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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.
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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