Bob “Crooksy” Brooks should be a salesman. Apparently Josh Shapiro has been convinced that Crooksy is good for his personal political ambitions, and he’s going to endorse him. Of course, they’ve been saying that since July, but still. The good ole’ boys from Harrisburg have been up here telling people to endorse him, because the Governor will be “soon.” Only a couple did, and for all the wrong reasons. Most people don’t want to support a racist, a religious gun-nut fundamentalist, and guy who stole from his mother-in-law and didn’t pay her back for 14 years, even losing on appeal. You would think in a Democratic primary the racism alone, let alone the embrace of political violence, would do it. Ryan Mackenzie has nothing to fear if he gets to run against this crook. No normal person is going to trust a guy who broke a contract with his mother-in-law for 14 years, it shows you exactly who he is. People aren’t going to vote for a guy who lies, steals, and pulls underhanded moves to take over his union. Bob “Crooksy” Brooks is just another Tulsi Gabbard or John Fetterman.
Crooksy is either a real good salesman, delusional, or just hilarious. Now he’s claiming he’s going to get endorsed by Gavin Newsom, according to sources. Look, I’d say he’s full of shit, but he did get Deadbeat Bernie Sanders to endorse him, which is both political malpractice and hilarious. You know what they say about crooks of a feather? But Newsom? Really? Coming across the country to endorse a guy who stiffed his mother-in-law? Gavin Newsom wants to embrace the latest marginal intellect white savior complex candidate endorsed by the bolsheviks? That helps him how? He wants to tell Black voters he is for the guy who hates Kaepernick for kneeling?
There is definitely an element within the Democratic operative world that thinks we need to run communists and bigoted white guys. They think a guy with a Nazi tattoo is what we need to win in Maine. They’re not right though, and Newsom is smart enough to know that. So why would this be? The #2 guy at the IAFF is their head guy in California, and I’m just taking a shot in the dark here, but he may be the link. Perhaps it’s a very low brain wave version of political chess, where one Governor thinks he can get a major endorsement for his quixotic 2028 Presidential campaign, and the other Governor then is convinced he absolutely needs to get in on this too, so nobody gets the credit. I mean, I’m spit balling here. It’s definitely not worth the trouble though.
Look, this is borderline hilarious. Given what a narcissist this guy is, he probably opened an email from Newsom and thinks he’s getting his endorsement now. As one out of the Valley lawmaker puts it, “we all like Bob, but none of us think he can do it.” He’s way nicer than I. If I didn’t know the place he tended bar, I wouldn’t believe he was smart enough to tend bar. Bartenders I know are the smartest people out there, they know when to get cut off a bad situation. This guy is trying to drink from a fire hose while a raging inferno blazes in front of him. The problem is, the powerful and brilliant minds that gave us the 2024 Democratic Party in Harrisburg and Washington are trying to astroturf this guy a victory. This is like handing a mentally ill person a loaded AR-15.
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.
They really didn’t need to do it. I guess if you think keeping the government open was crucial, maybe you think they did. If you’re a federal worker, maybe you’re happy they did. Maybe if you’re on SNAP, you’re happy to get what you can here. It wasn’t necessary though. Republicans could have re-opened the government themselves by ending the filibuster. Eventually, when the government re-opened, federal workers would get back pay and SNAP would be restored at that time. Republicans could have done it and eventually would have to turn off the pressure on them from the public. Then they would have owned all the terrible things in this bill. They would have owned pricing a large chunk of the 20 million or so people insured under ACA plans out of the health insurance market. They would have owned the closing hospitals from their Medicaid cuts AND the cuts to the ACA subsidies. This is their government. They fought hard to win it and give it to President Trump.
