Small-d Democrats Fight Back

Hope is the theme I have tried to harp on all year, as the one constant during this new century of upheaval is that we are not condemned to our present fate, and the backlash to this fascist project is clear and obvious to anyone who understands how to read polls (so not Matt Yglesias and the abundance crew). It’s an important lesson that Democrats of all stripes should harness in the wake of their total annihilation of the Republican Party in elections across the country last night, because winning people’s vote is just the start of a journey to truly win voters over, not the end of it. This Democratic wipeout doubles as a cautionary tale about what happens when you prove to voters that you’re completely full of shit and can’t deliver on any of your promises.

All year long, Democrats have been winning low turnout special elections in some pretty eyebrow raising parts of the deep red country, and last night was the culmination of it. Even though America’s elite have proven themselves to be the most feckless, cowardly and greedy humans this species has ever produced, everyday people are still fighting for our democracy. Last night’s results should give you all the hope in the world, because history has proven we don’t need the gilded elite when we have each other, and we have the power and the democratic tools to bend them to our collective will. There will be battles on the left about whether Zohran Mamdani or former CIA agents are the best model for the Democratic Party going forward, but that is missing the forest for the trees. They both are for now because they beat the ever-living shit out of their Republican opponents.

All politics is local to some degree, and the nationalization of it these past couple of decades has really harmed the Democrats, especially in Senate races as rural idiosyncrasies got phased out for national caricatures the party didn’t push back against and even contributed to. The lesson from last night is that Democratic voters are more than willing to crawl over broken glass to vote out Republicans right now, and there are a lot of Democratic voters out there, including many who just voted for Trump a year ago. There is almost no good news for Republicans anywhere in America’s 2025 election night, and you should check out Bolts’ excellent election coverage to see the full scale of the blowout.

Strength In Numbers’ G. Elliot Morris plotted last night’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Georgia together, and he found that “Almost every single county moved to Dems” compared to 2024. New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won a difficult race where Andrew Cuomo garnered enough votes to defeat Eric Adams in 2021 and Bill de Blasio in 2013, but not a democratic socialist in 2025. Spineless Democrats who are horrified that people may like them and their GOP allies like Mike Johnson will argue that the state which flipped hardest towards Trump in 2024 is supposedly a bastion of socialism where Karl Marx’s corpse would win in a landslide, but the data proves otherwise. Andrew Cuomo, his dipshit billionaire backers frying their brains to a crisp on the Nazi microblogging site, late-shifting Sliwa Republican voters, and their conservative Democratic allies did a good job of turning out a conservative electorate to give the Democratic favorite a run for his money, yet the race was still called for Mamdani pretty much as soon as the first batch of votes came in.

while the story in Virginia and New Jersey was heavily one of relative turnout, with far more votes than usual coming from liberal areas, this was not the case in New York

Republicans showed up in pretty clearly greater numbers than Democrats, motivated to beat Mamdani

but they didn’t

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— Michael Caley (@michaelcaley.bsky.social) November 5, 2025 at 6:15 AM

“What happened last night is blue states and blue cities voted blue,” said Speaker Mike Johnson today, perhaps not realizing what he was admitting. “We all saw that coming. And no one should read too much into last night’s election results.”

Pennsylvania and Georgia are blue states? Man, that’s really bad news for the 2028 GOP presidential candidate. Even Mississippi? Yikes. We may be looking at an FDR or Reagan-style near-shutout then. Mike Johnson wants you to focus on Mamdani, California’s prop 50 redistricting effort passing, and the other two headlines of Virginia governor-elect Abigail Spanberger and New Jersey governor-elect Mikie Sherrill–and not Pennsylvania voters rejecting a GOP effort to remove three Democrats from the state Supreme Court. Or the widely assumed “bellwether races” for Georgia’s utility board that will inform next year’s Georgia elections for governor and U.S. Senate where two Republican members were upset by Democrats, as this will be first time since 2007 that a Democrat serves on this commission. Or how Democrats broke the Mississippi Republican Party’s 13-year supermajority in the state Senate, as voters flipped two GOP seats to Democrats. Or in my hometown of Aurora, Colorado, where GOP City Council Member Danielle Jurinsky, who had made a name for herself on the Fox News circuit lying about Venezuelan gangs and such, is currently in third place where the top two win in the unofficial results, trailing by a little less than 3,000 votes. The small-d democrats are taking over.

Many big-D Democrats spent yesterday morning deriding their impending victory against Trump’s financial backers in America’s largest city, while small-d democrats spent the day delivering it to them, providing a stark metaphor for this moment. The beauty of our small-d democracy is that anyone can be a small-d democrat, and partisan labeling has no bearing on a love for our foundational egalitarian principles. If you are like many on the right who want to impose an American aristocracy on the rest of us, then you do not believe in small-d democracy, and those who do have proven themselves eager to utilize the tools given to us by our Founding Fathers to build the future we want, not the monarchy they were fleeing. The mistake Trumpism constantly makes is they forget their enemies get a vote too.

We live in an age of Kings, and it has produced backlash similar to a previous Gilded Age a century ago. Republicans have spent the year talking a big game about imposing their rule for generations, and Trump is demanding they make good on it today. The problem for Republicans is that they have long proven to be mostly talk, as the best way to understand the party is that everything they do is designed to be its own Fox News segment. Yet again they have not been able to deliver on their promises to the American people, and they know it. Prices are up. Health care is expensive and is about to get a lot more expensive for people if the ACA subsidies are not extended. The job market sucks. Housing prices are at all-time highs while interest rates are still making mortgages way too expensive. The government run by a Republican trifecta is shut down while SNAP benefits for 40 million people are about to expire and holiday travelers are spending three hours in line at the Houston airport. It does not look like life will improve for the average American in the near-future, and the GOP is already losing elections suggesting a Democrat +8 national environment, similar to Democratic wipeouts in 2006 and 2018.

These dumbfucks told the people with guns that they’re fat and ugly and should get out of the military while revoking their benefits, destroying the VA, and exposing their friends to the Russians and Chinese in unencrypted group chats. Outside establishing their own Praetorian Guard at DHS, this fascist putsch has been all hat and no cattle—they’re even going to economic war with American cattle ranchers! Iowa is in a recession because Trump alienated their largest soybean customer and then betrayed their farmers for Argentinian farmers. This is all so stupid and sure to backfire, and last night’s election results are proof that it already is. Trump had his worst poll ever come out this week from CNN and he freaked out over it. The tide is not turning; it has turned. The question is one of degree now.

Which is where small-d democrats of all stripes come in. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so eloquently stated last night, this isn’t about ideology, it’s whether you “understand the assignment” or not. Fascism is here. It’s a really stupid and self-destructive form of fascism, but Trump is pretty clear about his desire to replace the Constitution with himself. Article I genuinely does not exist under alleged Speaker Mike Johnson and alleged Senate Majority Leader John Thune right now. Whether it’s a democratic socialist or a neoliberal CIA agent is secondary to the matter of whether you will fight for small-d democracy, deliver for working people and actually address America’s affordability crisis and culture of elite impunity to try to undercut fascism’s appeal. Last night was the start of that battle, as voters trusted Democrats to address their major problems the same way they trusted Trump to do it one year ago. It’s on Democrats like Mamdani and Spanberger to actually deliver for their constituents now, lest they continue this trend of voter backlash to the party who just won power into 2026.