And there you have it- the death of the subsidies is here. Trump is demanding direct payments to the people of cash for the ACA subsidies, or he won’t sign it. Of course that won’t work, I know you’re thinking it. People will pocket it. People will buy junk plans. It’s literally just a give away. Yes, you’re right.
Chuck already put abortion access in danger with this stupid deal. Now it’s the whole Affordable Care Act. Giving 8 votes to the GOP to re-open the government was political malpractice, and bad government. It was never a good idea. The most leverage they had to get the subsidies back was in the shutdown. Now Trump is going to say he wants to give the subsidies straight to the people, instead of the companies. And guess what? The GOP Congress will go with that. Democrats will probably end up voting no. A lot of that money will never get to health care, and a lot will go to junk plans. The system will collapse.
I’ve got a friend since high school, he was a Marine and fire fighter. When we were young after a few shots, he would remind us all “he likes ’em crazy.” I mean, look, different strokes for different folks. I read this, and I immediately thought of him-
“A 26-year-old Ocean City woman who claimed she was brutally assaulted because she worked for Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Ocean City) instead orchestrated the entire incident — paying a scarification artist to wound her and staging the scene with zip ties and “Trump Whore” written on her stomach and “Van Drew is a racist” on her back, federal prosecutors alleged today.
Natalie Greene, a Rutgers law student, allegedly concocted the hoax in July, with an accomplice making a late-night 911 call to report that she had been ambushed by three men on a nature trail in Egg Harbor Township. Police officers found Grenee bound with black zip ties, her shirt pulled over her head, and the political slurs scrawled across her torso. She told police that her supposed attackers had a gun and threatened to shoot her, and struck her in the head.
Prosecutors say nearly every detail was fabricated.
Greene allegedly drove to Pennsylvania and paid a body-modification artist $500 to carve the wounds on her face, neck, and upper body, using a pattern she had provided in advance. Investigators later found matching zip ties in her Maserati SUV. Cellphone records showed that two days before the purported attack, her co-conspirator searched online for “zip ties near me,” a discovery authorities cited as further proof that the incident was staged.”
Jussie? Are my doing this right? This isn’t just politically crazy, this is cray-cray crazy. The type that will break your windshield to show “they love you.” I’m not about this life.
Seriously though, people keep trying this stuff. What rando that attacks you on a trail knows you work for the Congressman? How do they know to attack you for your politics, are you wearing a shirt with a candidate’s name on it? At least when people put a fake noose on their desk or something, it’s plausible that they targeted you for your race, that’s something visible to the eye. It’s still fake, but it could have happened in some alternative timeline. A random woman on a trail at night doesn’t seem so obviously conservative.
In all seriousness, this girl is seriously ill. She did bodily harm to herself to stage political violence. I hope she gets help, and hopefully then is allowed to return to her education and life. This stuff is not stuff any normal person does, but I guess we can hope she’s young and learns. Right?
John Fetterman was hospitalized last week, and has since been discharged. Thank goodness he’s ok. I think he’s a bad apple as Senators go, but we don’t cheer for people to die or be seriously hurt here. Apparently he was on a walk in Braddock and had a heart issue that made him light headed, then he fell, and he had wounds to the face. Again, we’re glad he’s alright.
Thankfully, John Fetterman has outstanding health insurance as a United States Senator. I think that’s a good thing. We invest tremendous actual power of every part of our lives in these 100 people, and we should want them to perform their duties at a healthy, high level and always get the care that they receive. A lot of people complain about the benefits the public *gives* to these 100 people. I don’t. We should want good people to want those jobs, and this is part of what you give good people to take them. Also though, everyone should have access to quality health care.
The government doesn’t give me care though, and that’s ok with me. Look, if we had national health insurance mandated on everyone, I’d probably be getting lesser care than I get for buying health care on the Affordable Care Act created exchange for Pennsylvania, Pennie. I pay full price (In 2025, $427 a month) for my plan, I’ve hit my deductible in consecutive years because of my health issues, and in exchange I have received first rate insurance that has saved my life and well being a couple times now. You get what you pay for, and that’s what I got. I don’t take the premium subsidies, because it then impacts your tax returns, and I don’t want them more complicated than they are. I just want access, and frankly this is much cheaper than I’d have been buying care for myself without the passage of Obamacare. I know what I’m getting into.