Instead, the Democrats got absolutely nothing. The “promise” of a Senate vote on subsidies for ACA buyers in December isn’t worth the air used to utter it. It’s not a promise to pass it through the Senate, it’s not a promise to vote on it in the House, it’s not even enforceable to get a vote in the Senate. It’s a promise that is worthless and made for the naive. There are now those saying it’s brilliant because Speaker Johnson was forced to swear in Adelita Grijalva, thereby giving the signatures to force the discharge petition on the “Epstein Files.” Number one, we got the smoking gun without the vote even happening, but also, even Epstein’s own words implicating Trump are probably not going to move Republicans, and we are a day later and absolutely zero Republicans are calling on him to step down. We got everything we needed from a leak, the actual vote in Congress will probably be turned into a circus. We didn’t need to trade health care for it.
What’s worse is now the Democrats will get beat at their own game. Namely, Republicans are going to use health care to gut reproductive health services for women to the bone. By passing the CR, Democrats have acquiesced Medicaid spending levels set in the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” Those are going to gut reproductive health care for all Medicaid recipients. Of course, it doesn’t stop there. Republicans are demanding tougher abortion rules in exchange for voting for the ACA subsidies, which will probably kill the bill, but it might even be worse if it ends up passing. Namely, they want to stop states who mandate reproductive health care in their ACA plans. Basically they’re going to make the major blue states accept their version of “pro-life” health care. If Democrats say no, they’ll torpedo the bill. There are also discussions about just handing out the subsidies as cash, which could destroy the entire ACA system.
Insurance companies set rates mostly based on whether they think there will be less or more consumers in the market for the next year. Based on already passed legislation and executive orders in 2025, insurance companies raised their rates, because they think less people will buy next year. Those 2026 rates are set in stone. With the ACA subsidies that are in question, which cover people who just missed qualifying for subsidies in the original ACA, less people will drop their coverage for 2026. That would do a lot to help keep rates in line for 2027. The Democrats best chance to force Republicans to fund those subsidies for 2026 died with the passage of this Continuing Resolution to keep the government open. Their time to pass these subsidies with little to no strings attached has now officially expired.
Chuck Schumer is apparently calling 2028 Presidential contenders (his idea of contenders, but whatever) and begging them to not attack the deal. Gentlemen, unsolicited, free advice- bury the deal. Democrats should be hanging their entire brand on expanding health insurance access, bringing down housing and food costs, and childcare costs. Essential, building block things that people absolutely need to live. Keeping the government open is not the important thing. Keeping the focus on fixing real people’s problems should be the entire focus. Chuck, Fetterstein, a couple of future retirees, a dude from Virginia, and a couple of random Senators I didn’t expect to cave all failed the test. It’s time for a change.
Chuck Schumer ended the government shutdown. Make no mistake about it. Republicans needed seven Democratic votes to re-open the government. They got eight. They even got two retiring Democrats who had no reason to walk the plank. The Democratic Caucus made sure the GOP got their votes.
There was absolutely no reason for it. Leave the government shut down. The Republicans offered absolutely nothing for those eight votes. The “promise” of a vote on subsidies for health insurance under the ACA is utter bullshit. There will likely not be a vote in the House ever, and it probably won’t pass the Senate either. The Democrats were offered nothing and took it. SNAP was gutted in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” so don’t tell me they needed to save that either, they’re saving a less than whole program (Which is already going to be a massive, massive problem). As for the federal workers, you make the GOP cave to pay them. They’ll get back pay then. Besides, in saving SNAP and federal workers from temporary pain, they’ve permanently lost a working health care system. It wasn’t worth the deal.
The politics are worse than the policy. Democrats won the 2025 Elections a month into the shutdown. Voters weren’t revolting against the Democrats. There was no price to pay. Not even a little bit.
Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats overvalue the government. There’s no reason to keep it open, no reason to save it. It’s not doing much good right now. Society was not falling apart without it yet. Yes, I know government has a role to play, and it is important to our society working, but that’s in normal times. This idea that this government is as important as it was in say, 2022, is silly. It’s foolish. It’s misguided.
