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.
President Donald Trump speaks with the media after signing a funding bill to end a partial government shutdown in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., Feb. 3, 2026.
Will Trump’s moves ever awaken conservatives?
Donald Trump has rewritten the rules of the presidency in ways that could change America forever, and not for the better.
His naked self-dealing, weaponizing the Justice Department against his political foes, turning on our allies, the casino-fication of the White House — none of it bodes well for the future of our democracy, setting precedents that other presidents on both sides of the aisle could very well continue.
But one of the most obvious things Trump has changed in politics is its concern with ideology and principle. The long-held philosophy that used to bind the Republican Party together is gone, because he simply didn’t have a use for it.
For conservatives, that’s been especially disorienting and troubling. It began with Trump’s disregard for the debt and deficit, and carried through to this term’s embrace of tariffs, or protectionism. His personal disinterest in what the Christian right used to call “family values” dismantled the evangelical base of the party. And his courting of white nationalists and antisemites changed the face of the party.
None of that has been enough, however, to move conservative lawmakers to significantly break with Trump or even call him out. They happily co-signed his tariffs, watched as he exploded the debt and the deficit, turned the other way at his criminality and immorality, and defended police-attacking insurrectionists at the Capitol. He even managed to tick off the Second Amendment crowd with his crackdown on guns at protests and in Washington.
None of this is conservative. But so long as they kept winning, cowardly Republicans not named Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger didn’t seem to care.
But now, with a new idea hatched, will Republicans finally remember their conservative roots?
On Monday, Trump called on Republicans to “nationalize the voting.” It was a startling suggestion for a party that’s always concerned itself with state’s rights and federalism.
“The Republicans should say, we want to take over, we should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” he said.
The call is in service of his election lie, of course, an answer to the non-existent scourge of voter fraud that rigged just the 2020 election and somehow not the 2016 or 2024 elections.
Except Trump is the one attempting the rigging. He’s tried to end mail ballots and voting machines, sued two dozen blue states for their voter rolls, embarked on a rare mid-decade redistricting campaign, dismantled the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and pardoned dozens of people who signed false election certifications for him in 2020.
It’s tempting to dismiss the idea as merely a self-soothing ramble, the nonsensical blurting of an old man still fixated on an imaginary injustice. But it should offend and worry everyone, not least of all Republicans.
Elections are held locally for good reason — it’s harder to rig them that way. The Constitution says states shall determine the times, places and manner of elections, for the explicit purpose of decentralizing and protecting their integrity. It’s the backbone of federalism.
But for House Speaker Mike Johnson it’s nothing to get worked up about. “What you’re hearing from the president is his frustration about the lack of some blue states, frankly, of enforcing these things and making sure that they are free and fair elections.”
But Democrats are rightly concerned, and preparing for potential “federal government intrusion” in the midterms. “This is now a legitimate planning category,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. “It’s extraordinarily sad, but it would be irresponsible for us to disregard the possibility.”
Extraordinarily sad, indeed. But will it revive the dormant conservatism in the Republican Party? Will lawmakers remember their principles and patriotism? Or will they continue to sleep through Trump’s total remaking of America’s political system?
Maybe this will be the thing that finally wakes them up.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.