America has Buyer's Remorse
On the Blue Wave from Tuesday.
WOKE IS BACK. THERE ARE NOW 400 GENDERS AND YOU ARE A RACIST. YOU WILL ALSO MEMORIZE THE KORAN BY NEXT TUESDAY. INSHALLAH.
David, you should see someone.
MY INSANITY IS A SUPER POWER. OK, I’ll stop with the all caps. But for real, if you don’t have the Koran memorized by Tuesday, Zohran will come to your house and read the Communist Manifesto to you, wearing just socks. This is what happens when you let the Democrats win.
And win they did, B.T. (big time) on Tuesday. This has been a repeated story since 2022ish, but Democrats are now officially the Party of off-year elections. Since Donald Trump was elected in 2016, there has been a huge shift in highly-educated voters to the Democratic Party, and educated voters tend to vote.
But that’s only a small part of the story.
New York City is its own little thing (and we’ll get to it later), but the results in Virginia and New Jersey are shocking. I think everyone expected the Democrats in both races to win, but the margins are pretty seismic. Democrats didn’t just turn out their own voters; they flipped a lot of Trump voters too. Look at these results from Virginia:
If you look at that map, it shows the Democrats winning voters the rural, southwestern parts of Virginia, which have been pretty pro-Republican recently and particularly pro-Trump.
Democratic advantages with educated voters gets you some of the way to these results, but these are not happening unless there are some 2024 Trump voters who are switching to the Democrats. The evidence is actually really clear, even in these early days:
Latino voters supported the Democratic candidates this year by at least double-digit margins, according to NBC News exit polling. Latino men, who broke for Trump last year, according to the 2024 exit polls, favored the Democrats in each of the races where exit polling was conducted on Tuesday.
This is where I toot my own horn. If you have read anything I’ve written since Trump was elected (or even a little bit before), I have tried to say three things:
Trump’s victory in 2024 was mostly about inflation (and also Joe Biden’s misguided attempt at reëlection).
For this reason, his coalition is very fragile.
Very few people in the GOP understand why Trump won in 2024, which makes them vulnerable in future elections.
Here is a thing I said right after the election last year:
Trump’s first term was a disaster. He left office with a net loss in job creation, a spiraling economy, and a spike in crime. Biden cleaned it up in four years, and Trump will fail again because he is stupid, incompetent, and fat.
There is no such thing as a permanent coalition. When voters realize that Trump cannot magically reduce prices (this is DEFLATION, which doesn’t happen unless there’s a recession), the ones he flipped will flip back on him.
I think the GOP has fundamentally misunderstood how much Trump’s celebrity has helped him win elections. The voters who have propelled him to victory in elections since 2016 do not view him as President Chaos;™ they still see the dude from The Apprentice who is a tough, but talented businessman. And in 2017, Trump was able to ride the coattails of the strong Obama economy until COVID hit. When he was hit with a real crisis, the celebrity allure faded. It creeped back up again when the alternative choice was a vice-president they were unfamiliar with, and who belonged to an unpopular administration.
If you are reading anything more into Trump’s wins you are bringing your own biases. Here is great evidence: Do you remember Trump’s huge advantage with young men in 2024, to the point where there were countless articles written about how Gen Z dudes were now fully GOP? Look at the results from Tuesday:
The GOP does not have a “MAGA” coalition. They have a jumble of people who occasionally vote for them if the conditions are right, and going forward they have a major problem if Trump isn’t on the ballot.
Woke never went away. People are still watching the woke TV shows, and they don’t care that the Little Mermaid is black now. There is a political media culture that wants to tell you that the general public deeply cares about the stuff I am writing trying to write about every week, but they don’t. Elections are fundamentally about whether or not the people in power are doing a good job and the economy. And on Tuesday, Americans said Trump is doing a bad job and the economy sucks.
Talk dirty to me about Zohran.
Maybe the least surprising win on Tuesday was Zohran’s pretty easy coast to victory. In a three-way race it is hard to crack 50% of the vote but he did it, giving him a solid (but unclear) mandate as mayor.