Democrats had the GOP’s backs to the wall. They are unpopular and were ineffective. You tell John Thune and the Senate GOP to either make a real offer or they get no votes. Restoration of the subsidies should have been a bare minimum to talk, not a guideline. Thune could always have just ended the filibuster and funded the government himself. Democrats didn’t need to sign off on this.
I’m an OG Bernie hater. When his online weirdos put me on their hate list in 2017, it was a badge of honor. I knew then that he was a grifter. His campaign, his super pac (Our Revolution), and his institute (Sanders Institute) all employed his family. Some of his organizations bought his books (great for royalties). He made a profit off of running for office. So he kept running for President in a political party that he slams repeatedly and isn’t a member of. It’s a great existence, for him. He disowns all the stuff that is inconvenient for him, vaguely claims the populist stance, and makes a lot of money off of it. It’s easy to see the guy isn’t real.
I also never trust the people he elevates as our “future.” He has given us some real doozies. Bernie gave us Tulsi Gabbard (who literally had an internal campaign “hate” list that they put me on too). Tulsi Gabbard told us Assad in Syria was “not an enemy,” essentially blaming the U.S. for Russia invading Ukraine, and that Hillary Clinton is drugged and refusing to back her over her foreign policy and cheating Bernie out of the nomination. Today, Tulsi Gabbard is Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, claiming that Russia did not seek to help Trump in 2016 (they did), contradicting a GOP lead Senate report saying they did. Gabbard’s revisionist history is the backbone of the government’s case that former Obama era intelligence leaders lied to Congress and tried to frame Trump. In short, Tulsi Gabbard is a psychopath. Bernie Sanders told us she’s not. Of course, she got her rise by being a trusted friend to Bernie.
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.
Happy Saturday, friends… and enemies too! You see, I have a very, very good idea of my audience on this blog, and well, that impacts what I write here. I’d love to write my thoughts on the Sixers, or next year’s Foo Fighters tour, or the Phillies off-season. I write about how Bernie Sanders sucks and what’s wrong with Ryan Crosswell and Bob Brooks, and you read it though. Yesterday, I talked about how the Allentown crew put self preservation over what’s right, and you read it. You know who you are. A couple thousand hits in the immediate hours after can be confusing, but I still know who most of these readers are. Readers in Arlington, in Washington, in Philadelphia, in Rockville, in Ashburn, in Brooklyn, in White Plains, in Allentown, in Bangor (ok, this one slightly confuses me), in Easton, in McKeesport, in Bethlehem, in Princeton, in Camp Hill, in Braddock, in Phillipsburg, in Hazleton, in Harrisburg… shit, I’m going to be honest, some of you read this so much that I actually am like 99% I know who each of you are. I know who my daily reader from Nazareth is. I also know why you read this, because I pretty much know who you are. And look, that’s great. I write this so someone reads it. I don’t write it to read myself.
Most of you reading this enjoy it. Some of you (hey opposition researchers!) send me into to post here. When I’m reasonably sure it’s true, I post it. Some of you wonder why, and even are critical of me doing it, as if Rich Wilkins not posting something a.) makes it untrue, b.) means it won’t get out. It is a uniquely poor trait of Pennsylvania politicos, more so than any of the other states I’ve been in, that we think we can keep secrets. We can’t. I’m not on any of the campaigns right now, I’m not paying for this stuff, it’s so easy to find that any idiot could do it. Which gets to my other point here- most of you enjoy reading this blog, but yesterday the smoke coming from Allentown looked like a mushroom cloud. One subject was sending the post around complaining, one actually complained to me personally (one talked to me and we actually joked about it, but I’ll leave that for another time), and one is probably already reading this and fuming. I could hear the words that I’m sure came out of one of their mouths- “Rich is a nobody anyway and no one cares what he says.”- while literally talking about what I wrote. Hey, I like irony. The truth is, there’s lots more to come on Crooksy and others. I already have some of it. I’ll print it when I want to. Assuming I want to. And you should be glad I do. If I’ve found all this on a zero dollar budget, don’t you think Ryan Mackenzie has this and more (he does)? At least by me writing it, you know about it now, not when it’s hitting you in the face.
