Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic governor-elect of New Jersey, takes a photo with attendees on election night in East Brunswick, New Jersey, on November 4, 2025.
(Michael Nagle / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Donald Trump should have spent more time studying physics. In particular, he should have familiarized himself with Newton’s third law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Translated into language the MAGA-man might understand, that comes out, in the political realm, to something like “push a far-right agenda that tramples the rights of millions of Americans, and expect there to be massive blowback at the ballot box from an enraged, and energized, citizenry.” Challenge people’s dignity and legal status, and you should expect political movements to emerge that seek not only to protect existing human and civil rights but to expand them. Demonize immigrants, and you should expect coalitions that bring immigrants into the halls of power that MAGA is so terrified about losing control over.
This week’s election results, 17 days after at least 7 million Americans took to the streets in thousands of No Kings protests around the country, showcased that blowback in all its multifaceted finery. Pretty much everywhere there was an election, Trump’s agenda took a hammering, and local candidates triumphed by promising an inclusionary, economically ambitious, pro-immigrant, rule-of-law-based politics.
The headline of the day, of course, was that a socialist, Muslim, immigrant, millennial candidate won the mayorship of New York. But while Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary victory—and his equally extraordinary victory speech—was guaranteed to drive Trump into paroxysms of rage, the real story of Tuesday night went way beyond New York City. Take your pick: All around the country, the results were a rejection of the chaos, cruelty, incompetence, contempt for scientific knowledge, and corruption of Trumpism.
In Pennsylvania, three Democratic Supreme Court justices targeted by MAGA handily won reelection, each with more than 60 percent of the vote. In Georgia, two Democrats were elected to the state’s public utility regulator; it was the first time in nearly 20 years that Democrats had won statewide elections for a non-federal position. In Mississippi, Democrats picked up two state Senate seats and in so doing broke the GOP’s supermajority in the legislature.
New Jersey’s governor’s race had, for months, been described as a toss-up. In the end, Democratic candidate Mikie Sherrill won by 13 points. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger triumphed in the governor’s race by a similarly large margin, flipping the state’s governorship back to the Democrats. In the state’s House of Delegates, Democrats increased their numbers from 51 seats to 64. That’s a rout of epic proportions, fueled at least in part by the vast destruction to local jobs and to community that Trump’s war on federal workers has wrought in Virginia.
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And then there’s California, where Governor Gavin Newsom put his political muscle behind Proposition 50, a measure that would allow the state to suspend its independent districting board and redistrict House seats in a way designed to neutralize the GOP advantage secured by Texas, at Trump’s urging, implementing a mid-decade redistricting. By evening’s end, it was clear that Prop 50 had passed by a nearly two-to-one margin. Ominously for the Republicans, the measure didn’t just score big in liberal coastal cities. In conservative parts of the state with large Hispanic populations—inland areas such as San Bernardino, Riverside, Fresno, and Imperial County, all of which went for Trump in 2024—majorities of voters also supported Proposition 50.
The Proposition 50 results suggest a broad-based collapse in Hispanic support for the GOP over the past months, as ICE has repeatedly and violently targeted people for kidnapping and deportation based on their skin color, the language they speak, the accents they have, even the tattoos they sport. Isaac Newton would not have been surprised.
Add up the results, and Tuesday was an astonishingly bad day for MAGA. Yet, instead of reflecting on what voters were telling the MAGAfied GOP, House Speaker Mike Johnson blustered that these are all wins in Democratic states—to reiterate, they weren’t—and that there were no lessons to be learned heading into the 2026 midterms. GOP congressional leaders lined up to slime Mamdani—to accuse him of being a communist and to condemn the Democratic leadership for somehow being in bed with Mamdani. (In reality, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer did not even have the courage to say whom he had voted for in the mayoral election.) Trump posted, in all caps of course, that the GOP lost because of the government shutdown and because he wasn’t on the ballot.
That is, at best, disingenuous. Trump’s name might not have been on the ballot, but his policies and actions and contempt for the rule of law most certainly were. It was Trump, after all, who spent much of the past week defying court orders to restore SNAP expenditures so that millions of food-insecure Americans would be able to put food on the table this Thanksgiving month. And it was Trump who doubled down on this threat even as his own spokespeople tried to roll it back. It was Trump who went onto CBS’s Sixty Minutes days before the election to say that ICE hadn’t gone nearly far enough in its terrorizing of immigrants, “because we’ve been held back by the liberal judges.” And it was Trump who presided over the bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House, giving a middle finger to the notion that the White House is “the people’s house.”
Make no mistake, Donald J. Trump, felon, absolutely was on the ballot. And his maleficent presence turned out to be catastrophic for GOP candidates and priorities in one state after another.
The Republicans have sought to project an aura of invincibility and inevitability in the Trump era. Steve Bannon has even gone so far as to say that Trump will secure a third presidential term—despite the constitutional prohibition—in 2028, and that the hundreds of millions of denizens of the United States “just ought to get accommodated with that.” Tuesday’s elections should put the kibosh on that drivel. They showed, should anyone have doubted it, that there is nothing inevitable about the ultimate victory of Trumpism or about the country lurching rightward for years to come.
Trump isn’t an all-knowing, all-conquering political savant. Rather, he’s a thuggish, narcissistic man of mediocre intellect, an insecure and aged gangster who surrounds himself with sycophants and who has for far too long succeeded in ranting his way into the spotlight. On Tuesday, voters told him that the United States is not his personal property and that voters will not put up with so much of MAGA-man’s senescent, sadistic nonsense.