I do care about those people on the subsidies though, and there’s two reasons for that. One, I’m not some ghoulish nut who wants people in need to die. Second, self interest. Insurance companies set their rates based on how many people they think will buy for the year. When the subsidies became endangered this year, insurers assumed that less people will buy care for next year and keep it for the whole year. Because they thought they’d have less customers, but they wouldn’t pay out any significantly less amount, they raised rates on the people who are buying. Those rates are now set in stone for 2026. The subsidies are still a question. If those subsidies are not continued, more people will drop their care either before or during the next year. That will drive 2026 premiums up even higher. That will impact me a lot. It is in my interest that these folks get their subsidies.
The best chance for those subsidies to be continued was in the continuing resolution passed by Congress last week that ended the government shutdown. Eight Democratic Senators voted to pass the resolution without the subsidies. Now Democrats are hoping for a vote in December on a stand alone bill to fund those subsidies. Only the Senate is committed to even voting on that bill, and now it is not attached to any Republican priorities that they would *need* to care about. So Republicans in the Congress can kill it several different ways. Even 41 of the 53 Republicans could kill the vote by never allowing it to the floor. They could get 50 Senators to just vote it down and kill it at final passage. They could attach a bunch of amendments, such as on abortion, and damning the subsidies to be voted down even by Democrats. They could pass the bill in the Senate and House Republicans just never give it a vote. House Republicans might just decide to vote it down. Or they could pass it, and Donald Trump could just veto it. And it almost certainly won’t be able to be over rode in either house of Congress. So really the only chance Democrats have of getting the subsidies continued is to give the Republicans something else for it. That’s what the shutdown was supposed to be about. Republicans don’t need anything in December now, so Democrats will have to offer Republicans something they won’t like to pass this bill before the year ends. It was strategically stupid.
John Fetterman, who deservedly has great health care, was a leading proponent of voting to re-open the government. I’m glad he has great health care. If he is actually glad that I have good health care, he showed he doesn’t care very much. Protecting what 20 million of us have was not a priority for him like making sure the Trump government was funded. We can see his priorities. They are not priorities that apparently take the rest of us into account.
Let’s just take the Epstein situation in context for a moment. For many years, my belief is what they had his contact book and maybe some emails with some not famous rich guys who were pedophiles. People like Epstein, or Jerry Sandusky before him, love having other famous people around them, partially for cover, partially to be able to blackmail them if they’re in trouble. That’s basically what I made of Epstein’s relationship with Trump and other famous people. It was no different than Sandusky’s relationship to Andy Reid or Peyton Manning. So I expected that if we ever saw the files, we’d be greatly disappointed by what was in them. After all, this is what happens every time a major conspiracy theories government files get released.
Well, I am wavering in that opinion. If that were the case, Trump would have released them to clear himself and taunt his enemies. If the files contained damning information about Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, or any of the other Democrats he claims were Epstein friends, Trump would release them. Trump could release all the files with an executive order today. He’s not. Even if the files cleared Clinton or anybody else, he’d still be releasing them and claiming otherwise. There’s only one reason plausible for why Donald Trump is not weaponizing the actual Epstein files- it’s suicide. If he releases these files, he’s opening himself up to trouble.
Let’s be clear, the government has not released anything so far. The House Oversight Committee Dems released a couple of e-mails in which Epstein flat out says Trump knew what was going on, and the estate of Jeffrey Epstein released 20,000 or so pages of e-mails. The e-mails dampened speculation that Clinton and some others went to Epstein Island or were involved, but I wouldn’t say the book is closed there. The e-mails were clear as day on Trump though- whether he took part or not, he knew. And Epstein told Maxwell to use that to her advantage, to blackmail him. Trump isn’t disputing the authenticity either. Hell, the only argument coming from his supporters is that “Bubba,” who Trump gave a blow job, was not Bill Clinton. I mean cool, that’s big to know. How about the rest of it?
