Roiling Discontent.

The off-year election results.

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The tell was President Trump.

Ordinarily, when a race is “within the margin of error”, or reasonably close, both parties roll out their “big guns” at the end. Over the final 7 days of this year’s off-year election campaigns, former President Barack Obama stumped for the Democratic Party nominees in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections and for passage of Proposition 50 (enabling the redistricting of Congressional districts to the Democratic Party’s advantage) in California. President Trump didn’t campaign in any of those three statewide races. The only ads that featured him were aired by Democratic Party candidates, state (and local) Democratic Party(s) and/or “independent” PACs.

For good reason. A decisive majority of voters in all three states dislike or despise Mr. Trump. The number of those who despise him exceeds the number of voters who dislike him by roughly 4-to-1.

This is true on the national level as well. President Trump’s average approval rating nationally is 40%, plus-or-minus 4 percent. He’s very popular among Republicans. He’s obviously very unpopular with Democrats. He’s increasingly unpopular with Independents, in most high-quality polling by a margin of roughly 2-1.

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But how unpopular is he really? Compared to who or what?

This from The Gallup Organization:

Next, we’d like to get your overall opinion of some people in the news. As I read each name, please say if you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of that person — or if you have never heard of them?

Bernie Sanders: 49% favorable, 38% unfavorable.

Donald Trump: 41% favorable, 57% unfavorable.

(Source: news.gallup.com)

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The Republicans in each of the off-year election states understood these numbers from the beginning, which is why they did everything possible to “localize” their races; make them about state and local issues and (in New Jersey and Virginia) about their opponents’ alleged ineptitude and unfitness for office. Democrats in all three states “positioned” their campaigns as referenda on Trump specifically and MAGA more generally.

Last night’s elections revealed which “message” won.

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There are caveats about the “winning message”, of course:

(1) California was a tough slog for the GOP from the start. It is a ferociously anti-Trump state. In the 2016 presidential election, Trump received 31.5% of the vote in California. In 2020, 34.3% of the vote. In 2024, 38.3% of the vote. In all three cases, Trump ran against remarkably weak Democratic Party presidential nominees (when compared to, sat, Messrs. Obama and Clinton). Being aligned with Trump in California is like swimming with cement shoes.

(2) Virginia was difficult, because the GOP fielded a weak candidate and the government shut-down caused distress across northern Virginia, which is where the votes that win elections reside.

(3) New Jersey was “winnable”, showcasing a not-ready-for-primetime Democratic candidate and a focused and disciplined GOP nominee. But Trump was the hurdle the GOP nominee couldn’t hurdle.

(4): Off-year elections (meaning elections held one year after a presidential election) almost always result in defeat(s) for the party in power in the White House.

(5) Democrats are now more likely to vote in off-year and mid-term elections than they were, say, 25 years ago. That’s a big change and perhaps the most pertinent one with regard to last night’s results. If Republican voters are less likely to vote in off-year and mid-term elections, more of them need to be fired up. The single best motivator of GOP voters is President Trump. The fact that he was publicly AWOL from all three races suggests that had he hit the campaign trail and stumped for the GOP in all three states — urging “the base” to “get out and vote” — it would have hurt, not helped, the GOP’s cause.

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Among the many astonishing things about Mr. Trump’s political success has been (and is) his extraordinary good fortune. In his victorious presidential campaigns, he drew two of the weakest opponents imaginable (Clinton and Harris). In his second term as president, he has found himself up against the weakest Democratic Party leadership team in decades.

Part of his luck is luck he’s made. His command of the MAGA base has silenced virtually all Republican opposition. His ability to leverage his opponents’ weaknesses to flummoxed resignation is unmatched. His domination of legacy and social media is both intimidating and unrelenting. And, just in time, God (or the devil, depending on your point of view) seems to intervene on his behalf.

And so She has, once again. God’s gift this time is Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City. Wall Street Journal columnist (and the newspaper’s former Editor-in- Chief) Gerry Baker put it succinctly:

On paper, he is the kind of Democrat that might have been invented in a laboratory of perverted social science by a MAGA Dr. Frankenstein: a socialist, an immigrant, a Muslim, son of a movie director and a professor of postcolonialism, holder of a degree in “Africana studies,” a 34-year-old whose experience runs the gamut from co-founder of the Bowdoin College chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to membership of the New York state Assembly for the last five years, with stints as a rap producer and tenant organizer. Have I missed anything? Well, his employment experience does include a gig as “third assistant director” on the 2016 Disney movie “Queen of Katwe,” whose director, Mira Nair, is Zohran’s mom.

In case those credentials weren’t enough, he has enhanced his status as tribune of lost causes, saying at various times that he wanted to “defund the police,” “globalize the intifada,” open city-run grocery stores and reinvent an America in which there were no billionaires. (Source: wsj.com)

There could not be a more perfect foil for Republican consultants to highlight from one end of the United States to the other. Before this day is over, the White House and the GOP more generally will do everything in their power to make last night’s election results “the Mamdani election.” It will dismiss the results from New Jersey, Virginia and California as standard fare; the party out of power always does well, each loss was to be expected, etc. etc. On background, the GOP consulting class will spin a tale of “losing the battle, winning the war.”

And that may be work, at least for the time being. The question is whether it’s true or is it a misreading of the current political environment.

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Perhaps the most important fact about American politics these days is the gathering backlash against the financial and business communities, the overlords of Silicon Valley, scientists genetically modifying human beings, a self-assigned aristocracy of billionaires, the staggering corruption of The Swamp and its seemingly unstoppable ability to reward its denizens and beneficiaries.

