About last night’s election results, my mind holds two different narratives.
For those who haven’t followed: Democrats racked up wide margins for Virginia and New Jersey governor. Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won NYC mayor with huge turnout and 75% of the youth vote. Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 50 won 64-36 in California. Down-ballot, Democrats won statewide and local races in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere by wide margins.
One narrative is that MAGA without Trump fails. This narrative echoes how many of us felt before the 2016 election. In that time, the “Obama coalition” of liberalizing white suburbanites, Black people, Latinos, and Asians was chipping away at—and promised to eventually overwhelm—the GOP “Southern strategy” coalition of businessmen and rural racists. Trump’s shocking 2016 win upended that view, but it was never clear whether, or to what extent, Trump’s base was a dangerous expansion of the 2010 Tea Party racist backlash, or simply an allegiance to one singular faux-populist strongman.
With the 2024 election, that puzzle became more complicated: The GOP made huge inroads with Latino voters. There was a solid shift to the right nationwide, and a devastating shift in heavily Latino counties.
But again, it wasn’t clear whether this was simply and solely about Trump.
Comparing last night’s results to last year’s election, it seems that—without Trump on the ballot—county-by-county voting patterns bounced back to the pattern that favors the Obama coalition. Latino counties went back to being reliably Democratic. Educated “independent” suburbanites hedged their support for local MAGA candidates.
This pattern bodes well for 2026 and 2028. It supports the narrative that MAGA without Trump fails. It supports the idea that the underlying progressive-centrist coalition—the coalition that passed the American Rescue Plan Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, the coalition that restored the Paris Agreement and established Juneteenth—is intact. Trump is done as a candidate. Once we get back in power, these important changes to government and economy can be restored and expanded.
(Many on the left exclude themselves from this Democratic coalition—they are strangely uninterested in equality, the climate crisis, child poverty, and health care access whenever these issues are effectively addressed by Democrats in power.)
The other narrative is that of generational change and activism. Young people are embracing the idea that life under capitalism is mostly crappy and the purpose of government is to make it less crappy by providing economic security and universal human rights. Mamdani carried that message and won with it, won by a large margin. I have the feeling that educated independent suburbanites weren’t really with him. He benefited from having a truly loathsome opponent. I doubt the strategy that just won in NYC will travel well.
At the same time, Mamdani’s brand of democratic socialism is exactly where we need to go to address the multiple crises engendered by an economic system that becomes more outdated and more inhuman with each passing day. Right-wingers and many self-styled “centrists” are excoriating New Yorkers for electing him. They have reason to do so. Once working people see how much better life is with fast and free busses, free childcare, and rent freezes, there may be no end to what they demand from capital.