We don’t know enough to know how bad this story is. If there are really files implicating Trump, God knows who else they are going to drag in. Every “CC” on an e-mail is being combed through now. It could get ugly. The e-mails are the tip of the iceberg. We need the rest of the emails, and not redacted. We need all of the other seized evidence, which was most of this guy’s apartments. We need all the texts too. We need everything. I think it’s becoming at least partially obvious where it would lead. I think we need the real important question answered though- when it’s obvious that Donald Trump at least knew what was happening, will anyone actually change their minds on him?
For the last decade or so, Democrats have pretended we would welcome MAGA fans to the tent if they just denounced Donald Trump. This is both nonsense and also pretty awful, as we don’t really agree with them on much as a matter of policy. For instance, it was a mistake to embrace Liz Cheney. Her fight against Donald Trump was admirable and honorable, but let’s be serious for a second- she’s a Neo-conservative hawk on foreign policy, pro-life, refused to even embrace her LGBTQ sister’s marriage, and no friend of the environment, unions, or expanded access to health care. What exactly did we agree with her on in 2024 besides Donald Trump’s personally being awful. That’s fine in the context of a campaign, where voters have to choose between two options. Voting against Trump because he’s a pig is reasonable. There are people though that wanted to make Cheney Defense Secretary, and still others who said she should be on a “unity ticket” for President. What exactly is that kind of administration going to do? Sort of ban abortion? Kind of drill for oil in protected lands in Alaska? Attack a Middle Eastern country “in a way?”
Words I never thought I’d write- I respect Marjorie Taylor Greene’s opposition to Trump lately, be it on Epstein or other political matters. I do think she’s bothered by the Epstein situation (I think out of some misconceptions, but that’s fine because she’s morally right here), and her opposition to Trump and Johnson is at a personal and political cost to herself. Do I think she is also trying to rebrand herself because she either thinks or knows (God knows what she’s seen) that Trump is potentially toxic, but I don’t hate that as much as I should. Again, we spent a decade telling them we’d welcome them. Now we’re sort of stuck at least defending her against threats of violence and retaliation from Trump and his followers.
Don’t mistake MTG’s areas of sanity with agreement though. She’s right in the above meme, creating a 50 year mortgage to deal with housing problems is just piling more debt onto consumers to solve the issue. MTG still doesn’t agree though that the issue is that workers are getting a smaller and smaller share of a bigger and bigger pie, and that the wealthy, corporations, and bosses are pocketing too much money. Don’t kid yourself, she won’t call on taxing Elon Musk at a higher rate, creating a windfall tax, or raising wages. So sure, I appreciate her being kind of right on housing and opposing really bad policy decisions. I’d even work with her on that if I were a member of Congress. She’s not ready to embrace good policy though either.
Democrats should at least welcome that MTG and hopefully other Republicans might consider abandoning the most regressive portions of Trumpism, and maybe even Trump himself. We should defend them from his cronies and crooks who attack them. We shouldn’t forget that this woman once talked about Jewish space lasers and wild fires together in the same sentence. I’m glad she sees the light and respect whatever humanity is in her. This isn’t the beginnings of an alliance though.
Turnout was really high in this year’s election. Here in Northampton and Lehigh Counties we topped 90,000 voters for the first time in a municipal election. While Donald Trump carried the 7th Congressional district last year, this year high turnout was really bad for Republicans. Democrats won by damn near 20% in both Executive races and won every other county office too, in addition to winning every blue and contested municipal race too. Two years ago we were talking about 70-75,000 voters in each county. Democrats wildly seemed to over perform with the additional voters, whether they were Democrats or independents. Virtually all Democrats voted Democratic, and the margins among independents were wildly beyond the norm (at least from the most complete evidence we have, which was over performance beyond registration in the mail). Why was higher turnout pretty good for Joe Biden, bad for Kamala Harris, and amazing for Democrats basically everywhere this year?
