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VERDICT NUMBER ONE: AMERICA HAS BIG-TIME BUYER’S REMORSE ABOUT
TRUMP  
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Michael Tomasky
November 5, 2025
The New Republic
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_ Elections are the one opportunity we have to see what the people
think. And what they think is clear: Trump sucks. _

America's sleeping giant has awakened — and it's roaring. (Robert
Reich re-post on Facebook),

 

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
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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
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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
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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
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by 15 points, every county in the state moved in the Democratic
direction. Also in Virginia, the Democrats picked up a staggering 13
seats
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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_
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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_
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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.]_ 

* 2025 Elections
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* California
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* Prop 50
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* Abigail Spanberger
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* Virginia
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* Mikie Sherrill
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* New Jersey
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* New York
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* New York City
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* Politics
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* Democratic Party
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* gavin newsom
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* Donald Trump
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* socialism
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* DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM
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* Elections 2026
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* 2026 Midterms
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* Government Shutdown
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