DL Open Thread: Wednesday, November 5, 2025

Hope.  Hope I haven’t felt in 365 days.  The election results reflect nothing less than a total repudiation of Trump and Trumpism by the American people.  Other than a couple of ‘stick-in-your-eye’ ballot measures in Texas, the news was all good.

Here are some results you may have missed, no, wait.  Before I do that, here is today’s headline in Politico:

Republicans try to turn national Democratic candidates into Mamdani copycats

That’s the lead story? Today? Seriously?

But, I digress.  Here’s why the repudiation of Trump runs deeper than you might think:

Georgia:  This is big.  There are 5 elected members on the Georgia Public Service Commission.  All five were R’s.  Two were up for election, and both lost.  A referendum on high utility costs? Probably.  But, D victories in Georgia portend trouble for Rethugs in 2026, where a Governor’s race and a Senate race await.

Virginia: Democrats went into Election Day with a 51-49 edge in the House Of Delegates.  They have flipped, wait for it, at least 13 seats.

New Jersey: Democrats appear to have picked up 5 Seats in the New Jersey Assembly, giving them a super-majority.

Colorado: Perhaps Kim Williams will want to check out the results of these measures:

Prop LL: Without raising taxes, may the state keep and spend all revenue generated by the 2022 voter approved state tax deduction limits on individuals with incomes of $300,000 or more and maintain these deduction limits in order to continue funding the healthy school meals for all program, which pays for public schools to offer free breakfast and lunch to all students in kindergarten through twelfth grade?

Prop MM: Lower the state tax deduction limits for taxpayers earning $300,000 or more from $12,000 to $1,000 for single filers and from $16,000 to $2,000 for joint filers, increasing $95 million in taxes annually to support the Heathy School Meals for All Program. The purpose of the measure is to ensure the state’s two-year-old Healthy School Meals for All program, which provides free school meals to all Colorado students, has enough money to operate.

Both propositions passed handily. Never let it be forgotten that Kim Williams killed school lunches in Delaware because she could.  She should be primaried.

Maine: A Rethug measure to suppress voting in various and sundry ways was overwhelmingly rejected.

Is Chuck Schumer New York’s Biggest Loser?

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the dean of New York’s congressional delegation and an avatar of old New York politics, made it to Election Day without endorsing Zohran Mamdani, the young Democratic nominee for mayor with leftist views.

Mr. Schumer, who voted early, declined on Tuesday to even reveal whom he cast his ballot for.

It was a sharp break from the tradition of party leaders getting behind their party’s nominees for local races in their states. And it reflected the complicated calculus of a leader facing his own political challenges while trying to guide a divided Democratic Party seeking to win seats in competitive states with little appetite for a Democratic Socialist who is deeply critical of Israel.

Some Democrats called it a failure of leadership.

“It is hard to imagine something more emblematic of what’s wrong with the Democratic Party than an aging insider refusing to support a young generational talent who has built a movement that looks like the future,” said Ben Rhodes, who worked as a top adviser to former President Barack Obama.

Speaking Of That Movement, here is my favorite article from yesterday:

Volunteering for Mr. Mamdani’s campaign became a salve for members of a generation diagnosed by psychologists with anxiety and by the surgeon general with loneliness, whose religious affiliation is often “unaffiliated” and who also apparently killed drinking and having sex.

Mr. Mamdani’s campaign wasn’t just about mobilizing, but socializing. And the social buoyancy of his campaign wasn’t just for show. Young people turned up and voted. The city’s roughly two-week stretch of early voting, which ended on Sunday, saw more than 735,000 residents cast ballots. The median age of these voters was 50, brought down by nearly 100,000 voters under the age of 35 showing up between Friday and Sunday.

Mr. Mamdani’s campaign did not want volunteering for him to feel like work, but like a chance to meet new people and discover new corners of New York. His vision of the city, the campaign said, is of a joyful place — one where New Yorkers can spend less time slogging and more time hanging.

That vision and the strategy began about a year ago, when Mr. Mamdani slid onto the social media feeds of Gen Z New Yorkers. He jubilantly crisscrossed boroughs, hitting beaches, road races and food stalls in a way that made people want to join in. He talked nonstop about the cost of living in a city where $18 cocktail menus and no-longer-one-dollar pizza slices are unsustainable on an entry-level job salary. He shared his pro-Palestinian views with supporters, who were confronted with videos of the deaths and destruction in Gaza.

And Mr. Mamdani did something else that they weren’t expecting. He invited them to come out — to a scavenger hunt (with a prize of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips, a sly reference to a Mayor Eric Adams campaign controversy), to a soccer tournament, to do-it-yourself merch nights, to a social for shredding personal documents, to bars where people could drink $5 Miller High Lifes and debrief after door knocking.

In a city of crowded apartments, of “Hey, I’m walking here,” of sweaty, squeezy subway cars, of bodegas jammed with midnight snackers, being a 20-something with no Sunday morning plans can sting a little more. Through Mr. Mamdani’s campaign, young voters found new friends.

While I grant you that few can even approach Mamdani when it comes to charisma, elements of what he did here is replicable for campaigns elsewhere, including right here in Delaware.  You want to grow a political movement (as opposed to sustaining an insider apparatus that only benefits insiders), this is the way to do it.  This article made me happy.

And, yes, hopeful.

What do you want to talk about?