Democrats get down and a little bit dirty

Tuesday was a coast-to-coast festival for the party that's supposed to be obsolete.

New Jersey governor-elect Mikie Sherrill

The depth and breath of what happened at the ballot box Tuesday can be symbolized by Jay Jones.

He is a Democrat and was running against incumbent Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares. He was favored to beat Miyares, a typical MAGA culture-enforcer, until Oct 3, when the National Review unearthed some texts.

Jones had endorsed the idea that former Virginia House speaker Todd Gilbert should be shot. The question was that if you had two bullets and you had Gilbert, Pol Pot and HItler together, what do you do? “Spoiler: Put Gilbert in the crew with the two worst people you know and he receives both bullets every time.”

Jones actually tried to explain this. He said that not only should Gilbert die, but that Gilbert’s wife Jennifer should watch her own child die so that Gilbert would reconsider his views on gun violence.

Later, he declared that the Gilberts were “breeding little fascists” and that if Republican legislators were to pass away, he would “piss on their graves.”

Even before that Jones had barged over the line of disqualification. He had made a deal for 1,000 hours of community service after he was convicted for reckless driving, but then devoted half of those hours on behalf of his own political action committee.

In a sane world, he’s gone, right? How much worse were those texts than Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tape?

But Jones had learned from Trump. He didn’t quit. And nobody made him. Abigail Spanberger, running for governor, called the whole thing “abhorrent” but did not disassociate herself, and indeed Jones appeared with President Obama and Sen. Tim Kaine. The urge for victory eclipsed the conscience of the party.

Jones lost his polling lead, but then rebounded. On Tuesday he beat Miyares by six points. Even then he looked like a slacker, since Spanberger won by 14 points, the largest Democratic margin in that race since 1961 when Virginia Republicans were as rare as blue herons. State Sen. Ghazala Hashmi became lieutenant governor, and the first Muslim woman to win a statewide election anywhere, by a 10-point margin. Democrats gained 13 seats in the state assembly and now have a 64-36 majority.

And the Democrats spread a tent big enough for Jay Jones. Those who rebuked the Republicans for standing behind Roy Moore and Herschel Walker proved they’ve learned GOP techniques about dodging shame.

The Democrats milked Tuesday to the final drop. They validated the polls that said Americans aren’t wild about higher prices, White House demolitions, Border Patrol thugs stealing children and a stripping-down of government services and jobs. They also mocked the pundits that tried to tell us the Democrats were like some wounded battleship, leaking oil in the Gulf of Indecision. The planners of the first NASA launch probably didn’t have as many meetings as the Democrats have had since last Election Day. Too liberal? Not liberal enough? Shouldn’t we be trying to find more truck drivers and short-order cooks to run for the Senate and for President, since they represent the Real People? Why didn’t Kamala Harris spend more hours on frat-boy podcasts, and endure genitalia jokes and verbal beer pong? Isn’t that where America lives?

The answers came Tuesday, from coast to coast.

Rep. Mikie Sherrill, the same type of down-the-middle Democrat that Spanberger is, was supposed to be struggling to beat Jack Ciattarelli in the New Jersey’s governor’s race. Ciattarelli had come within three points of Gov. Phil Murphy three years ago. Instead, Sherrill won by a poll-busting 13 points.

Three Democratic Supreme Court justices in Pennsylvania were under the gun, up for recall, thanks to a campaign funded by billionaire Jeff Yass. Not only did they survive, they all got at least 62 percent of the vote.

Now sit down and transport yourself back to March of 2020, when New York governor Andrew Cuomo was reassuring his COVID-fearing constituents every morning. What were the odds that, five years later, he would run for mayor of New York and get dunked upon by a socialist from Uganda?

Yet Zohran Mamdani won by eight points, then delivered a withering speech that wished Cuomo “happiness in his private life” but said this should be “the last night I utter his name.”

Actually the first name Mamdani uttered was that of Eugene Debs, who ran for President five times as a socialist. Then Mamdani slyly referred to a former politician who said candidates “campaign in poetry but govern in prose,” without mentioning that the politician was Mario Cuomo, Andrew’s father.

