrary to all the hand-wringing from Extremely Serious Centrist Pundits who leaped at the opportunity to blame 2024 losses on support for trans people or immigration, voters showed that the culture war stuff is much less important to them than the tangible things that actually affect their lives. One exit poll found that 52% of respondents thought that trans rights had “gone too far,” but they voted for Spanberger anyway because the rent is too damn high and they hate Trump.

Unless you’re a Republican podcaster, hate won’t put food on the table. It’s time to show Americans that Democrats will.