For the most part since LBJ left Washington, the only Democrats who have won national elections were generally personally popular at the time (Carter and Biden were both popular when they won and not as popular when re-election time came). In general, midterms and elections where less personally popular Democrats lead the ticket had not been very good. Basically Democrats won elections where they could massively mobilize the electorate behind a charismatic figure, really until Trump became a political force. From 2017 forward, Democrats have actually done very well in lower turnout elections that they used to lose. Democrats have done remarkably well in special elections. Democrats are winning odd number year Governor races (Virginia, New Jersey, Kentucky, and Louisiana) at an 80% clip in the Trump years. Democrats won a landslide in 2018 and lost just single-digit seats in Joe Biden’s midterm. Democrats are doing really well in elections where only people who are super engaged and really care how government operates are voting. They’re doing less well in electorates with lower education levels and where voters are largely motivated by large scale cultural issues, and less by “how things will run.”
Even in 2024 we saw signs of this. Harris became the first Democrat to carry college educated white men for President in my lifetime. She did see declines among Black men and Latinos, but once you account for education levels, that is entirely confined to voters who had a high school education or less. The most important data point for guessing how a voter will vote is becoming education. Someone with a graduate degree is probably voting Democratic, regardless of race. Increasingly a high school educated (male in particular, but really in most female groups too) voter is probably not voting Democratic.
This is not about “smart vs. stupid,” which would be a lazy and overly simplistic way to break it down. This actually comes down to how important government *seems* to be in your every day life. Many people in jobs that require some sort of advanced degree, or in fields where a college degree is mandatory for entrance (You could think of this as doctors and lawyers, but I’d argue this gets down to some more traditionally blue collar jobs like nurses and teachers) either interact directly with or deal with regulatory decisions by the government. Almost everything in education, from busing and school lunch regulations, to minimum competency standards for teachers, to spending at research institutions involves the government. Everything in a lawyers world involves the government, from the courts they argue in to the laws they argue about, to the court system and it’s services for those involved in it, to their own ability to practice law, it’s set by the government. Even in the health care field, the government is involved in everything from minimum competency for doctors and nurses, to insurance companies and what they must cover, to research and development dollars that fund development of the drugs they use to save lives. People in fields that legally require a degree, or for that matter practically demand you have a certain level of education, interact with the government a lot. Some of the smartest people I know work as bartenders, or in retail, or in a trade- they’re savvy and they often times do pretty well at making money. The government is less ever present in their jobs, and many of them feel as though the government is a hinderance. Find me a bartender that loves when LCB comes around. Find me a guy that paves driveways that thinks the government helps their lives. Friends of mine who lay concrete frankly think the government takes their tax money too much, and gives them way less in return than they deserve. Many of these people don’t have overly positive interactions with the government at the times that they have to interact with it, and they’re not huge fans.
It would be a mistake to think this is the only factor. I know plenty of professors who have a negative point of view of the government, even if they do interact with it a lot. God knows that can be true of teachers, nurses, doctors, and lawyers too. The thing is, again, they’re in fields that there is no choice but to care about what the government does, it impacts their every day life. Of course they’re going to vote more, and they’re going to be motivated to do so even in relatively “minor” (bullshit term) elections, because many of them care about the consequences. Now, add on that people with college degrees and even more so graduate degrees are increasingly voting Democratic, and what you have is a world in which Democrats are winning the voters with the highest engagement in the political system. This is helping them in “low turnout” elections. It’s also helping them even when turnout goes up in those elections, because the additional people who show up are much more alike to their voters than the GOP’s current base.