Look, I’m not your boss. I’m not your dad. I’m not your Governor. I give you information, if you don’t care about that, it’s fine. If you’re fine with racism, fine. If you’re fine with extremism, fine. If you’re fine with political violence, that’s not fine, but you can be. If you’re fine with being untrustworthy, fine. Look, if you think Kaepernick was an ass for kneeling during the national anthem, that’s your choice. Bob Brooks agrees with you. Just own that though. Don’t claim he’s changed, because now he’s telling you he did because it’s good politics. Don’t claim it was “just a messy divorce,” when he didn’t pay his mother-in-law back one penny for over 14 years before she sued him. She had him sign a contract after four years of not being paid, and he still didn’t pay her. Just own it. If you’re fine with this because the guy’s union gave you a few bucks for your re-election, I actually totally get it. Just be real with yourself. He doesn’t dispute that he got sued and lost, hell he appealed it and lost. He doesn’t claim he didn’t post racist and extremist memes, he just says that was then. Hell, Ryan Crosswell at least tries to claim he wasn’t “really” a Republican, even though he re-registered in multiple states, and that he only worked on non-competes, not union busting as a private lawyer. Crooksy pretty much admits everything. Or just says it doesn’t matter.
Blogs aren’t the real world. This blog will not move voters next year. Maybe a few of you won’t vote for one candidate or another over something I show, but my audience is in the thousands, and as I stated above, you live in lots of different districts. Basically 90% of you are here reading for politics. A few of you are here reading about the other topics, and you’re my favorites. Most of what I write on this blog is for my audience’s interest though, a bunch of politicos. Sometimes it really reaches a broader audience, of politicos who never met me before. That’s great. This blog can only serve as a guide to how to win an election, it’s not going to get it done on it’s own. That takes money and mass communication with voters. That is not happening here on this page.
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.
It’s Election Day. New Jersey and Virginia will elect Governors. New York City will elect a Mayor. There are state legislative races in a few states. Pennsylvania elects some judges, and maybe re-elects some too. Here in the Lehigh Valley we have Executive races in both counties and Mayoral races in Allentown and Bethlehem, kind of. Are my interested in all of these races? No. Honestly, some of them are probably over now. Others have my attention. What are they?
Will Mamdani reach 50% in New York City? As much as I hate this, the answer should be yes. He is the Democratic nominee in a city that is heavily Democratic. Also, despite what some folks might think, this is not the New York City of Ed Koch or Rudy Giuliani. It’s a very liberal place, one that is probably being pushed left by Trump. The post-Bloomberg city (which is wildly misinterpreted in many ways) isn’t really looking to moderate. Oh sure, Adams did win four years ago, when he beat a collection of also rans and never was. Mamdani is problematic and offensive to me in many ways. The truth is, he’s not to the residents there. AND his opponent is Andrew Cuomo. I think Cuomo would do a better job as Mayor. No one is begging for his return to power in New York though. If he wanted to vindicate himself, he should have stayed in office and fought during the allegations, every prosecutor but one ran away from the report (and that one got dismissed at the first hearing). He didn’t though, and that implies there was some fire to the smoke. He’s damaged goods. Mamdani hitting 50% or not is the interesting part to me, I don’t buy the late polls showing Cuomo surging into the race. I’d love it if he beat this guy, but that ain’t happening.
How many seats do Democrats pick up in the Virginia legislature? I was told by someone who knows that the Virginia Dems are now playing in districts as red as R+10. They probably won’t win those, but if they’re winning out as far as R+5, it’s a sign that the Republicans are in very bad shape for next year. For geographic context, this would mean Democrats winning in places like the Richmond suburbs or the western exurbs of DC. I’d be surprised, but if it’s true, it’s the canary in the coal mine.
