With the possible exception of the Virginia Attorney General race, nothing about last night’s election results was surprising. Democrats won in blue jurisdictions. That would not be surprising in any election year, let alone an off-year with a Republican in the White House.
The margins are attributable to Democrats being fired up with Trump-hatred. Thus, in the New Jersey governor’s race, the GOP ran the same candidate as in 2021, Jack Ciattarelli. Ciattarelli improved his performance this year, getting 1,378,405 votes, compared with 1,255,185 in 2021. But Democrat Mikey Sherrill massively outperformed, getting 1,792,793 votes compared with the 1,339,471 that Philip Murphy got in 2021. (The numbers I use for this year’s election are not final, which only strengthens the point I make.) The difference? The hated Donald Trump is now in the White House, and Democrats are fired up.
Something similar happened in Virginia, where Abigail Spanberger, by all accounts a mediocre candidate, got a whopping 1,967,646 votes compared with Terry McAuliffe’s 1,599,470 in 2021. Virginia is a particularly anti-Trump state because of the large number of federal employees who live there.
The Democrats are fired up now, and they will stay fired up for the next year. I think the conventional wisdom about off-year elections will hold, and the Democrats will make significant gains in 2022. I think it is almost a foregone conclusion that they will take the House, and will spend the following two years doing nothing but investigating the Trump administration. Nothing will pass Congress, and we may see another government shutdown. So I hope the Republicans will do all they can in the next 12 months.
The result that stands out from the rest is Jay Jones winning the New Jersey Attorney General race, by 1,797,542 to 1,580,385. Jones is the candidate who sent texts about shooting the Republican leader in New Jersey’s legislature and urinating on his grave, while also watching his children die. Those texts didn’t cause a single Democrat politician to abandon Jones, and Barack Obama campaigned with him. If we do the math, there were only 170,104 Democrats who voted for Spanberger but did not vote for Jones–8.6% of Spanberger’s voters.
I think we can conclude that the overwhelming majority of Democrats are not uncomfortable with the idea of killing Republicans. I think that most Democrats would like to see President Trump assassinated, and a majority, while they may not join the many thousands of Democrats who openly cheered the murders of Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk, didn’t mind those killings and thought they advanced their party’s cause.
Have we ever seen hate at this level before? I think we have, in the 1850s, when pro-slavery Democrats, among other things, burned down the homes of abolitionists. (As the victim of a firebombing, I can relate.) Today, as in the 1850s, I think it is a legitimate question whether there is enough basis in shared values of citizenship between liberals and conservatives to go forward as a united country.