This doesn’t mean Democrats are going to win every non-Presidential election moving forward, or that their electoral problems in rural America will take care of themselves (less of their voters live there), or that they can’t win Presidential elections anymore. In 2020, Joe Biden won as a really old white man, who leaned into identity politics quite a bit, but was generally viewed as a moderate. That’s probably a pretty good place for a Presidential candidate to be if they want to win, but it’s a really hard space to occupy. There is no candidate for 2028 that really makes it to that spot. For what it’s worth, I think Biden might have reached peak saturation for Democratic voters running at least somewhat under the Obama paradigm. Any more voters we may find will cause us to turn off an equal number of people and turn them out for Republicans. We probably have to offer someone for President who is not a generic Democrat. I’m not suggesting this as a midterm strategy, or even as a regular strategy to win seats in the Senate, the House, or Governor’s mansions. What I mean is that maybe giving our base everything they can ever dream of has a ceiling in a national election, where a lot of voters have varying degrees of animus towards the government. The base Democratic voter may not be moving forward more “like” the median voter in a Presidential race than a Republican base voter. It’s too early to say that with absolute certainty, I’d like to see how things look after Trump is gone. It does seem though that Democrats are becoming the party of the engaged, and that is quite a change from even a few decades back.
Ok, so there they are. Epstein e-mails. A drop in the bucket out of the Epstein files. Damning as hell though. As a legal matter, this wouldn’t warrant conviction on it’s own, probably. As a political matter, they spent months blocking this. Basically, his whole Presidency. According to Jeffrey Epstein though, Donald Trump spent time with one of his girls. In plain black and white, he wanted Ghislaine Maxwell to use that as blackmail.
In a sane world, we’d focus on the blackmail and say this man is too compromised to serve as President. He is. That’s not what will happen though. Democrats will focus on the actual criminal act here, and well, I’m not even sure where that can go. Epstein is too dead to testify against Trump. Both he and Maxwell are convicts, and would be tough to put on a witness stand. Of course, there is the whole matter of Trump being sitting President now too. DOJ will take the position that they can’t prosecute their boss. Even the states, Manhattan basically let him go even after his conviction, because he had won the election. This is legally DOA.
Then there’s the politics. Ask yourself something- what would it take for Republicans to care about this? They didn’t mind his “grab ’em by the pussy” moment, his Muslim ban, his insulting John McCain, his election denial, or for that matter, January 6th. Now you think they’re just going to say “yep, he did it, he has to go?” There’s virtually no chance. They’ll question the authenticity, question if it’s as bad as it looks, complain about someone else they allege to be involved, or some other nonsense to distract from the black and white words in the email. Maybe a few of them get mad, but they will simply be ostracized by the party and left to die. If they had video of him sleeping with a young girl, hell if he got caught sodomizing a small dog or boy on 5th avenue, they’d move the goal posts. That’s what they’re going to do here.
Democrats and people who dislike Trump in general have spent a decade trying to find the magic bullet to “cancel” Trump. They don’t get it, you can’t. They can hope other Republicans eventually feel some shame and split with him, but why would that happen now? Oh sure, this is really bad. So was January 6th. It arguably strengthened him.
There are apparently 10 8 Senate Democrats ready to vote to re-open the government. After 40 days, they’re going to cave on health insurance subsidies for the promise of a future vote that will never happen, and even if it did, Republicans will vote it down. Yes, they’re going to vote to re-open the government, in exchange for nothing. Useless pile of human waste, Senator John Fetterman appears to be one of the ten. That’s no shock. He was ready to sell out 20 million Americans from the start.
What was the point of the 40 day shutdown? Americans weren’t mad at Democrats on Tuesday, but now they’re caving for nothing at all. A Democrat not willing to fight for health care is not really a Democrat at all. If this wasn’t a fight worth winning, why start it? I mean really, they’re giving the subsidies away anyway. They could have done that 40 days ago if there was an expiration date on their spines.
Chuck should retire. These Senators should be primaried. Sure, some bums will emerge in the new group, but less us be disappointed then, with a few scalps in hand.
No, this isn’t a real person, really for real here.
A socialist was elected Mayor of New York City. That’s really not shocking. Trump had 69% disapproval amongst NYC voters yesterday, and the only other real option was Andrew Cuomo. I don’t need to add to that. 50.4% selecting Zohran Mamdani given that Donald Trump was backing Andrew Cuomo and the other guy was a vigilante, is not all that impressive. If Mamdani wasn’t a socialist and didn’t make it clear he doesn’t like Jewish people, he’d probably have reached 69%. The fact that he didn’t means a lot of anti-Trump voters couldn’t come around to backing him. In fact, only a little better than 7 in 10 anti-Trump voters selected him, and I assume the rest probably voted for Cuomo. When you think about it that way, it’s not so wildly impressive.
