READ: Why Trump is worried about last night

Dems didn’t become “more socialist” — they tacked toward the center, which is their key to defeating MAGA.

Last night delivered a message that Donald Trump is surely fretting about this morning. In fact, he even struggled to come up with a response to the Democrats’ election sweep in major races, suggesting feebly on Truth Social that the only reasons Republicans lost were because Trump himself wasn’t on the ballot and because of the shutdown. (See post, below). The latter claim was a shocking admission because he didn’t even bother to blame the Democrats for the government closure.

He’s not processing this well. But there’s a bigger reason.

Trump and his political advisors are worried about how the Democrats won. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey didn’t win the governor’s races by shifting left, parroting social media activists, or embracing progressive litmus tests. They won because they claimed the political center, and voters rewarded it in a moment when they’re very nervous about the chaos coming out of the White House and Washington.

Meanwhile in New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s victory revealed a paradox. He won with the lowest margins of any New York City mayor this century with a meager 50 percent. It was far from a resounding win in a place where some of his recent predecessors have won with 65 - 75 percent of the vote. One of the most gifted progressive communicators in the country could barely clear a bar that mainstream Democrats have routinely vaulted in the nation’s bluest metropolis.

Taken together, the night’s results did not signal some progressive wave. It was a moderate wave. The victories signaled that the Democratic Party is largely re-centering itself around stability and governance, not ideological performance. And that rightfully has the White House feeling anxious.

To his credit, this is precisely what Paul Begala told me hours before the polls closed. Begala, the veteran Democratic strategist who helped elect Bill Clinton, has a simple mantra about winning elections in America: the center is where the power is. In our Election Day conversation, he noted that in Virginia Democrats chose Spanberger, a former CIA officer and Congresswoman, without any kind of bruising ideological primary that’s become standard in big races.

“If the Republicans have abandoned the center,” he said, “then Democrats should take the center.”

And they did. Spanberger’s victory wasn’t a surprise in the final days, but the Party should certainly see it as affirmation. A purple state with a Republican governor, a state Trump could have tried to influence, chose a Democrat who didn’t run away from the middle. She ran quite gingerly toward it.

New Jersey told a similar story. Mikie Sherrill, a Navy veteran and former prosecutor, won decisively in a state where political fatigue easily could have cut the other way. Again, it did not. Voters picked the calm candidate over the Republican aligned with a party now synonymous with shutdown theatrics, threats to public institutions, and whatever the daily disaster is out of the Oval Office.

I think it’s easy to miss how extraordinary this is. A Democratic Party that has been caricatured for years as captive to its left flank just won two major gubernatorial races by nominating candidates who are the opposite of hysterical ideologues. This is the main story. Once Trump finally wakes up, he’ll try to make Mamdani the poster child of the night, but it’s far from the case.

To repeat, Mamdani’s vote share (as Begala predicted perfectly) was dramatically lower than what Democrats have achieved in New York City for decades. In the bluest big city in America, a candidate backed by socialist organizers did not surge. He barely cleared the floor. If the left wants to argue that Mamdani represents the future of the Democratic Party, it will have to explain why its most promising avatar underperformed the local Democratic baseline by double digits.

The right and the left will both try to make Mamdani the story, because both of their narratives depend on claiming that Democrats are shifting left. But the electorate just told us the opposite.

All of this should make my former boss Donald Trump a nervous wreck. He thrives when he can run against caricatures and when Democrats nominate the easy foil, the outrage-of-the-day progressive, or the technocratic scold. He really wants the 2026 midterms to be a referendum on “the radical left.” Yet last night denied him that argument.

There is a deeper undercurrent, though, which Begala and I discussed at length. The rise of political violence and domestic instability is spooking people. Nearly one in three Americans now say political violence may be necessary to “save the country.” That’s not a fringe statistic. That’s your neighbor at the grocery store. As I said to Begala, that’s the same percent of Americans who own a cat.

Think about that. If you shake hands with a stranger in America, they’re just as likely to own a cat as they are to believe we need to kill each other to fix our country. The other two-thirds (a vast majority of Americans) are concerned about this — and desperate for stability. They see Trump accelerating nationwide disorder, and voters who went to the polls last night resoundingly repudiated it.

The Election Night results suggest the public still recognizes an alternative. The center is not exhausted. The center is awake. The crowds at the No Kings protest — where Democrat figureheads like Paul Begala, longtime conservatives like me, military veterans, and young parents all stood side by side — proved it. And now, the voters in Virginia and New Jersey have echoed that same message at the ballot box.

Democrats learned, again, how to win by tacking to the center and speaking to the majority of Americans who just want a functioning country. Trump should be shaking in his wrinkled pants, because the thing he fears most is the thing these results signal. His dictator antics are showing him for what he really is. A loser.

Your friend, in defiance,

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