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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!
I am pretty happy about Mamdani. I have a somewhat radical opinion about democracy that is rarely held in the intelligentsia circles - that if voters want something, let them have it. The other thing that said circles never learn is - don't talk down to the voters. They have no choice but to vote Cuomo - guess what they did have a choice. And it was not voting for Cuomo.
The squeals of the anti Mamdani factions are a balm on the soul. And the ADL worst nightmare seems to be coming true - antisemitic as a label is sliding into indifference. Which is kinda amusing when right now for the first time in probably 60 years in the West there is proper 14 karat antisemitism showing its head.
I do hope that he will be able to hurt NY City enough to push things toward R in 2026 and 2028, but I doubt it - the mayor just doesn't have that many powers to ruin something that fast.
I wasn't really paying attention to the NY election race, but for some of the World Series I was watching the Fox NY stream - and boy oh boy were some of the ads airing totally unhinged.
I'm vaguely aware that Mamdani is a sort of DSA-type, so I think it's fairly safe to bet policy-wise he's a bit out there, but also won't accomplish much. But it's hard not to root for him a little given the kind of frothing, incoherent rage he was generating.
I only saw bits of some ads online, and "unhinged" was a thought that came to my mind as well, reminiscent of the type of things thrown at Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024, which ostensibly helped him get elected in 2/3 of those cases. The past decade or so, I'd been worried that President AOC was going to be the Dems' President Trump, but it looks like Mamdani being that might be more likely. The Republicans might MDS their way into creating enough political will to change the Constitution to allow someone naturalized into US citizenship to become POTUS for the sake of Mamdani.
Mamdani has a position of real executive power unlike AOC who is just 1 of 435 legislators. Given he's a socialist, it's hard to believe he won't fuck it up. Even if he weren't ineligible I can't see him being a serious contender for President based on what I expect his record to be.
As much as I'm being tongue-in-cheek by taking how hot Mamdani's been the last 3 months and extending it out forward (then he'd be God Emperor of the Democratic People's Republic of Earth within the decade - but no one remains that hot in politics for that long, not even exceptions to exceptions to exceptions like Trump), I think this analysis is flawed.
Almost certainly he will fuck it up - by default because he's a politician, and even moreso because he's a socialist - but a politician's record doesn't matter for his electoral prospects; it's the perception of his record by the voters that matters. And I've been burned too many times underestimating just how far the distance between perception and reality can be, especially in politics, to bet that Mamdani's (predicted) poor record once he becomes NYC mayor will meaningfully affect his chances in future elections for bigger seats, relative to his apparent charisma to half the voters, along with his superior genetics and religion to much of that same half.
My prediction as of a couple weeks ago has been that once Mamdani wins and rules over NYC, to whatever extent he achieves his political promises, they won't effectively address the real thing that the policies are supposed to address, and this failure will entirely be blamed on Republicans and not-sufficiently-socialist-Democrats for not doing what their moral superiors have told them they ought to do, rather than Mamdani and his allies for simply having a poor understanding of how politics and economics work. Whether or not this assignment of blame is "fair" or "correct" for whatever those terms mean in this context, most high status journalism outlets will reinforce the notion that it is "correct" to enough of an extent that it will be the mainstream, default, "educated" opinion that Mamdani didn't fail, he was failed by an Islamophobic, racist, and probably transphobic populace/political machine that stood in his way even after he had used his sheer force of charisma and standing for Basic Human Decency to convince enough voters to elect him.
One major wrinkle (among many, I'm sure) in this prediction is that these high status journalists' credibility has been falling among the electorate and seems likely to continue, and so I could be overcorrecting from underestimating the future distance between perception and reality to overestimating it.
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I’m old enough to remember when people thought the Republicans might do this so that their own guy (Schwarzenegger) could run for president.
President Schwarzenegger would have been so so cool.
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