Consider: Chaos at the airports. Forty-two million SNAP recipients — actually, at this point, non-recipients — scrounging for food. Health insurance prices through the roof as Obamacare subsidies run out at the end of the year. Furloughed federal workers, many of them still at their jobs, without pay, many also scrounging.
There’s more: Serious Medicaid cuts looming. Masked government thugs on the streets of our cities, looking for brown-skinned and Spanish-speaking people at Home Depot. And good luck, thanks to the on-again-off-again-on-again retributive tariffs, with your holiday shopping.
Meanwhile, the government shutdown on Friday reached an all-time-U.S.-shutdown record of 38 days and counting.
Now, do you wonder why Democrats ran the board in last Tuesday’s election?
For Donald Trump, cruelty is the point, as Atlantic writer Adam Serwer famously wrote. But it could be that, at long last, Trump has finally overreached. I mean, how much more metaphorical blood on the metaphorical floor do we need to metaphorically see?
Or do you think Trump is winning hearts and minds by making a trip to the airport — already not exactly a picnic — into a living hell? Do you think he’s winning hearts and minds by appealing a judge’s order to fully pay SNAP recipients during the shutdown?
Trump’s plan has been to use ordinary Americans as hostages to force Democrats to fold. He thinks he’s squeezing Democrats by squeezing us. But we can ask now: Is that really a forever strategy?
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Dems didn’t just run the board on Tuesday. They ran the board and more. They won races for governor with moderates. They won the New York City mayor’s job with a Democratic socialist. California passed its pro-Democratic redistricting plan by a two-to-one margin. Dems flipped two statewide public utilities commission seats in purple Georgia, winning them by more than 20 percentage points. Voters kept the Supreme Court blue in purple Pennsylvania. And, yes, progressives even won resoundingly in Aurora City Council voting.
Meanwhile, according to the exit polls in New Jersey, the Latino vote, which had moved strongly to Trump in 2024, now moved significantly against him. Does he think his masked thugs are helping? Does he think SNAP delays and cuts are helping?
The polls were close in New Jersey, but Democrat Mikie Sherrill won by 16 points. Pollsters are quickly looking to change their models before midterms. In Virginia, a Republican governor won in 2021, but Democrat Abigail Spanberger won by 17 points — the largest Democratic win in Virginia since the Jim Crow days when the state’s Democrats were the party of racist Dixiecrats.
It seems that just about every chance voters had to repudiate Trump, they did. And yet, the experts tell us we shouldn’t get carried away by Tuesday’s crushing rebuke to the Trump Restoration.
Or by the polls showing Trump’s approval numbers starting to drop significantly, with a possible forecast of cratering. Or by the polls showing Trump and the GOP Congress getting most of the blame for the shutdown.
I get it. The out-of-power party usually wins these elections overwhelmingly, and this was an off-off year election, and we’re still a year away from what we’ll call for now the most important midterm elections in memory, or possibly ever.
But if we’re not going to get carried away — and I don’t mind if you ignore the experts on this one — we should, at minimum, take great heart. And act on it. I mean, even Trump admits the shutdown helped Democrats in the election.
If Tuesday’s results didn’t foretell the end of Trumpism in America — and I’m pretty sure they didn’t, exactly; he still wields enormous and often unchecked power to do harm — they showed the wide cracks in MAGA world and a way forward for the growing resistance. Seven million in the streets for the No Kings rally. Many tens of thousands at the ballot box telling much the same story. Voter turnout set records in New York and California for off-off year elections.
The people are leading the politicians — and wouldn’t you know it, the politicians, who can count votes, seem to be catching on. Because everything depends on what happens in the next election. Democrats must win back the House. There’s even some talk — probably as a result of post-Tuesday exuberance — of Democrats possibly taking the Senate.
As an example of Democratic spine, a vote was scheduled Friday in the Senate on the latest GOP bid to end the shutdown. Republicans had sweetened their previous bid by agreeing to pay furloughed federal workers. The federal employees’ union called for Dems to take the deal.
It seemed, for a time, that enough Democratic moderates might cave and waste the opportunity to continue to show they wouldn’t be bullied by Trump. But then came Tuesday’s elections, and everything changed. Then came Tuesday, and Republicans were expected to call off Friday’s vote because they didn’t have the 60 votes — requiring at least eight Democrats to side with them — to reach cloture.
Then came Tuesday and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made a counteroffer Friday to reopen the government if Trump agreed to a one-year extension of federal health-care subsidies, instead of making vague promises to negotiate the subsidies only if Democrats end the shutdown.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune called Schumer’s offer a “non-starter.” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally, called it, uh, “terrorism.”
☀️ MORE FROM MIKE LITTWIN
Should we take that as a “no” or as a “you’re telling me there’s still a chance?”
What it all tells me is that there was one overriding factor in the Democrats’ near sweep. People want Democrats to fight. In the elections in New York and New Jersey, they didn’t just blame Trump for the bad economy or for his march toward authoritarianism, they told voters they were prepared to fight for the cause.
In Colorado, virtually every Democrat is running next year on the premise of taking the fight to Trump.
The fight — not just the economy, not just the march toward authoritarianism — is the point. Because it’s all that Trump understands.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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