5 Dem victories you missed while celebrating Mamdani's win
Ride the blue wave.
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Good Morning to all the wine moms! And Hispanic voters! And … Gen-Z men? Tuesday was a very, very good day for Democrats across the country.
Obviously the most watched contest was in New York, where the mayoral election became a proxy battle in the Trump administration’s war on cities. Turns out, people resent having their tax dollars used to extort them into voting for someone odious — especially when they contribute tens of billions of dollars more they get back to the federal fisc every single year. And Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger’s resounding victories in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections confirm that Republican policies are really, really unpopular.
Guess everyone got tired of waiting for $2 gas and decided to skip right to transgender for everyone!
But across the country, there were dozens of down-ballot races where Democrats cleaned up. Let’s enjoy five!
1. Virginia House of Delegates
It’s not just Gov. Glenn Youngkin who will be packing his fleece vest and leaving Richmond — 27 percent of Republicans in the commonwealth’s House of Delegates will be heading home as well.
Democrats flipped 13 seats, increasing their total from 51 to 64, almost a supermajority. That’s the best showing for Democrats in the chamber since 1987. With the GOP’s desultory performance Tuesday, Democrats now are almost certain to gerrymander Virginia’s congressional maps before the 2026 election, netting Democrats three or possibly four seats.
Democrats won every single close race, flipping four seats in districts won by Trump and nine in districts won by Harris — a major accomplishment for Abigail Spanberger and the Virginia Democratic Party.
In Northern Virginia’s HD30, newcomer John McAuliffe bested incumbent Geary Higgins, outraising him three to one. In the 22 years since it was created, the district has never been represented by a Democrat. Just two years ago, Higgins coasted to a six-point victory and Trump won it by a point. This year McAuliffe edged out Higgins by two.
Similarly, in HD66, which encompasses parts of Loudoun and Fairfax Counties, Republican incumbent Bobby Orrock was bested by Democratic challenger Nicole Cole. Just two years ago, Orrock won by eleven points. This week he lost by upwards of four. In HD86, Republican incumbent A.C. Cardoza, who won by 13 percent in 2023, lost by seven to Democrat Virgil Thornton — a 20 point swing! By any measure, that’s a blue wave.
2. Miami mayoral race
No major metropolitan area has moved more to the right in the Trump era than Miami. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the city by 40 percent. Eight years later, Kamala Harris margin was just one point. Local politics has been dominated by Republicans for decades, with only one Democratic mayor since 1993.
But this week, for the first time in ages, Democrats had a turnout advantage in Miami, and it paid off.
Miami’s mayoral race goes to a runoff if no candidate tops 50 percent. On Tuesday, Democratic County Commissioner Eileen Higgins came in first with 36 percent. She’ll go to a runoff against former police chief Emilio Gonzalez, who was endorsed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and leaned hard into his MAGA bona fides. Despite spending over $700,000, Gonzalez trailed Higgins, getting just 19 percent of the vote, and narrowly besting third place finisher Ken Russell, a Democratic former city commissioner.
Taken together, Higgins and Russell’s votes totaled 54 percent. If Democrats can maintain their momentum through the December 9 runoff, Higgins will be the new mayor of Miami — a massive sea change from the past two mayoral elections, where Republican Francis Suarez (who is term-limited out) netted 86 and 79 percent of the vote.
And, in case anyone had trouble reading the room, Miami voters resoundingly approved local charter amendments barring gerrymandering and term limits.
3. Georgia Public Service Commission
Georgia can feel like fools gold for liberals.
Sure, it has two Democratic senators. But no Democrat has won statewide in a local election since 2006. And so it’s especially notable that Democrats Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard not only flipped two seats on the Public Service Commission, but dominated them.
Hubbard defeated recently appointed commissioner Fitz Johnson, and Alicia Johnson defeated longtime Commissioner Tim Echols, who served on the body since 2011. Johnson will be the first Black woman to serve in statewide elected office in Georgia.
Buoyed by anger over rising power costs, both Democrats cracked 60 percent of the vote — an ominous sign for the Georgia Republican Party as it heads into 2026, where it aims to defeat Sen. John Ossoff and defend its hold on the state house with Gov. Brian Kemp term-limited out. Democrats massively improved their performance across the state, but particularly in the suburbs and with rural Black voters, triumphing in counties Trump took by large margins, including one he won by 30 percent.
