2025-11-05 12:08:09
California voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50 in a race called by the Associated Press before a single ballot was counted—a reflection of decisive support in a victory that significantly boosts Democratic chances of retaking the House of Representatives next year. The ballot measure establishes a new congressional map through 2030 that could help Democrats win five additional seats, offsetting a mid-decade gerrymander passed by Texas Republicans over the summer.
“The folks who were on the sidelines, who felt like redistricting would be too difficult or unpopular to do, may now feel differently once California voters pass Prop. 50.”
Prop 50 represents Democrats’ first significant victory against President Donald Trump’s unprecedented plan to rig the midterms by pressuring as many GOP-controlled states as possible to redraw their maps before the 2026 elections. The hastily assembled California plan, championed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, asked voters to temporarily set aside the congressional maps drawn four years ago by the state’s independent redistricting commission and approve new maps passed by the legislature that were designed to maximize Democratic representation.
Though the independent commission remains popular in California, Democrats successfully convinced a majority of voters that urgent action was needed to hold Trump accountable and restore fairness to the race for the House.
“Voters have been able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time, which is that they support independent redistricting but they also believe we’re in an existential crisis where something has to be done,” says Paul Mitchell, a California-based redistricting expert who drew the new congressional map.
Supporters of Prop. 50 hope that the ballot measure’s passage inspires other Democratic states to act. Even if California Democrats ultimately pick up five seats to counter the Texas map, other Republican-controlled states, including Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio, have since redrawn their maps to give the GOP additional House seats—with more red states, like Indiana and Florida, potentially still to come. That means Democrats could ultimately start an additional six-to-10 seats behind in the race for the House.
Virginia Democrats are moving forward with a remap that is similar to California’s plan and would ultimately need to be approved by that state’s voters. On Tuesday, Maryland’s Democratic governor, Wes Moore, announced a redistricting bid, as well—though the Democratic head of the state Senate opposes the effort. National Democrats are pressuring Illinois lawmakers to redraw that state’s maps, too.
“The folks who were on the sidelines, who felt like redistricting would be too difficult or unpopular to do, may now feel differently once California voters pass Prop. 50,” Mitchell told me.
Though California Republicans failed to generate significant resistance to the ballot measure, the Trump administration has sought to cast doubt on the validity of the election, previewing the strategies it might use to contest the midterms.
The Justice Department announced that it was sending election monitors to five counties in the state with large Latino populations, which Newsom called “voter suppression, period.” Trump also claimed the vote would be “totally dishonest” and said the DOJ would sue to challenge the map. The DOJ lawsuit hasn’t materialized, but lawsuits by California Republicans and GOP members of Congress to block the measure failed in state and federal court. On Tuesday, Trump escalated his attack on the ballot measure, calling the vote “unconstitutional” and threatening a “very serious legal and criminal review.”
“I’m certainly concerned about it as a model for what they’re going to do in other places,” Sara Sadhwani, a former Democratic member of the state’s redistricting commission who supported Prop. 50, said before the vote. “It appears that they are trying to test-run intimidation tactics on our special election in 2025 and perhaps in preparation for 2026.”
But if the Trump administration sought to deter voters from supporting Prop. 50, it didn’t work, with early voting turnout almost reaching presidential election levels.
While many supporters of Prop. 50 were uncomfortable with partisan gerrymandering and would like to ban it at a federal level, they believed that unilateral disarmament in the redistricting wars was not an option.
“Our current president and his administration is explicitly saying that we want to change the rules of the game midstream in order to insulate ourselves from the people’s judgement,” former President Barack Obama said on a livestream with Newsom on October 22. “The people of California are saying stop. This is not how American democracy is supposed to operate. And that’s what Prop. 50 is about.”
2025-11-05 11:29:30
Timothy Rodriguez has lived in New York all his life. But the notion of a Muslim mayor never entered the realm of possibility for him.
That changed Tuesday when Zohran Mamdani’s victory made him New York’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor-elect.