Ok, here’s the small reality check, if you need one. Yesterday definitely suggested 2026 could be a really good year for Democrats. Joe Emrick might finally lose. We should beat Ryan Mackenzie if we nominate the right candidate. Let’s go back to the Mamdani example for a moment, and treat him as charitably as we can. Let’s assume he’d still get 7 in 10 anti-Trump voters in the Lehigh Valley and everywhere, even though most of the places we are going to discuss are less liberal than the Big Apple. 55% of New Jersey voters didn’t approve of Trump. If Mamdani got the same 73% of the anti-Trump vote there, he would be at 40.15%. Mikie Sherrill got 56.3% in the actual New Jersey race, or a bit more than 100% of those votes. How about in Virginia, where 56% of voters didn’t approve of Trump? That comes out to 40.88%. Abigail Spanberger got 57.2%, or also just north of 100% of anti-Trump voters. Sherrill and Spanberger got about 102% of the anti-Trump vote and Mamdani got 73%. More of the country will have Trump’s negatives in the 50’s and maybe low 60’s next year, as opposed to New York City’s 69%. Since Mamdani literally got a bare majority of the vote with Trump at 69% disapproval, you would basically need Trump’s actual disapproval to be at 68% in any district to be able to win with a candidate like Mamdani. That’s not going to be the case in any competitive race. For argument’s sake, California had Trump’s disapproval at 63% last night. If Mamdani got that same 73% of anti-Trump vote in California, he’d be at 45.99%. There are going to be a lot of races on the board in California next year. A socialist candidate viewed as friendly to Hamas/oppositional to Israel, like Mamdani, would probably lose in many California seats. For what it’s worth, Proposition 50, the re-districting question, got 63.9% of the vote, or roughly 101% of anti-Trump votes.
Here in the Lehigh Valley, Nadeem Qayyum won a seat on the Northampton County Council. Let me be clear, I didn’t support him. I waited until after the election to say this because it’s not my place, but Qayyum told members of the Lehigh Valley Labor Council in an endorsement interview that he planned to announce after he was elected that he was the first socialist elected in Northampton County. Even Nadeem knew he had to hide some things. Even as Nadeem lied about being a socialist, he still only got 85.25% of what Tara Zrinski received with the same voters. We know even less about Theresa Fadem. Never the less, they won in spite of plenty of other problems. All of the Democrats beat all of the Republicans though, and by a lot (almost 10,000 votes out of 91,000 votes cast). I’ll get deeper into this later, but the key to the Democratic victory *appears* to not just be vote-by-mail, which was up by close to 5,000 votes in the end, but actually the Election Day surge of anti-Trump voters. Election Day voting was up by 14,000 votes from 2023 to 2025. It’s rather clear by the margins that these people were voting for Democrats, and Democrats only.
So what does all of this mean here? Let’s assume for a second that Tara Zrinski and Josh Siegel got an even 100% of the anti-Trump votes last night in the County Executive races. That’s 59.38% in Northampton County and 60.61% in Lehigh County. A Mamdani-like candidate would get 43.35% in Northampton County and 44.25% in Lehigh County. That’s also assuming next year’s electorate is exactly like this year’s, and well, look at the 2022 numbers (which probably won’t be exact either, but still much closer) in Northampton and Lehigh. You go from just shy of 187,000 votes in the two counties to well over 260,000. The GOP, even if they’re doing awful, will do a little better than this year, and I’m not including Carbon, which actually voted NO on retention for the Supreme Court Judges last night, so Trump may still be in the positive there. I’ll go with the average in Northampton and Lehigh County though today, 60% anti-Trump voters. That’s 43.8%.