This election produced some of the wildest individual county results in recent memory. Paulding County, a very GOP-leaning suburb which has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1980 and backed Donald Trump by 24 points, voted for both Johnson and Hubbard. Early County, a small, very Republican county in South Georgia which backed Trump by 12 percent in 2024, gave Johnson and Hubbard a 28 percent margin of victory. In Turner County, both Democrats won by five points, after Donald Trump carried it by 29 percent last year.
This should terrify the state GOP, which might have been tempted to write off 2020 as a fluke. In reality, Georgia is still very much a purple state.
3. Mississippi special elections
It takes a lot to get the conservatives on the Fifth Circuit to throw out a state’s legislative map for being too racist. But after the last census, Mississippi Republicans managed to do it.
The court ordered the state to redraw its maps and hold special elections, which it did this week. These elections were by no means automatic Democratic pickups — Republican legislators still tried their best to give Republicans a fighting chance.
And still, in Northern Mississippi’s Senate District 2, longtime community activist Theresa Isom crushed her Republican opponent by 26 points, besting Harris’s margin by 20. Isom even ran 10 points ahead of gubernatorial candidate Brandon Presley, whose 2023 loss still represented the best performance this century by a Democrat at the top of the ticket.
A bit further south, Democrat Justin Crosby won his Harris +1 seat by five points, despite being massively out-raised, defeating popular Republican incumbent John Lancaster. Even sweeter, former Hattiesburg mayor Johnny Dupree won District 45 by 42 percent, outrunning Harris by 17 points. With Dupree and Isom’s victories, Mississippi Democrats broke the GOP’s supermajority in the state senate for the first time in 13 years.
In fact, Mississippi Democrats have had major momentum this year, picking up seven mayor’s races and close to a hundred alderman (what they call city council) seats in June.
5. Maine voters return mail voting restrictions to sender
With Sen. Susan Collins up for re-election and the gubernatorial race wide open, Maine Republicans have turned to the party’s favorite electoral strategy: restricting access to the ballot.
The Maine GOP bankrolled a ballot initiative for a constitutional amendment which would have required voter ID to cast a ballot, eliminated two days of early voting, capped drop boxed at one per municipality, and barred disabled voters from automatically receiving absentee ballots.
The effort was doomed from the jump. First, asking voters to amend their state constitution to enshrine cartoonishly evil things into law tends to turn people off. (Ask the Ohio GOP.) Second, if you are going to make the ask, you would do well to time it to coincide with a national panic over “ballot integrity” stoked by your party’s standard-bearer. Instead the Maine GOP dropped it during an off-year election where Attorney General Pam Bondi has promised that election tampering is over.
In the event, just 26 percent of Maine voters supported the amendment, and opposition to it may have even juiced turnout. With no major races on the ballot, the “no” side racked up 71 percent of the total votes Kamala Harris did in 2024 — enough to pass a “red flag” gun law!
Bonus round: What we’re not gonna do is…
While Mamdani romped to victory in New York City, Democrats in next-door in Nassau County were among the few who actually did worse this election cycle than last.
Republican County Executive Bruce Blakeman cruised to reelection, winning by 12 points after barely squeaking it out in 2021. While Democrats did pick up one seat in the legislature, they actually seem to be losing ground in a county which Trump won by five points in 2024 and lost in both 2020 and and 2016.
The knives were already out for New York Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, who also heads the Nassau County Democratic Party, since he refused to endorse Mamdani. And Tuesday’s lackluster showing in his own back yard will make those knives even sharper.
In short, Tuesday night was a resounding blue wave across the country. Voters tuned out the Republican distraction machine and turned up for candidates who actually stood for something.
Enough doomscrolling! Time to get off our asses and get to work.
That’s it for today
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Re the Maine vote. Maine also has the highest population 65+ (I’m sure this by %, as Maine’s pop is only ~1.5 million). That age demographic turns out, but I’m sure they like the ease of voting by mail.
Wonderful to read about the victories in other states including Mississippi and Georgia. People are horrified and sickened by Trump’s initiatives and the hateful MAGA project to shift even more wealth to the ultra wealthy and decimate health insurance, SNAP and voting rights. Maine needs to get moving to defeat Susan Collins. The GOP has become an extension of Trump’s personally, vicious, irresponsible and cruel. Let’s take out the trash!