“It’s a big win for New York City, of course, it’s a big win for Muslims,” Rodriguez, 35, told me after news of Mamdani’s win broke on Tuesday night. “I’m happy to see change and that these things are possible.”
I first met Timothy a few hours earlier, in downtown Brooklyn, outside the Al-Farooq Mosque. It sits on a block of Atlantic Avenue, home to two Middle Eastern grocery stores and shops selling goods such as spices, Islamic decorative arts, and clothing. When we spoke, he and his sister, Ally, 33, had just wrapped up the Asr prayer, one of the five daily prayers for observant Muslims. Neither had voted yet, but they both hoped to see Mamdani elected.
“A lot of Muslims don’t feel like they have a place here,” Timothy said. He hopes that, like former President Barack Obama, Mamdani can “inspire” other Muslim New Yorkers to run for office and help “break the stigma that Muslims aren’t good people.”
The siblings cited Mamdani’s relentless focus on affordability for their support. “Prices are high, rent is high,” Timothy said.
“Especially food,” Ally chimed in, her young daughter hoisted on her hip. The fact that Mamdani is also Muslim, she said, was merely “a bonus.”
Throughout his historic campaign, Mamdani has been outspoken about his faith. According to the New York Times, the 34-year-old democratic socialist visited more than 50 mosques on the campaign trail, with members of his campaign visiting nearly 200. Mamdani has also addressed Islamophobia head-on, in visits to city mosques and online, detailing his and his family members’ experiences with racist attacks after former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo laughed at a conservative radio host’s suggestion that Mamdani would be “cheering” in the event of another 9/11. “That’s another problem,” Cuomo added. (Cuomo later rejected allegations of Islamophobia, claiming that Mamdani was trying to “divide people” by making an issue out of the radio exchange.)
But the comments by Cuomo were only the latest in a series of escalating attacks, which started in earnest on the night of Mamdani’s primary upset back in June. As I wrote at the time:
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Donald Trump Jr., Laura Loomer, and Charlie Kirk were among the right-wingers who fired off Islamophobic smears about Mamdani and Muslim New Yorkers to their millions of followers after Cuomo’s surprising concession. The posts come days after reports that Mamdani has faced threats and attacks prompting an investigation by the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force.
Since then, others have piled on. Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa baselessly accused Mamdani of supporting a “global jihad.” Outgoing Mayor Eric Adams also decried the rise of “Islamic extremism” in Europe. Even on Tuesday, as New Yorkers headed to the polls, NBC News reported that a pro-Cuomo super PAC was running a last-minute ad depicting Mamdani in front of the Twin Towers on 9/11, accompanied by a quote from leftie streamer Hasan Piker, saying “America deserved 9/11.” (The Cuomo campaign has sought to tie Mamdani to those comments, even after Mamdani disavowed them as “objectionable and reprehensible.”)
“What a lot of this anti-Muslim rhetoric and Islamophobia has done for a lot of people in the city is that people feel like they have their Muslim identity on the sidelines,” Saman Waquad, president of the Muslim Democratic Club, of which Mamdani is a member, told me.
Though Waquad said that the racist attacks “put a target on all of our backs,” she was encouraged by Mamdani’s decision to stand proud in his identity as a Muslim New Yorker. “When we see Zohran show up as a Muslim and not shy away, it gives people more courage to come out for him,” she added. “In many ways, he’s one of us.”
Noting that the city is home to an estimated one million Muslims, Waquad added: “That’s a lot of folks that are going to feel seen.”
Tazul Islam, a 40-year-old office manager from Queens, whom I also met outside the Al-Farooq Mosque on Tuesday afternoon, told me he hopes Mamdani remains proud of his faith once he is officially sworn in as mayor.
“Hopefully, he can fix some of the misunderstandings and myths about the religion,” Islam said. The faith, he added, “has a lot more to do with making the world a more beautiful place than the scare tactics we hear.”
2025-11-05 10:42:44
Despite years of voter suppression efforts by the state’s Republican Party, Virginians have spoken: It’s time for GOP gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears to “go somewhere and sit down.”
Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who represented the state’s 7th District in Congress until this year, defeated Earle-Sears in a highly anticipated race to become the first female governor in the Commonwealth’s centuries-long history.
Spanberger beat Earle-Sears by a staggering 12-point margin with close to 80 percent of votes counted, according to Associated Press projections. The 56-44 win—representing well over 300,000 votes—comes at a precarious time for the Democratic Party, with Virginia serving as a critical bellwether for the country’s feelings on President Donald Trump before national midterm elections next year.
For years, Virginia Republicans have been working overtime to suppress the state’s Democratic voters, including a blatantly illegal voter roll purge in 2023 orchestrated by then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin. In 2024, the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc ruled in Youngkin’s favor, forcing nearly 1,600 voters to fight for their registration to be reinstated. A year later, shortly after Trump’s re-election, the Justice Department voluntarily dismissed a lawsuit originally brought forth by the Biden administration that once again challenged the purge.
Spanberger’s victory is a promising sign for Virginia’s effort, alongside other Democratic-led legislatures, to redraw district lines after states like North Carolina and Texas were subjected to extreme gerrymandering by Republican legislators that functionally disenfranchised a huge swath of their voters. Alongside the governorship, all 100 seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates, the lower chamber of its state legislature, are also up for reelection—which will determine the GOP’s chances of leaving Democratic redistricting dead in the water.
2025-11-05 10:37:10
Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City on Tuesday, defeating former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo for the second time in five months and capping a stunning rise from obscurity to the helm of the nation’s largest city. A 34-year-old state democratic socialist assemblyman from Queens, Mamdani became the city’s first-ever Muslim mayor—and the first immigrant mayor in half a century—with an obsessive and inimitable focus on “affordability.” In the process, he ushered in a new era of city politics and slammed the door shut on an old one.
Mamdani’s platform, his ubiquity, his alliances and relationships, and his identity helped him build a new winning coalition.
The throughline of Mamdani’s campaign was a willingness to meet people where they were, in physical and ideological ways. For a democratic socialist, that meant trading dogma for a slate of unavoidable policies tied to unavoidable things: free childcare, a rent freeze, fast and free buses, and city-owned grocery stores. His hopes and policy prescriptions were things that every voter deals with, or knew someone struggling with. The message was so unavoidable that Democrats everywhere else in the country kept going off-message to argue with it.
Mamdani was the most relentlessly disciplined Democratic nominee for anything that I’ve seen in years. He was conversant in the language of the city, and also its literal languages. (It was a good sign when Mamdani was falsely accused of using AI to film an ad in Spanish; it was a better sign when the candidate’s team promptly published an equally compelling set of outtakes.) You could accuse Mamdani of pandering, of course. But this is politics—the point is to pander in a way that makes voters feel seen and heard.
Heading into the primary, there was a common suspicion (shared by me) that for all of Cuomo’s weaknesses and Mamdani’s strengths, the coalition politics just weren’t there for a lefty challenger in New York City. But the returns then, and now, revealed a different story. Mamdani’s platform, his ubiquity, his alliances and relationships, and his identity helped him build a new winning coalition.
The DSA members in “the People’s Republic of Astoria” formed an organizing base that sustained him during the primary, but his campaign was equally at home in outer-borough neighborhoods like the two he featured in his launch video—working-class and home to large numbers of South Asian and Muslim communities whose residents had never been courted or seen to such a degree by a mayoral campaign. He won the primary convincingly, thanks in part to an alliance with the favorite son of North Brooklyn yuppies, the progressive Jewish comptroller Brad Lander. Mamdani’s coalition was historically young—this was the election where millennials finally seized control of the levers of power. But had crucial back-up from old-school leaders like US Rep. Jerry Nadler (who endorsed him immediately after the primary) and the Rev. Al Sharpton (who joined Mamdani at a rally in the final days).
Soccer fans were the Mamdani Coalition in a nutshell: a young, diverse, polyglot group that united immigrant communities and yuppies.
