Almost as Good as It Gets?

In the classic film, Network, Howard Beale delivered one of the most remembered lines in movie history: “I’m mad as hell, and I am not going to take it anymore”. Many voters, from Virginia to California and Maine to Georgia, seemed to feel that way. Frustrated by chaos, corruption, and exhaustion, they turned out in record numbers to deliver sweeping victories for Democrats, winning most every significant contest on the ballot.

Virginia, Virginia, Virginia

Virginia has again shown itself as a bellwether of change. Abigail Spanberger won by the largest margin since Bob McDonnell’s 2009 victory, as Democrats swept all statewide races in an election with turnout higher than four years ago — a clear sign of Democratic energy.

Less noticed but equally consequential were Democrats’ massive gains in the House of Delegates, where they flipped 13 seats and will hold a 64–36 margin come January. Speaker of House Don Scott, arguably now the most powerful man in the state and the primary architect of the romp, exclaimed that this “is what a mandate looks like,” while cautioning that “the word of the day is restraint. We can’t overreach.”

Republicans, meanwhile, imploded. Neither Trump nor mainstream conservatives ever embraced Winsome-Sears, whose campaign was derided by a Trump ally as a “dumpster fire”—a label made literal when her campaign bus caught fire on the roadside. Late GOP money shifted to Jason Miyares, but even that could not save him. Trump supporters unloaded after her loss. Chris LaCivita, longtime Virginia GOP strategist and Trump’s 2024 campaign manager, wrote: “A Bad candidate and Bad campaign have consequences — the Virginia Governor’s race is example number 1.”

Winsome-Sears faced incredible headwinds. Trump is even more toxic in Virginia today than he was in 2017, when Ralph Northam won the governorship by 9 points and Democrats gained 15 seats in the House of Delegates. And with this year’s Republican candidates carrying major weaknesses, it was a perfect storm for Democrats. You could see this in the turnout numbers. In Republican-leaning districts, turnout was down, while the opposite was true in Democratic areas. Fairfax alone produced a surplus of 205,000 votes, 100,000 more than McAuliffe’s total of four years ago. Spanberger’s margin remained consistent from the beginning until the very end, when the undecided vote broke decisively for the next governor.

Spanberger’s margin, coupled with the national environment, was key to the victories of her running mates, Ghazala Hashmi and Jay Jones. Jones was successful in linking Miyares to Trump, and the outgoing AG’s failure to fight for universities like UVA and George Mason left him further exposed to criticism. Despite the last-minute publication of Jones’s inappropriate text messages from several years ago, he still won more votes than Governor Youngkin did in 2021 (1.75 million to 1.66 million) and his margin of victory was much larger than the outgoing governor (200,000 vs. 64,000). Youngkin’s 2021 victory now appears to be more of an anomaly than it did at the time.

Looking to the future, Democratic performance improved across the state. Whether this portends a reversal of the party’s lackluster results in rural areas is not clear, but this year’s results provides some optimism.

New Jersey, New York, and Turnout

Trump was a factor in most every key race. In the Commonwealth, Trump’s cuts in federal employment was felt more personally. But the president’s “termination” of the Gateway Project in New Jersey and New York, the largest infrastructure and jobs project in the nation, because they were “democratic initiatives” became an organizing tool for both newly-elected Governor Mikie Sherrill and incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Sherill’s race was supposed to be close; it was not. Democrats also picked up seats in the Jersey state assembly, and may have a super majority when all votes are counted.

In New York, Mayor-elect Mamdani harnessed the affordability crisis to mobilize young voters and ran an insurgent campaign against entrenched wealth — including Donald Trump himself. Republicans will likely try to make him the face of the Democratic Party, but last night’s results show each electorate is unique, and victory depends on tailoring messages to local coalitions and concerns.

In New Jersey, about 54% of registered voters cast a ballot, the highest turnout in a non-presidential election since 1998, dramatically up from the 40% who voted in the last governor’s contest. New York City, turnout was higher than any year since 1969.

Voting for Ideas and Democracy

In California and Maine, where no statewide candidates were on the ballot, voters instead turned out for ideas! In the Golden state, an overwhelming majority approved a constitutional amendment empowering the legislature to redraw congressional maps—an explicit rebuke to Texas’s recent partisan gerrymander designed to rig the midterms. In Maine, voters soundly rejected a voter-suppression initiative that would have required photo identification at the polls, defeating it by a commanding 64–36% margin.

Democrats in Pennsylvania notched 3 critical victories to retain seats on the state supreme court at a time when voting rights and democratic protections increasingly depend on state-level decisions.

Change even reached deep-red states. In Georgia, Democrats scored major upsets by unseating two Republican members of the Public Service Commission, the office that determines utilities rates and influences state climate policy. The victors will be the state’s first Democratic commissioners since 2007. And in Mississippi, two special-election victories ended the GOP’s supermajority in the state Senate.

Even in local areas, the blue tide swept Democrats into power. In Onondaga County, New York, a traditionally red jurisdiction surrounding Syracuse, Democrats won every contested seat for the local legislature, giving them the majority for the first in approximately 50 years. Just down the road in Oswego County, New York, Democrats picked up five Republican seats in the county legislature.

When Trump was elected, many predicted that there would be an electoral backlash. It has arrived. But the real test lies ahead: whether the energy of this moment can be sustained through the 2026 midterms and beyond.

The election results remind us that democracy still works when people believe in it, organize for it, and show up to defend it. The message from this election is clear—Americans still vote for ideas, fairness, and for the future.

A version of Almost as Good as It Gets? was originally published on the Substack "Fights of Our Lives" and is republished with permission.

David J. Toscano is an attorney in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a former Mayor. He served fourteen years in Virginia’s House of Delegates, including seven as the Democratic Leader.