It's OK To Feel A Little Elated About The Elections, For A Treat
It's a long way to November 2026. Keep your joy reserves full!
Democrats (and California’s big voter initiative to defend against Texas’s GOP gerrymander) romped through the off-season elections Tuesday, and by Crom, it was good to see. As usual, there’s a lot of day-after “four-to-seven takeaways from the election” punditry about what it all means and where to go from here, and some of it is quite good, especially this Perry Bacon piece at New Republic.
Here’s my takeaway from the takeaways: In the long year between now and the 2026 midterms, we’re really going to have to remember how good yesterday felt as we work toward throwing out the current Trump-licking Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Yes, yes, there is lots of organizing, strategic decisions, and numbers-deciphering that will go into the 2026 campaign; I’m not discounting the quantitative side of campaigning. But I’d also like to put in a word for that “hopey-changey thing” that vicious old hate-biddy Sarah Palin mocked, because it matters a hell of a lot when you’re fighting something as monstrous as the Trump machine.
There’s going to be lot of shit to slog through between now and the midterms, and the Trump machine has made very clear it will do all it can to restrict voting wherever it can. That’s why we need to remind ourselves of how fucking good it feels to see our fellow Americans rejecting the politics of nastiness and hypocrisy that MAGA revels in.
Trumpworld runs on ugly vibes, to the exclusion of what some of us still insist on calling “objective reality.” To win against all that nihilism, we don’t necessarily need to abandon reality in favor of different, better vibes. But there’s a strong case to be made that sticking to the familiar consultant-driven “let’s talk kitchen table issues” strategy won’t work in a post-reality world, no matter how much we want to cling to the idea that politics is about making the best argument.
The end of a world that makes sense, meanwhile, has driven the left insane: Exasperated liberals jab at charts and graphs and facts and figures and pretend any of it matters anymore. After a decade of being Leslie Knope lost in the jungle facing down the Predator, left-leaning parties still think there’s a way to engage in good-faith talks with the Predator if it would only ingest enough data quantifying what is and is not real.
We don’t have to give up on reality, but we should also acknowledge that for most voters, charts and graphs are boring. God knows I wrote a lot of “Actually, the economy is doing pretty good under Joe Biden” pieces that didn’t even move the needle much here at Wonkette, because to lots of Americans, the “Bidenomics is working” message didn’t feel real. Last year, a critical chunk of the electorate decided that maybe the lying fascist who danced weirdly was worth voting for, because he promised to bring down prices, didn’t he?
This year, the vibes are similar, but working against Trump because nope, he didn’t bring prices down, and actively made things worse with his stupid tariffs. Exit polls in all four of the states with the big off-year races found voters’ top concern was the economy. Zohran Mamdani kept his focus on affordability throughout his campaign for New York mayor, and despite the advice of centrist squishes that Democrats should throw LGBTQ+ people, undocumented folks, and abortion rights under the bus, he won without compromising on basic human rights, because his campaign focused on making life more affordable for New Yorkers without leaving anyone behind.
Do you know what it's called when a politician stands tall and refuses to back down in the face of pressure to do a politically convenient thing? It's called vibes. […]
Mamdani's vibes have invigorated parts of the New York voting population that would have never been enthusiastic about a replacement-level Democratic candidate who begged folks to get excited about their campaign's latest economic bar graph, now with a vibrant blue hew. Vibes inspire. Vibes motivate.
That worked great with New York City voters, but the takeaway isn’t that Democrats need to start adopting Mamdani’s policies, but to run optimistic, inclusive campaigns that push back against the meanness and division that Trump and his sycophants have been pushing. In Virginia and New Jersey, Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill might not have won by adopting the issues Mamdani did, but they absolutely benefited from rejecting the overwhelmingly negative, fear-based messaging of Trumpism.
In Virginia especially, we saw that just a year after Trump’s campaign capitalized on fearful messaging about transgender people, Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears got nowhere with similar fearmongering. She lost to Spanberger by 15 percentage points, after more than 57 percent of Republican ad spending in Virginia went toward anti-trans messaging. Democrats also took nearly two-thirds of the seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates, largely on the strength of voters’ pervasive rejection of Trumpism.
Hilariously, at least some MAGA Chuds seem to be clinging to the idea that they lost Tuesday because their candidates were somehow not heartless enough. A Fox News “takeaways” piece echoes Trump’s own narcissistic conclusion that Republicans only lost because he wasn’t on the ballot to bring out the wackaloon faithful.
The Fox piece approvingly quotes this opinion from Twitter (archive link), although it misattributes the opinion to GOP strategist Chris LaCivita when it was a whole different rightwing Trumpnugget, Alex Bruesewitz, who was apparently the brain behind “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” last year. Bruesewitz sighed and lamented that this year’s Republican candidates were insufficiently committed to Sparkle Fascism, explaining,
“Candidate quality matters. Tonight was a great lesson for the Republican Party: running squishy Rs who are lukewarm on Trump and MAGA, even in ‘purple’ states, doesn’t work.” Your candidate needs to be able to turn out ALL FACTIONS of our party, and they do that by being MAGA all the way.”
Well gosh, if the GOP wants to double down on being awful, then hell yes, let’s spend the next year not only being anti-Trump, but actively presenting a positive, inclusive worldview to counter it. And that doesn’t mean we can’t also be mean as we need to, like pointing how fucking weird these weirdos are. And as is my wont, I will once again close with the advice of the Sainted Molly Ivins:
So keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.
And if you feel the need to show off a chart or a graph, fine, indulge yourselves, but keep the focus on the good vibes. And mean it.
[New Republic / Bad Faith Times / NPR / Erin in the Morning / Fox News]
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I am deeply disappointed in the lack of sandwich puns in this thread. I was expecting much more cheesiness from the Wonketariat.
We see it way too much even around here. Some of y'all really don't know how to just enjoy a win.