This last November 4, the Dems had a good day: They won the mayor’s race in NYC; Cuomo’s political career has now ended. They won the only governors’ races in NJ and VA. And Proposition 50 passed in CA. And all those wins were by wide margins!
The “fucking moron” in the White House wasn’t pleased, of course, because all those electoral campaigns were essentially “stick it to Trump” contests. You could only improve on those results if the leader of the Fascist Party of America would have an apoplexy-driven stroke and died.
But will all those Dem successes continue to occur in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential race?
Let’s look at the candidates involved. The new NYC mayor will be about as far left as they come compared to the more moderate left-of-center new governors. The CA result, largely engineered by California’s current governor, depended on that politician sitting somewhere in between. The Dems will need a very wide tent again to include this wide political spectrum.
The CA campaign was of course a necessary response to Texas and other red states trying to rig the midterm elections to get more fascist House reps, a tactic suggested by the fascist Trump and his MAGA minions. Yes, the ass who complained about the 2020 election being rigged is trying to rig 2026 election results because he knows a Dem US Congress can (and will!) stop his fascist takeover of America in its tracks—he knows he’ll not get a damn thing done during his last two years!
Gerrymandering is one clear negative to come out of the November 4 election results, but Narcissus le Grand forced Dems to answer Texas and other red states’ attempts to rig the 2026 elections. It will further divide the country when we need so much to come together to save it, not with fascism but with an old-fashioned but necessary bipartisan give and take leading to consensus. Gerrymandering is equivalent to House reps choosing their voters, not the other way around like it should be; but if that’s what the Fascist Party of America wants, Dems must answer fire with fire for democracy to even have a chance of surviving.
Extremism is the bane of any democracy, and America’s has a shitload of that now: One side in a democracy always loses when this occurs. The NYC mayoral result is a big negative in that sense; the two gubernatorial results big positives, because left-of-center candidates won, leaving some room for reasonable compromise.
Of course, our fascist in the White House can continue to wave his middle finger at Congress and the courts as he tears apart the US Constitution with his insane executive orders and wastes taxpayers’ money defending his crazy fascist policies in court. The November 4 results won’t change any of that.
In fact, Dems shouldn’t celebrate those electoral results too much. Once fascists win a few battles on route to destroying a democracy, it’s hard to recover from the losses using only democracy’s tools, basically elections and willing legislative and judicial branches. (The last aren’t willing anymore, of course.) American fascists have successfully corrupted all those tools!
The fascist train in the US already had a full head of steam before November 4. A few patriotic heroes on the track probably can’t stop that evil train. We must all come together and derail the damn thing before it’s too late. Our future midterm and presidential elections will be the determining factors of whether democracy in America can truly be saved. Last November 4 only offered a small glimmer of hope for that possibility.