Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic governor-elect of New Jersey, takes a photograph with attendees on election night time in East Brunswick, New Jersey, on November 4, 2025.
(Michael Nagle / Bloomberg by way of Getty Pictures)
Donald Trump ought to have spent extra time learning physics. Specifically, he ought to have familiarized himself with Newton’s third law of motion: For each motion, there’s an equal and reverse response. Translated into language the MAGA-man may perceive, that comes out, within the political realm, to one thing like “push a far-right agenda that tramples the rights of thousands and thousands of Individuals, and count on there to be large blowback on the poll field from an enraged, and energized, citizenry.” Problem folks’s dignity and authorized standing, and you need to count on political actions to emerge that search not solely to guard current human and civil rights however to broaden them. Demonize immigrants, and you need to count on coalitions that carry immigrants into the halls of energy that MAGA is so terrified about shedding management over.
This week’s election outcomes, 17 days after not less than 7 million Individuals took to the streets in hundreds of No Kings protests across the nation, showcased that blowback in all its multifaceted finery. Just about all over the place there was an election, Trump’s agenda took a hammering, and native candidates triumphed by promising an inclusionary, economically bold, pro-immigrant, rule-of-law-based politics.
The headline of the day, in fact, was {that a} socialist, Muslim, immigrant, millennial candidate received the mayorship of New York. However whereas Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary victory—and his equally extraordinary victory speech—was assured to drive Trump into paroxysms of rage, the actual story of Tuesday night time went means past New York Metropolis. Take your decide: Throughout the nation, the outcomes have been a rejection of the chaos, cruelty, incompetence, contempt for scientific data, and corruption of Trumpism.
In Pennsylvania, three Democratic Supreme Courtroom justices focused by MAGA handily received reelection, every with greater than 60 p.c of the vote. In Georgia, two Democrats have been elected to the state’s public utility regulator; it was the primary time in practically 20 years that Democrats had received statewide elections for a non-federal place. In Mississippi, Democrats picked up two state Senate seats and in so doing broke the GOP’s supermajority within the legislature.
New Jersey’s governor’s race had, for months, been described as a toss-up. In the long run, Democratic candidate Mikie Sherrill won by 13 points. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger triumphed within the governor’s race by a equally giant margin, flipping the state’s governorship again to the Democrats. Within the state’s Home of Delegates, Democrats increased their numbers from 51 seats to 64. That’s a rout of epic proportions, fueled not less than partially by the huge destruction to native jobs and to group that Trump’s conflict on federal employees has wrought in Virginia.
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After which there’s California, the place Governor Gavin Newsom put his political muscle behind Proposition 50, a measure that will permit the state to droop its unbiased districting board and redistrict Home seats in a means designed to neutralize the GOP benefit secured by Texas, at Trump’s urging, implementing a mid-decade redistricting. By night’s finish, it was clear that Prop 50 had handed by a virtually two-to-one margin. Ominously for the Republicans, the measure didn’t simply rating massive in liberal coastal cities. In conservative components of the state with giant Hispanic populations—inland areas resembling San Bernardino, Riverside, Fresno, and Imperial County, all of which went for Trump in 2024—majorities of voters additionally supported Proposition 50.
The Proposition 50 outcomes counsel a broad-based collapse in Hispanic help for the GOP over the previous months, as ICE has repeatedly and violently focused folks for kidnapping and deportation based mostly on their pores and skin colour, the language they converse, the accents they’ve, even the tattoos they sport. Isaac Newton wouldn’t have been shocked.
Add up the outcomes, and Tuesday was an astonishingly unhealthy day for MAGA. But, as a substitute of reflecting on what voters have been telling the MAGAfied GOP, House Speaker Mike Johnson blustered that these are all wins in Democratic states—to reiterate, they weren’t—and that there have been no classes to be discovered heading into the 2026 midterms. GOP congressional leaders lined as much as slime Mamdani—to accuse him of being a communist and to sentence the Democratic management for one way or the other being in mattress with Mamdani. (In actuality, Senate minority chief Chuck Schumer did not even have the courage to say whom he had voted for within the mayoral election.) Trump posted, in all caps in fact, that the GOP misplaced due to the federal government shutdown and since he wasn’t on the poll.
That’s, at greatest, disingenuous. Trump’s identify may not have been on the poll, however his insurance policies and actions and contempt for the rule of legislation most actually have been. It was Trump, in any case, who spent a lot of the previous week defying court orders to revive SNAP expenditures in order that thousands and thousands of food-insecure Individuals would be capable to put meals on the desk this Thanksgiving month. And it was Trump who doubled down on this risk whilst his personal spokespeople tried to roll it again. It was Trump who went onto CBS’s Sixty Minutes days earlier than the election to say that ICE hadn’t gone nearly far enough in its terrorizing of immigrants, “as a result of we’ve been held again by the liberal judges.” And it was Trump who presided over the bulldozing of the East Wing of the White Home, giving a center finger to the notion that the White Home is “the folks’s home.”
Make no mistake, Donald J. Trump, felon, completely was on the poll. And his maleficent presence turned out to be catastrophic for GOP candidates and priorities in a single state after one other.
The Republicans have sought to undertaking an aura of invincibility and inevitability within the Trump period. Steve Bannon has even gone so far as to say that Trump will safe a 3rd presidential time period—regardless of the constitutional prohibition—in 2028, and that the a whole lot of thousands and thousands of denizens of america “simply must get accommodated with that.” Tuesday’s elections ought to put the kibosh on that drivel. They confirmed, ought to anybody have doubted it, that there’s nothing inevitable concerning the final victory of Trumpism or concerning the nation lurching rightward for years to return.
Trump isn’t an all-knowing, all-conquering political savant. Quite, he’s a thuggish, narcissistic man of mediocre mind, an insecure and aged gangster who surrounds himself with sycophants and who has for a lot too lengthy succeeded in ranting his means into the highlight. On Tuesday, voters instructed him that america shouldn’t be his private property and that voters is not going to put up with a lot of MAGA-man’s senescent, sadistic nonsense.
