Key takeaways:
Tuesday’s blue wave has washed over us, swallowing New York. For a state that’s used to being a bit of the center of things, we are decidedly not the focus of national attention this week. That would first of all be Texas, where it’s fair to say that we’ve seen a shocking, generational reorientation.
Not only did James Talarico win the open U.S. Senate seat, fulfilling what had seemed like a pipe dream even when the charismatic Beto O’Rourke came close eight years ago, but Gina Hinojosa defeated incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and Democrats even look on track to flip the Texas House, a series of results that would have seemed unthinkable to me even 48 hours ago. Nathan Johnson handily defeated his Republican challenger for the Texas attorney general’s office, neutralizing what had long been a sort of clearinghouse for conservative legal agitation like the effort to ban certain abortion-related drugs nationwide.
Elsewhere, Democrats won Senate races in Ohio, Iowa, South Carolina, North Carolina, even Kansas. It is possible that the Dem Senate candidate wins in Mississippi. Mississippi. The last Democratic senator to serve in Mississippi was John C. Stennis, a Dixiecrat who supported Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential bid and voted against the Civil Rights Acts. Across the country, this was not just an election but an inflection point in American political history, one whose full implications we will only understand in the next weeks, months and years.
Not the main story, but key to Congress
Within all that, our little Empire State got a bit lost in the conversation, devoid as it was of any big election shockers. That doesn’t mean, though, that there’s nothing to be said about New York in this election and this new political paradigm. Gov. Kathy Hochul crushed Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman by 20 points to win a second full term after what was seen as a worryingly thin margin of six points four years ago. She even beat Blakeman narrowly in Nassau itself, as well as in Suffolk, the other Long Island county. In 2022, when a projected red wave failed to materialize and Democrats out-performed expectations nationally, it was Long Island that saw its own mini red wave, with the GOP picking up enough seats there to form its razor-thin House majority. Things didn’t exactly fully swing back, but Republicans lost ground in these NYC suburbs, including some state senate seats that are projected to become part of a new veto-proof supermajority for Democrats in the body, a level of dominance they had lost in 2024.
I had cautioned in the aftermath of the 2024 vote against seeing those results as evidence of some fundamental and lasting reorientation of New York politics, and it appears I was right. I think that’s a lesson that had to be learned about Trump’s own victory, too. A lot of pundits strove to represent his slim triumph – during a global anti-incumbent wave driven at least in part by post-pandemic inflation – as some complete shift in political sentiment against the Obama-Biden liberal consensus and in favor of Trump’s authoritarianism and crude transactionalism. Business leaders, political leaders and parts of civil society — ranging from some news media to arts organizations, law firms and nonprofits — decided to bend the knee early on, agreeing to pay Trump to settle lawsuits, agreeing to burdensome federal oversight and so on, all of which only looks even more embarrassing and tactically misguided now.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani was not, of course, on the ballot himself, but it strikes me that he had some impact on the broader political landscape. Over the past 11 months, I think the mayor has been able to embody what some people are calling a “you can just do things” administration; that is, he’s taking action on promises to make New Yorkers’ lives not only more affordable but more enjoyable, from the rollout of expanded childcare programs to small-bore but flashy initiatives like giving away Broadway tickets to people who could not necessarily otherwise afford them. He has the benefit of being the mayor in a city where the mayor has unusually broad executive powers, but what this has helped demonstrate nationally is that, all the scary commie talk aside, his brand of democratic socialism is to a large extent about using government power to materially improve lives through social programs and public benefits, something that seems a lot less frightening to people in practice than in theory. I don’t think Mamdani is the reason that, say, Troy Jackson defeated Republican Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, but I do think he helped defang some of MAGA’s culture war agitation, which is the only card they really had left. All of the “[insert candidate] is for they/them, not you” ads seem to have done nothing for GOP candidates.
Accountability or affordability?
New York is also, of course, where both likely legislative leaders hail from (and, despite his official change of address to Florida, the president). I don’t want to say that it’s a done deal, and there have long been grumblings about efforts to shake things up, but I would honestly be shocked if Chuck Schumer and particularly Hakeem Jeffries don’t end up as Senate majority leader and House Speaker, respectively (though plenty of shocking things have happened as of late). Interestingly, they seem to have taken somewhat different rhetorical tacks in the immediate aftermath of the midterms, with Jeffries telling MS Now that “the American people don’t want us to get even,” meaning that his caucus would be focused on affordability rather than things like impeachment. Many people interpreted that as pouring cold water on the prospect of focused and aggressive congressional investigations of the sort I wrote about last week. Schumer, meanwhile, was much more pugnacious, saying the “days of Trump’s supplicant Senate are over” and pledging to “launch investigations, take [Trump] to court, and entangle him in legislative razor wire.”
This was a surprise given how, while both are generally cautious politicians, Jeffries has been the more direct challenger to Trump over the past couple of years. Still, it’s very early days and we’ll have to see how things develop as they navigate their own leadership elections, and each will have the power independently to investigate the administration (or not) to the extent they choose. For what it’s worth, I think Jeffries’ initial impulse is wrong here; this kind of wave is the product at least in part of anger that will need to be satisfied. Voters are mad at Trump and his MAGA movement. Those who weren’t mad before have been moved to anger by high prices, by the Epstein files, by war in Iran, by Trump’s limitless corruption and so on. They want to see consequences, and moreover, it was the lack of consequences after Trump’s attempted coup that culminated in the Jan. 6 riots enabled him to reemerge and wreak havoc. As was demonstrated in Brazil, where the son of former president Jair Bolsanaro was defeated in a runoff election almost four years after his father’s failed coup attempt, democratic societies only survive by holding even the powerful to account.
Beyond Jeffries, NYC is sending Brad Lander, Claire Valdez and Darializa Ávila Chevalier to the House, where they will join fellow progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the city’s delegation. It goes to show how political identities in Congress have shifted that legislators who a few years ago would have made national headlines as likely members of a small squad of progressive House members are now just a few more faces in a growing crowd. If anything, the blue wave may have lessened their influence; with almost 260 seats, Jeffries can afford to lose a lot of progressives and still get things done in a way outgoing House Speaker Mike Johnson could not afford to lose any MAGA legislators. Still, I think that after a few years on the relative periphery, progressives will be a central bloc in this Congress.
