GUEST COLUMN, J. Basil Dannebohm
On Nov. 4, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger won their gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia by double-digits. GOP strategists blamed the Democratic victories on bad Republican candidates. While it’s true that Virginia’s Winsome Earl-Sears was unhinged and New Jersey’s Jack Ciattarelli had lost two previous bids for governor, Mr. Trump blamed the losses on the government shutdown and the fact that he wasn’t on the ballot.
Not everyone agreed with the President.
“Virginians and voters spoke loud and clear that they’re pissed off at the Trump administration,” Christina Freundlich, a Democratic strategist who worked on the Virginia lieutenant governor’s race, told Politico. “Democrats came out in record numbers, and this is a foreshadow of what we’re going to see next year.”
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. After all, five days later Democrats caved, ending the longest government shutdown in history without a solution to their healthcare demands.
As the evening’s major winners were declared, Alexander Burns, senior executive editor for Politico, observed, “After the failure of a [Biden] presidency that promised a return to normalcy, Democrats and plenty of independent voters on Tuesday embraced political disruption instead. Rather than voting to restore conventions sundered by President Donald Trump, these blue-state voters turned to more drastic remedies.”
Burns raised two very important points.
1.) The real celebration is that many Democrats have broken free — in record time — from Bidenism and establishment politics.
2.) Democratic victories were mostly in blue states. Just as Trump’s 2024 victory was hardly a “mandate,” the 2025 election was by no means a “blue tsunami” as some on the left suggested.
There were two notable exceptions: Democrats flipped a pair of Republican-held state Senate seats in Mississippi and two seats on Georgia’s Public Service Commission.
As the East Coast celebrated Sherrill, Spanberger, and NYC’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, Democrats on the West Coast were applauding the passage of a California ballot measure that delivered five additional seats for the party in the U.S. House ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Living vicariously through coastal liberals, Democrats in the Kansas Legislature issued a media release with a headline that read: “Kansas Becomes First State to Reject Trump’s Redistricting Scheme.”
While it’s true that Republicans, who hold a majority in the state legislature, lacked the signatures necessary to call a special session, the matter of redistricting will simply be taken up during the 2026 legislative session. That’s hardly the definitive rejection that Democrats in the Sunflower State are suggesting. But in ruby red Kansas, the left takes any win they can get — even if those wins come in the form of misleading headlines.
As Politico’s Sasha Issenberg pointed out, “California [will] join Texas, Missouri, Ohio, Utah and North Carolina among states that have already redrawn their districts this year to extend one party’s haul of seats, with processes to do so underway in Virginia and Indiana. Illinois and Maryland could follow shortly, with others to take on the project in years to come.”
Kansas will almost inevitably be included in those “others.”
Republican gerrymandering efforts in red states will make a legitimate “blue tsunami” at the midterms a far more arduous task. November 4th was a touchdown in the first round, but it’s not even halftime. Democrats haven’t won the game just yet.
As CNN’s Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju posted after the results came in, “This was a big night for Dems, no doubt. But let’s not forget: the GOP still has the edge in the gerrymandering wars — so winning the House will be a district-by-district slog. And tonight’s races were in blue and purple states. To take back the Senate, Dems need to win in red states, too. Long way to go till the midterms.”
Charlie Sykes, an anti-Trump conservative commentator, agreed.
“Dems may be distracted by other bright objects. So, it’s important to learn the right lessons, and avoid the delusions about last night. because there is still a lot of unfinished business,” said Sykes.
The Nov. 4 victories will only further enrage an already vengeful Trump and make the prospect of free and fair midterms even more bleak. In fact, on the morning after the election, Trump told Senate Republicans that if they ended the filibuster and followed his instructions, Democrats will “most likely never attain power” again.
While the left should rightly celebrate their wins, an unprecedented battle against an American President inebriated by authoritarian fantasies has only just begun. As H.N. Hirsch, an emeritus professor of politics at Oberlin College, noted on social media, “It was a great night. Which means he [Trump] and his minions are terrified. Terrified fascists do terrifying things.”
