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Notes -
Who else up watching election results? As of the time of this writing Decision Desk has called all of:
The Virginia governor race in favor of Abigail Spanberger (D).
The Virginia lieutenant governor race in favor of Ghazala Hashmi (D and the first Muslim woman elected to statewide office).
The Virginia Attorney General race in favor of Jay Jones (D lmao).
The New Jersey governor race in favor of Mickie Sherrill (D).
The NYC mayoral race for Zohran Mamdani (D, projecting a majority of the vote too lmao).
Both statewide Georgia Public Service Commissioner races for the Democratic candidates.
Polls are still open in California so no word yet there on the redistricting ballot measure. In other Jay Jones news the house delegate who leaked his texts is on track to lose her re-election, as part of dems winning a trifecta in the Virginia government.
The county by county level results I've seen show pretty much all of the above running ahead of Harris and Spanberger even running ahead of Biden in 2020. Is this indicative of what we might see going forward? Dems had previously overperformed in special elections this year but this is the closest to a general until next years actual federal elections. If these trends hold up not a good sign for Republicans!
How does that fit into a wider context? I see 7/7 Democrat wins. Were there just seven meaningful races? Were they expected to go D regardless of the current trends? Anything special about any of those races?
Jay Jones's win -- and lackluster to nonexistent pushback from the 'moderate centrist's -- is pretty radicalizing.
Guys, are users here surprised by this outcome? I don't think you should conclude that over half of residents in Virginia want you personally dead. You should conclude that most of them know nothing about this text scandal that only the Motte and Twitter know about, but they know about every single time ICE tackled a protestor.
The mainstream media has been hammering the Trump administration's every move. I listen to breathless NPR coverage every morning, and they're complaining about something new and "unprecedented" literally every single day. People actually think Republicans shut down the government on purpose just to specifically repeal Obamacare subsidies, instead of letting them expire when the law said that they would expire. How could Virginia ever, ever have had any other outcome in this election?
The traditional media channels still have a say in what people think about and talk about, and they do not want you to be happy with the Trump administration.
To quote myself 29 days ago:
The meme would be I'm not surprised, I'm just disappointed, but I didn't have the hope for that. I'm mostly just trying not to become a ball of rage.
Trump was not on the ballot this year. Jaye's opponent was not campaigning -- nor was -- a MAGA Trumpist. Neither would have any power over immigration law or enforcement. There is near-unprecedented access, bought at no small cost, for information outside of the mainstream media and NPR cloister, at the same time that the broader progressive movement is crowing about the importance of Not Ignoring Evil. Jone's comments even got some mainstream attention.
The best-case scenario would hold that despite all those unprecedented (and likely unstable) advantages and uniquely bad behaviors, it wasn't enough. Indeed, it turned out to be enough not enough that it mattered less than past scandals in the same state.
But, worse, that's a prediction that would predict side effects. 'If only the average voter knew' runs headfirst into what we're imagining that the average voter would do if they did know. And some of them did. Optimistically, maybe one-in-ten? Forget anyone running out into the street and screaming into the sky like a Charlton Heston outtake, forget any member of the Abundance Caucus speaking against the man without being pushed about him first. You'd expect to see someone horrified.
So then the next best-case scenario's that everyone just thought it hyperbole, or joke. But then you look at everybody that thought it funny when Kirk was murdered...
But no. They don't 'want' me dead. They don't even know me! It'd just be funny afterward.
You should have told that to Miyares before the election because that's what he campaigned on. He doesn't have an Issues section of his website, but he does have an Accomplishments section, which he divides into four sections. One is law enforcement and one is immigration. Another one is the opiate epidemic, which is fine, but that's par for the course among people running for AG regardless of party. The other is protecting children, by which he mostly means the Loudon County school incident but also includes a few other non-culture war things. Even with the normal AG stuff he could only offer half a loaf because there was nothing about fraud and corporate malfeasance, which, I don't know his record and Jones attacked him for being too friendly to big business, so maybe there were people he didn't want to piss off.
As for the Trump stuff, it was even worse than @KennethAlmquist points out. The centerpiece of Jones's campaign was that Miyares sat idly by when Trump was running roughshod over the state and didn't bother joining in lawsuits that other AGs were filing. In particular, he didn't join in the one that argued that Federal employees were wrongfully terminated, the result of which was the employees got reinstated in other states but not in Virginia. I don't have to tell you that there are more Federal employees in Virginia than in most other places. Miyares had no response to this, and when confronted drifted into his normal mode of attacking Jone's liberal legislative record and lack of experience as a prosecutor, which is fine when you're winning but doesn't cut it when you're behind. Jones was able to successfully paint Miyares as more loyal to Trump than to Virginians, and it was a fatal blow.
I'd say that most of them knew because Miyares wouldn't shut up about it, to the point that he'd use it as a crutch and bring it up when confronted with a question he couldn't respond to. Miyares, however, had the misfortune of representing a party that has spent the better part of the past decade defending statements from Trump that would have previously been undefendable all the while bemoaning cancel culture and the alleged erosion of free speech. To be fair, at first the Republican establishment did condemn him and try to end his career, but once he secured the nomination these condemnations gradually turned to excuses, and then justifications, and finally admissions that they really didn't give a shit. Republicans are well past the point where they can credibly say that this is the point where they draw the line. Do you seriously think that if similar texts from Trump came to light a month before last year's election that the GOP establishment would be tripping over themselves to endorse Harris? Do you think his voters abandon him en masse? Do you think Trump even apologizes? I think you know the answer to this one.
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I didn’t follow the race (I don’t live in Virginia), but if DuckDuckGo is to be believed, the only mention of Donald trump on Jason Miyares’ campaign website is in a Washington Post piece that was copied to the website. Nothing condemning the fake electors scheme (which he presumably knew about when he campaigned for Donald Trump in 2024). Nothing condemning the use of the Justice Department to go after his enemies. Low level cases like the prosecution of Sydney Reid (which I assume Trump had no knowledge of but which likely is the consequences of his personnel choices and the tone he sets) also go unmentioned.
So Miyares wasn’t campaigning as a MAGA Republican, but he also didn’t go out of his way to indicate that he would take his duty as attorney general to the law over the wishes of Donald Trump. Miyares was the only candidate in Virgina endorsed by Donald Trump. Miyares could have refused to accept the endorsement; he didn’t.
Someone running for attorney general can’t plausibly claim to have no interest in what Trump is doing to the Department of Justice and the rule of law, so silence looks like complicity. Another way to look at this is that if somebody is running for office, they either define themselves forcefully or risk letting other people define them.
That's a defense that would undermine Spanbergler, nevermind Jones, and notably it didn't. Neither could forcefully define themselves as the not-killing-kids (and committing hilarious frauds, if we're going to pretend 'rule of law' matters).
Dem voters just didn't care.
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