The Blue kept spreading like a Dodger rally in the ninth. Maine rejected two Republican-based measures that would have complicated voting. Georgia elected two Democrats to the Public Service Commission. Mississippi broke a GOP super-majority in the state Senate.

Fifty-eight percent of Colorado voters decided to tax the wealthy in order to fund a healthy meals program in public schools.

And, last but not least, Gavin Newsom’s Proposition 50 rolled to victory and will help even up the gerrymandering mischief triggered by Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. More astounding than the 64 percent majority was the total vote, over eight million with 25 percent still to be counted, and the fact that the networks called the race about two seconds after the polls closed.

Yes, the voters are digesting the news, and not all from YouTube or TikTok. And in California they stood in long lines to vote for one issue, a procedural one at that.

It is true that Trump was not on the ballot. For once, that might have been a break for the Republicans. And it’s also true that most of the activity happened in blue states. The only real MAGA victories came in local elections on Long Island.

Reliably the New York Times headlined the night as a good one for a “beleaguered party.” Hey, don’t be afraid to let go of those narratives. They aren’t innertubes; you won’t drown. You weren’t a hip political journalist if you didn’t yawn over the “boring” campaigns Spanberger and Sherrill were executing. Boring? Most of us would crave a boring month or so, or a day when we actually don’t see or hear the President. “The voters are exhausted,” said Michael Steele on MSNBC, although not too exhausted to vote.

The truth is that the Democrats have had maybe one really bad day in the past five years, and that was last Election Day, and it could have been far worse. Trump’s popular vote margin was a point and a half over a candidate who only got the reins in mid-July and was too timid to step away from President Biden. Elissa Slotkin, Jackie Rosen, Ruben Gallego and Tammy Baldwin all won close Senate races for the Democrats.

In all special legislative elections this year Democrats have exceeded their Presidential election performance by an average margin of 14.1 percent. In Iowa State Senate District 35, Democrat Mike Zimmer won by four points. Trump carried that district by 24 last year.

The hand-wringing over finding a “face” of the party is just classic D.C. nonsense. There is no shortage of appealing faces and quality candidates. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer is routinely knocked for dealing with Trump to add a new mission to Selfridge Air National Guard base, i.e., doing what governors are supposed to do. If she wants to run she’ll have widespread support and star power.

And if she doesn’t, there’s Newsom and Gallego and Pete Buttigieg and Josh Shapiro and Mark Kelly and Andy Beshear and J.B. Pritzker and who knows? There’s at least a possibility the Dems will have another good night in next year’s mid-terms, provided Speaker Mike Johnson actually lets the winners be seated, and the buzz will follow. Some of us are old enough to remember when Michelle Bachman, Carly Fiorina, Jon Huntsman, Amy Klobuchar, and Rick Santorum were getting the Beltway closeup.

When asked about the “face” problem, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez immediately replied that the party itself is a multitude of faces. Mamdani and Beshear are both Democrats. Beshear would excite nobody in New York, and it’s hard to imagine Mamdani charming coal miners in Kentucky (although he just might). But it’s not MAGA. There’s no catechism from which all Democrats must read. The baseline is this: Do you think we’re all in this together, or do you believe in Hunger Games government? As long as MAGA continues to attack Americans it doesn’t like or recognize, the number of Democrats (and Americans) on the plus side will flourish. There is plenty of room for debate and disagreement within that number.

Look at the frenetic, unthinkable events since Jan. 20 and you’ll know that only a fool will predict what can or can’t happen next. We could have battalions in Venezuela; we could have riots in Washington. We could be fiddling while Kiev burns. Or crime could spike upward, as it does in hard times, and harden MAGA sentiments.

But you can’t look at Tuesday’s results, or the stony refusal of any congressional Democrats to crack under GOP pressure, and think that Democrats are an endangered or even retreating species. Tuesday night they even closed ranks behind Jay Jones, thus proving they’re not only willing to give up an eye in the fight, but a soul.