I wrote a longer thing on Zohran a few months ago where I kinda bashed on him, but I will revisit that and say I am actually excited for him. If he follows through with a lot of his misguided policy ideas, I still think they won’t work out, but overall he is a breath of fresh air in American politics. He won by going to halal carts and interviewing the owners. That is awesome. I am still skeptical, but I hope he has a lot of success.
I will also make an easy bet with anyone: I think he will work overtime to court Jewish voters and try to make them feel safer in New York City.1 Zohran is young, maybe naive, but he is not stupid by any means. He knows this is a vulnerability for him and I think he will seek to correct it.
But overall, NYC sent the sex pest back to the Shadow. For that, everyone should be thankful.
However, I was a little shocked to see the reaction from the anti-Zohran crowd afterwards. I saw a lot of people in public and also friends on social media say that New York “forgot” what happened on 9/11 by electing a Muslim mayor.
Here I was thinking that my skepticism of Zohran was related to his progressive policies, when in reality lots of people simply don’t like him because he’s a Muslim. I seriously thought it was such a non-issue, I laughed at this (very amazing) poke at Zohran’s religion:
It feels (slightly) less funny now that I know people hated Zohran just because he is a Muslim. Because it is November 2025 and woke is now officially back, I am happy to announce that these people are canceled and any pets they have will be sold at auction.
But seriously, it’s just gross. It’s also fundamentally low IQ. If you watch any of Zohran’s videos and the only thing you come up with is, “That guy doesn’t understand New York because he’s a Muslim,” you are a singled-celled organism. Full stop.
It actually sent me back to Mehdi Hasan’s debate with a bunch of “far-right Republicans” on Youtube. Spoiler: These guys were not actually Republicans; they were white supremacists who spoke positively of the Nazis.2 Here is what one of them said to Mehdi’s face:
Mehdi is an Indian-Muslim immigrant, just like Zohran. He is a U.S. citizen, just like Zohran. And a dude told him to his face he wants him out of the country.3
A few months ago, all of conservative media was in uproar about the horrific murder of Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s transit system. Iryna was a 23 year-old Ukrainian refugee and her murder was/is horrific. She was killed by a black man who had been imprisoned multiple times, so I will let you guess why it struck a nerve in conservative circles.
Pay close attention to the immigrants they memorialize and pay attention to the immigrants they tell to get out.
Zohran is American, oftentimes more so than his critics. If you reject that principle, you hate the country you live in.
OK, that was dirty.
I am going to hit every liberal dopamine center with this next section (which is short, I promise). The Democratic wins on Tuesday were so overwhelming, some right-wing influencers started testing the “rigged” waters again:
The contempt these people have for their own voters is pretty infuriating. Let’s just review what has happened since 2020:
After he lost, Trump hired two different commissions to review the election results and confirm he lost. Both commissions said he did.
He has now been in power for ten months, and has offered zero evidence of election fraud in 2020, to the point it cost him the election.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani has lost his law license because of his lies about the election, as has Jenna Ellis. Sydney Powell was also punished. Fox News had to pay 3/4 of a billion dollars because of their lies about the election results. And Mike Lindell has said he will need to file for bankruptcy, because he cannot pay the penalties related to his defamation cases about the election results.
If Trump had any evidence about Election 2020 being “rigged,” all of this stuff could go away. Rudy gets his law license back and Mike Lindell is a millionaire again.
Trump hasn’t released this evidence because it doesn’t exist. And they will still lie to their voters about it.
I AM BACK TO ALL CAPS AND I WILL TELL YOU RIGHT NOW I REFUSED TO PROOFREAD THIS POST. I WILL BE BACK TO WRITE ABOUT THE TARIFFS BLOWING UP AT SCOTUS BUT THEN THANKSGIVING WILL MEAN NOM NOM NOM NOM.
Jews are the most frequent victims of hate crimes in New York. Anti-semitism in America is a real thing.
I have heard from a few different people now that Mehdi’s experience with Jubilee has led a lot of left-wing people to turn down or even cancel events with them. That said, there were a few people within his Jubilee circle that said the Nazi guys were out of line.
This came roughly a year after a conservative guest on CNN told Mehdi he hoped “[his] beeper doesn’t go off,” an apparent reference to Israel’s wipe out of Hezbollah. Just sick.