Where am I going with this? Well first off, Mark Pinsley basically has the same policy views as Mamdani (I don’t consider him to be as bad of a guy), so nominating him is very likely to end in a loss. Then there’s Bob Brooks, a guy who has deep flaws that cut across party lines, and has the same consultants as Mamdani, and is supported by Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, a large cadre of the Mamdani supporters on the national level. Assuming Democrats can stomach the racism and other issues, he doesn’t deteriorate further than Mamdani’s share of the anti-Trump vote, Brooks is probably not doing much better than 44% because his policies and rhetoric is Mamdani’s rhetoric. I’m sure he’ll try to distance himself, like say John Fetterman, but does anyone want to send another version of Shrek to Congress. And what if he does fool people into thinking he’s not a bad guy, like Fetterman? Maybe he gets the more like 85% of the anti-Trump vote and gets to 51.15%, not factoring in Carbon and increased Republican turnout? He still probably narrowly loses. Candidates like Bob Brooks are gigantic risks to maybe lose a winnable race, or be the next John Fetterman. He should be DOA in the PA-7 Democratic Primary, and any efforts to push him by the state Democratic Party are emphatically stupid. We don’t need the Harrisburg insiders pushing their candidate.
As for Ryan Crosswell? Maybe he could win a general election running as a union busting, Trump Democrat. Why would you want that?
Candidates like Zohran Mamdani are fine for New York City. I wish he had lost, and I think the result was bad for New York, but they chose him. Candidates like Zohran Mamdani are not going to win us seats like NJ-7 or PA-7. Candidates like Mamdani wouldn’t represent upgrades in state legislative races in the Lehigh Valley either. We need to reject these folks. Failure to do so will not be unlike Tea Party Republicans nominating the “witch lady” for Delaware Senate in 2020, but they also have the longterm impact the Tea Party had on the GOP as well. I don’t want the Democratic Party to simply be a liberal flip side of the Trump coin. It won’t win, and it’s bad for America.
There’s going to be a lot of ink wasted on what happened yesterday. People are going to try and argue that Sherrill and Spanberger prove that moderate Dems win, which I tend to believe in more purple districts and statewide races. Others are going to argue that Mamdani shows that bold progressives win. It’s quite frankly a stupid argument. What kind of Democrat didn’t win? Are there things to learn about 2026 from the data? Yes. Ultimately what you should take away first and foremost from this is that when your actions, be it a trade war, shutting down the government, cutting people’s health care, or yanking their food stamps, end up making people worried about their next meal, their housing, their job, or their health care, you’re probably going to lose. This isn’t ideological. It’s survival.
Terry Fadem and Nadeem Quyyum had basically no resources, and beat the Republican candidates for County Council by over 13,000 and 9,000 votes each. Tara Zrinski meanwhile ran a hard campaign and earned a record breaking margin and became the first woman elected as Northampton County Executive. Jeremy Clark ran hard for his win on the Northampton County Court of Common Pleas, while Mark Stanziola was largely outspent in Lehigh County where he won easily. Democrats won the Bucks row offices with moderates, while they won state legislative seats in Virginia with all different candidates. There was no one specific type of Democrat that won tonight. Yes, some types won by more. None were really all that close though. And I can’t come up with a competitive race that they really lost. Nothing really mattered.
Running for office is hard, and the fact that this was simply a unanimous decision tonight doesn’t take away from the achievement of running a successful campaign. These people all put their names and reputations on the line in hopes of winning a race, and I salute them for that. With that said, there’s no deeper message in tonight. Donald Trump went too far, and voters reacted. They both gave large percentages of the vote to Democrats, and turned out in greater numbers than we had ever seen before. If you put your name on the ballot as a Democrat tonight in a place Democrats had any chance to win, you won. If you were a Democrat who crossed over, like Pat Dugan in Philadelphia, Ed Ducal in Allentown, or Roger Maclean in Lehigh County, you got your ass kicked. There was no interest in any of that. Even decently liked Republicans lost races tonight in any county or two that was even moderately purple. This was an outright rejection of Trump. Trump will never again be on the ballot, and Republicans haven’t done well trying to be like Trump when he’s not on the ballot too. Make of that what you will. Last night was far more decisive than any previous beating.
Apocalypse Vibes 