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2025 & 2026 Elections

  • Thread starter Thread starter nycfan
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There have been some pretty stunning special election results this year. All should come with the caveat that ever since 2017, special elections have favored Democrats, but what has happened so far this year has accelerated that trend. The week after Trump’s inauguration, Democrats won a special election for a State Senate seat in Iowa’s District 35, which Trump won by 21 points in November. A couple of months later, Democrats won a State Senate seat in Pennsylvania’s 36th district, which has voted for a Democratic president just once since 1856. The Downballot has an excellent tracker for every special election this year, and so far on average, Democrats are running 15.5 percent ahead of their 2024 results, faring worse than their 2024 margin in just 2 of 22 special elections, both coming in South Dakota.

That average was raised two days ago when New York’s State Senate District 22 produced a margin that defies all conventional political logic and wisdom. Trump won this south Brooklyn district 77 percent to 22 percent in November, then Democrat Sam Sutton won his election this week by a margin of 35 points—a gobsmacking 90 percent swing from how this district voted in the presidential election just a little over six months ago.


All politics is local so you can’t just look at everything as a direct repudiation of Trumpism. The previous congressperson Sen. Simcha Felder was a conservative Democrat who caucused with the GOP, and Sutton’s nonprofit work for years has made him a “fixture” in the community according to the local Democratic Party. The Republican he defeated, Nachman Caller, is an attorney who ran for the state Assembly ten years ago. Candidates matter and it seems as if the Democrats had a real advantage on that front in this race.

The dynamics of a Trumpy district with a conservative Democrat who caucuses with the GOP are very unique, but the margin that Sutton won by is impossible to ignore. I don’t care how popular you are locally or how rooted you are in the community, a 90 point swing in six months is telling you that something significant has occurred.
 
In 2026, if the economy remains sour and with everything else going on, Paxton loses the general, I think. Depends on who the Dems run, perhaps, but Paxton is divisive in Texas and the GOP is just not understanding how election cycles work. Taking out their long time incumbent/ high leader in the Senate to run a crook reminds a bit of Herschel Walker instead of, oh, pretty much anyone else.
 
dukeman92 said:
Last night Keishan Scott won a landslide over his republican counterpart. Delivering a 41 point thumping to become one of the youngest state legislators in the country.

www.thedailybeast.com

Young Dem Clinches Landslide Election Win in Lindsey Graham’s Backyard

Keishan Scott became the youngest member of the South Carolina House on Tuesday.
www.thedailybeast.com www.thedailybeast.com
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Yeah ... but ... he won in a +5 Harris area against a black republican in a special election. So, there's that. It's not like picking off Lady G herself.
 

“The Greak Un-Awokening…

Ambitious Democrats with an eye on a presidential run are in the middle of a slow-motion Sister Souljah moment.”

I’m sick of this bullshit already.

These folks are not just late to the party, they mocked and attacked the people who saw this coming years ago. When Bernie emphasized bread and butter issues and warned against over-reliance on culture war rhetoric, liberal pundits and staffers accused him of being tone deaf, racist, or out of touch with the future. Now that Trump has steamrolled them twice and Dems are floundering with working class voters, suddenly they're trying to act like they were pragmatists all along.

What’s happening now isn’t a principled course correction. It’s a rearguard action by a failed liberal establishment trying to protect its relevance. They're trying to rehabilitate themselves without admitting that the left was right not just about the optics of woke language but about the need to center material issues like wages, healthcare, housing, education, and debt.

The real tell is that these same popularists still won’t touch actually popular demands like Medicare for All, student debt abolition, or public jobs programs. Their problem was never with the language. It was with the threat to capital. They’re fine tweaking the brand, but they won’t challenge the structure.

So now we get this spectacle where the same people who sneered at economic populism try to rebrand as common sense realists while still rejecting the only politics that might build a real working class coalition. It’s cowardly, it's late, and it’s not fooling anyone who’s been paying attention.

Look at who’s at the front of this so-called “Great Un-Awokening.” It’s the same cast of careerist liberals and national security ghouls who never had any credibility with working people in the first place. Pete Buttigieg, the human LinkedIn profile. Elissa Slotkin, a literal CIA analyst turned Blue Dog. These aren’t people with a political compass grounded in class struggle or democratic accountability. They’re functionaries of empire and capital trying to rebrand themselves as the voice of reason.

They want to turn the page on “wokeness” not because they’ve had a real political awakening, but because it’s become a political liability. They’re not rejecting identity discourse because they care about working-class unity. They’re doing it because the polling shifted. And even then, they refuse to embrace the economic populism that could actually unite a multiracial working class. They’re fine backing off college campus jargon but won’t go near Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, or strong labor rights.

It’s a cynical pivot. The goal isn’t to win back working-class voters with a bold vision. It’s to hold together the crumbling coalition of donors, consultants, and MSNBC watchers while trying to weather the storm of Trumpism without ever acknowledging their own role in creating the conditions for it.
 
nycfan said:
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Covid changed that state. I remember going in 2020 to Disney in November. They required masks at the parks but you would have never guessed a pandemic was going on around every other part of the state. We stopped at a gas station in some small town and went in with our masks and I swear the woman at the register looked at us like she had never seen masks before much less on someone.
 
HintonJamesHeel said:
Covid changed that state. I remember going in 2020 to Disney in November. They required masks at the parks but you would have never guessed a pandemic was going on around every other part of the state. We stopped at a gas station in some small town and went in with our masks and I swear the woman at the register looked at us like she had never seen masks before much less on someone.
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So true. By Memorial Day 2020 COVID was over at my beach house in NE Fla. Huge crowds at restaurants and bars w no masks. Loved going there to get away from the misery of ATL. Also, when I went to the Orange Bowl in Jan 2021, Ft Lauderdale was WIDE OPEN with young people partying in the streets. Free State of Florida was born.
 
Certainly changing demographics and a backlash over covid have played a major role in Florida becoming a deep red state, but the long-term incompetence and dumpster fire aspect of the Florida Democratic Party certainly hasn't helped. Even before the changes since covid Florida's Democrats had a long record of bungling and self-inflicted disasters. This is a state party that hasn't elected a governor since 1994, a US Senator since 2012, doesn't control a single elected statewide office, and hasn't controlled either house of the state legislature in nearly three decades. In 2018 they did come very close to winning the governor and senate races, but that's about the only bright spot.

In 2022 they ran an over-the-hill, well past-his-prime Republican-turned-Democrat for governor and not surprisingly got crushed, and as of right now one of their leading candidates for governor next year is - wait for it - yet another Republican-turned-Democrat. It's very unlikely that Florida Democrats are going to win running candidates that are basically Republican Lite, as Florida voters will simply vote for the real thing rather than the blander, "diet" substitute. The Florida GOP organization is vastly superior to the Democratic one in almost every way, and until that changes their fortunes won't start to change either.
 
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