What does the red and blue on the map of California look like for Proposition 50? This might not make a lot of sense to you right now, but California moved substantially more red in 2024. Trump did the best of his three runs there. Now, he lost the state handily and particularly got battered in the coastal areas, but he did better. Almost the entirety of the inland areas went for Trump last year and it stretched further towards the coast than normal. Proposition 50 would counteract Republican efforts to gerrymander southern and midwestern red states by re-districting California to eliminate most of the GOP’s seats there. California is one of the biggest delegations the GOP has, even with Texas and Florida gerrymandered. That’s going to end tomorrow, but do they show any life, or are the lights going out there.
Is New Jersey too blue for a MAGA Republican? Setting aside the fact that I think Mikie Sherill has better ideas and excellent experience to be Governor, she didn’t run a great campaign. They tried to run a heavily bio driven campaign, leaning on her credentials as a fighter pilot and woman. That’s so 2018. She’s smart enough and has the right values, but her campaign lacked a North Star, most voters don’t know why and what she wants to do in January. People don’t love over qualified, smart candidates, and let’s be honest, they’re more harsh on women for this. Jack Ciattarelli made clear that he wants to undo the Murphy Administration and he’s the change candidate. Look, that’s easy when you’re the nominee of the party out of power. With that all said, let’s just say he did the mechanics of campaigning better, which is kind of understandable in his second run. He made one gigantic mistake though in so far as I can tell, he took the endorsement of Donald Trump. Trump did way better in New Jersey in 2024, and still lost by 9%. He’d probably lose worse in the 2025 electorate. So even though Ciattarelli may have won “the campaign,” does that matter at all anymore? My guess is no. I’d bet she wins by 3-5%. If she wins by more, maybe literally nothing at all mattered.
Forget the Virginia Governor race unless the result is jaw dropping, who wins the Lt. Governor and Attorney General races? Winsome Earle-Sears missed the memo about the 2024 Election. Part of the reason the “trans issue” popped the way it did against Kamala Harris is she was on video talking about it in a way the public disagreed with. Earle-Sears has run her race on social issues that Virginia voters just aren’t much interested in, and because of that Abigail Spanberger is going to crush her and become Governor. Spanberger wins by at least 7% tonight, and the only real question is if it’s more than 10%. That race wasn’t really interesting, as a good candidate beat a bad one. The fun was in the Lt. Governor and Attorney General races. The Lt. Governor’s race will either elect a Muslim woman, born in India or a gay Republican man. The Republican nominee, John Reid, drew the ire of the state’s Republican Governor, who called on him to drop out when his sexually explicit Tumblr account surfaced in the Spring. Honestly, I’ll pontificate a bit here, Reid should lose for many other reasons, but not that. State Senator Ghazala Hashmi, the Democrat, holds a narrow lead, but doesn’t quite hit 50%. I’m definitely watching that race. That’s an undercard compared to the Attorney General’s race. Incumbent Republican Jason Miyares has been accused of being Trump’s lapdog. Democrat Jay Jones sent texts to a colleague talking about killing the former Republican Speaker of the Virginia House and his kids. Honestly, it’s pretty disgusting. Virginians should not be proud, but I guess they have to choose one of these guys. Of course I’m interested in that.
Are we seeing the future in Pennsylvania? Retention votes were never overly competitive in Pennsylvania. I sincerely hope tomorrow’s is not, because it would basically put us in a permanent state of war over these seats. If this race is close, it suggests that this is our new normal though. I think the permanent campaign is part of why we’re in this national mess. I fear it’s our destiny.
Does anything happen in New Jersey? There’s a lot of folks who will privately tell you nothing will happen in the Garden State’s elections tomorrow. Sherill will win and virtually no seats will switch hands in the legislature. That’s not a bad thing if you’re a Democrat.
Who will win the Lehigh Valley’s County Executive races? As goes PA-7, so goes the nation. A Democratic sweep tomorrow will mean bad things for Ryan Mackenzie next year. Unless we screw it up, and pick a bad candidate.
Apocalypse Vibes 