Trump has stayed ahead of the gathering storm by leveraging cultural issues to his advantage. The question is how long that works. If financialization begets another systemic crisis, or a bear market, or a recession, and if AI leads to compounding unemployment, and if a self-designated “aristocracy” garners ever greater power, and if the “1 percent” keeps getting an ever larger share of the pie, there’s a tipping point.

There are glimpses of the tipping point already. This from Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times:

From afar, the past week and a half looked so disastrous for Graham Platner, the upstart Maine Senate candidate, that I contemplated canceling plans to see him campaign in person. It would be pointless to make the trip, I thought, if the whole enterprise was on the verge of collapse.

Platner is the oyster farmer and former Marine with a baritone voice and a Bernie Sanders endorsement who this fall came seemingly out of nowhere to capture progressive hearts nationwide. Recently, a barrage of ugly revelations made it look like perhaps all the hope invested in him had been misplaced.

First came the stories about his years of posts on Reddit message boards, which ranged from impolitic — in one, he called himself a communist — to offensive, and which led to the resignation of his political director, Genevieve McDonald. Then it emerged that Platner had a skull and crossbones tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi Totenkopf. He said that he and his buddies had chosen the image off a wall while drunk on shore leave in Croatia, which one of them confirmed to The Washington Post. What was harder to explain was why he’d kept it for 18 years, getting it covered up only last week.

Republicans, who’ve had unending scandals about apparent Nazi sympathizers and unrepentant racists in their own ranks, delighted in the opportunity to talk about a Democrat with a Nazi tattoo. And nationally, many progressives were ready to write Platner off. On the left-leaning social media site Bluesky, the debate about Platner now seems mostly about who’s to blame for the whole debacle.

But people in Maine kept telling me that on the ground, the Platner campaign still looked very much alive. Sure, some people had decided he’s unacceptable or unelectable. But many in the grass roots resented what they saw as an attempt by Democratic leadership to take down Platner and thus boost Janet Mills, the state’s 77-year-old governor, who announced her Senate campaign two weeks ago.

Andy O’Brien, a former Democratic state legislator and newspaper editor, told me that outsiders didn’t fully understand how radicalizing the second Trump presidency has been for ordinary Democrats. Even senior citizens, he said, were becoming “fire-breathing leftists. They’re just pissed off.”…

So I decided to go to Maine to see the Platner campaign for myself. Not long after I landed in Bangor on Monday, news broke that his campaign manager, Kevin Brown, was leaving after only days on the job, ostensibly because he’d learned his wife was pregnant. I worried that the trip had been a mistake.

By the end of the day, I knew it wasn’t. I have no idea whether Platner will win the primary, or if he can beat the incumbent senator, Susan Collins. But he’s nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online. And the crowds he’s bringing out — some of the largest in Maine, I heard repeatedly, since Barack Obama ran for president — are testament to a roiling discontent among Democrats that seems bound, one way or another, to transform the party. (Source: nytimes.com)

Platner isn’t just testament to “a roiling discontent among Democrats”. He’s testament to a roiling discontent among voters. Mr, Trump captured the roiling wave in 2016 and rode it to the White House twice. The question is who captures the next wave. It won’t be Mamdani. That much we know. It might be an updated Bernie Sanders.

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You can catch another glimpse of the roiling discontent moving left in the U.K. This from The Washington Post:

The battle to break Britain’s two-party duopoly has a new front — this time on the left. Enter Zack Polanski, the charismatic young leader of the Green Party whose savvy online communication style and appeal to younger voters are reminiscent of a certain mayoral candidate causing so much fuss in New York City.

For much of the past year, the talk of British politics — long reliably divided between Labour on the left and the Conservatives on the right — has been the rise of right-wing populist Nigel Farage and his Reform Party, which shares much of the same political playbook as the MAGA movement across the Atlantic.

But now a new left-wing populist face is causing a stir. In an age of mistrust of politicians and voter disillusionment, Polanski has convinced increasing numbers of Brits that he is worth supporting, much in the same way Zohran Mamdani has energized new swaths of voters in New York — and their teams have been in touch.

Polanski — who’s moved from actor and activist to the political stage in very little time — poses the first credible liberal threat to the incumbent Labour government.

At their highest, the Greens are polling at 15 percent — almost neck and neck with the governing Labour Party — although there is a substantial degree of variation in the polls, and a general election is years away.

Since Polanski took the helm, the party has picked up an average of about three percentage points in polling. Not bad for a party long relegated to the fringes of British politics and seen as focused on a single issue many voters felt was the pastime of liberal elites. Its membership has also doubled to 140,000 — more than the Conservative Party, according to recent estimates.

The rising numbers appear to be driven in large part by Polanski himself, with membership growing every time he appears in the media. Analysis of political voices in broadcast media by Be Broadcast found that the Greens had grown their broadcast presence since Polanski was voted in, with “airtime (mentions, interviews and general discussions) up 44% while every other major party fell by as much as 85%.”

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Supply and demand is a basic tenet of economics. Demand creates supply is a basic tenet of politics. The “candidacies” of Messrs. Platner and Polanski may amount to not very much at all. But the demand for something like them is increasingly apparent. Combine left-wing politics with a strict immigration policy and a powerful political “movement” forms.

What comes next, post-MAGA, may turn left, not right. Don’t be surprised if it does.

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Afterward (with a name added):

Next, we’d like to get your overall opinion of some people in the news. As I read each name, please say if you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of that person — or if you have never heard of them?

Bernie Sanders: 49% favorable, 38% unfavorable. (Net +11)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: 34% favorable, 38% unfavorable. (Net -4)

Donald Trump: 41% favorable, 57% unfavorable. (Net -16)

(Source: news.gallup.com)