I want to thank everyone who came out for our TPM 25th Anniversary show in Manhattan last night. Kate Riga and I did a live version of our podcast (it should be in your feeds soon). But before that we had a panel/oral history of TPM featuring three members of our current team — John Light, Nicole LaFond and David Kurtz — and three alums — Paul Kiel, Evan McMorris-Santoro and Katie Thompson. I loved this discussion. I’m not sure precisely what my expectations were, but whatever they were, it exceeded them.
Before this panel, we did a Q&A with a small group of readers and then after I was doing the podcast with Kate. Those were the things I needed to be on for. I decided in advance that I wanted to be as invisible as possible for the panel/oral history. I had some idea of wearing a hat and sunglasses. But it turns out I don’t own a pair of sunglasses. So I settled on a beanie and sitting as far back as I could. I wanted to watch as much as I could as an observer, not being in any kind of eye contact with the people on the stage and as far to the back of the venue as I could get so as few people as possible were aware of me being there. It’s hard for me to get outside of TPM, to get some distance to see it from the outside, and TPM probably has similar feelings about me.
One of the most important things to understand about politics is the danger of literalism, assuming the straightforward meanings are the important ones. You can be following the libretto but the real action is in the score. Closely related to this is the danger of assuming that politics operates by a kind of Newtonian cause and effect. Object A moves when it’s hit by Object B. That’s logical and straightforward. But that’s often not how things work. You can see some of this this morning in the DC insider sheets that distill conventional wisdom.
This morning’s Punchbowl newsletter runs with the headline “Political winds whip the MAGA movement.” The movement is rocked by an argument about antisemitism, good or bad? Trump’s tariffs, his central policy, are on the rocks. Trump’s out of sync with the congressional Republicans on the shutdown. Republicans are losing the shutdown. He’s unpopular. Their policies are unpopular. Costs continue to rise. It all sounds pretty bad, and the Punchbowl editors add in the bad election night too. What’s notable though is how much of this was the case before Wednesday morning, before which they were generally saying that things were going great for Trump and the GOP.
I was excited by Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy, which brought many young and minority voters, who had been turned off by the Biden-Harris years, back into the fold. I have been a democratic socialist since the late 1960s, so I also welcomed his attempt to run as one. That said, I wasn’t crazy about his victory speech.
The clearest read of what happened last night is that, as far as I can tell, Democrats won every race that was in meaningful contention anywhere in the country. That’s not just high-profile races in New York, New Jersey and Virginia or the redistricting proposition in California. It goes way down into races only obsessives or local observers were watching in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Mississippi and a bunch of other places. Democrats won everywhere, and just about everywhere they won by larger margins than even optimists were expecting.
Elections are hard to predict. But even with that, some of the notional “surprises” we’re seeing tonight are less surprises than a measure of GOP dominance over current press narratives. People were looking for an upset in New Jersey. Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin speculated that New Jersey might be moving toward becoming the next swing state. In fact, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D) currently appears on track to crush Republican Jack Ciattarelli. A similar failure of conventional wisdom appears to be unfolding in the Virginia Attorney General’s race. A lot of D.C. insiders had convinced themselves that a controversy over some intemperate texts (not nothing but fairly close to it) had doomed his campaign. As recently as a couple days ago, betting markets (which are proxies for conventional wisdom) gave his opponent Jason Miyares 3-to-1 odds of victory. Jones now appears on his way to a clear though not resounding victory with a 3-to-4 percentage point margin.