The videos and debate moments got all the attention, and the army of volunteers helped carry him across the finish line, but the nature of his coalition and of his unique style of campaigning was captured quite neatly, to my mind, by Mamdani’s attention to a subject candidates have traditionally ignored. A few weeks before the election, Mamdani held a soccer tournament on Coney Island with teams of varying skill sets from all over the city. Not long before that, he watched an Arsenal match with Spike Lee. He held a press conference to demand that FIFA make World Cup tickets available at a discount for New York City residents (again with the affordability), and reached out to a popular British soccer podcast to make the case to their listeners, too. No one has campaigned so thirstily for the votes of soccer fans in an American election, but soccer fans were the Mamdani Coalition in a nutshell: a young, diverse, polyglot group that united immigrant communities and yuppies.
This was a local race with national implications. I know that because national Democrats couldn’t stop offering unsolicited advice about what to do about Mamdani. The fact that the Democratic Party’s brand tanked worse in New York City last year than basically anywhere else in the entire country is the type of thing that you might think would cause Democrats to perk up and take seriously a young and energetic challenger. Instead, a lot of powerful people whose job is to ostensibly think about the long-term health of the party argued that voters should rally behind a bully and a creep who helped tank the party’s brand in the first place.
But it’s instructive that while Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader from Park Slope, kept his distance, and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from Bed-Stuy, offered the most tepid of endorsements, Mamdani nonetheless did receive advice from another underdog candidate that Bill Clinton once tried to stop. President Barack Obama called to congratulate him after the primary, the New York Times reported, and spoke with Mamdani for half an hour on Saturday. Obama is better at politics than everyone else in his party, but also someone who knows from experience what it means to promise change in a party that doesn’t really want to. Sometimes, to build the future you want, you first have to shake free of the past.
As much as the race was a validation of Mamdani’s efforts, though, it also marked perhaps the final chapter for the man he twice defeated. In the days and weeks after that June defeat, Cuomo allowed that he may have miscalculated. Borrowing from Mamdani’s color settings, if not his charm, he filmed a soft-focus video walking through a Manhattan park, and sought to portray himself as an amiable ex-gov who fixed up strangers’ cars. His face contorted into a mechanical smile. The theory behind Cuomo’s second campaign was that Republicans would join more conservative Democratic factions in uniting behind him, while he spoke more deliberately about affordability, and made the case for why he could succeed and Mamdani would fail.
I don’t know that someone as damaged as Cuomo could have truly seized a second chance, but the candidate barely even tried. Throughout the campaign, the man who resigned in disgrace after a state attorney general’s report found that he had sexually harassed nearly a dozen women insisted that his biggest regret was leaving office. (He continues to deny any wrongdoing.) Asked at a debate what he had learned from his first rejection at the polls, he said he regretted not being better at social media.
The man who resigned in disgrace after a state attorney general’s report found that he had sexually harassed nearly a dozen women was asked if he had any regrets. He said he regretted not being better at social media.
Aside from a call for more cops and the obvious quest for redemption, you’d be hard-pressed to say what Cuomo was running for office to do. His stickiest policy proposal was that Mamdani should not be allowed to live in a rent-stabilized Queens apartment anymore—a situation that Mamdani will soon resolve by moving into an 18th-century mansion in Manhattan. That fight was instructive, both in its weirdly personal nature and the ignorance of everyday life in New York City it displayed. Cuomo alleged that Mamdani was taking housing from “a poor person.” But only a very rich person would think that a poor person should be paying $2,300-a-month for a one-bedroom in Astoria.
It was in the home stretch where the former governor’s true colors really showed. Cuomo ran a grim, miserable campaign rooted in cynicism and fear. He laughed at the idea that his Muslim opponent might cheer on the 9/11 attacks. He suggested that the dual-citizen who emigrated as a child “doesn’t understand the New York culture, the New York values, what 9/11 meant.” His campaign released an AI-generated video featuring Mamdani eating with his hands and a Black man thanking the Democratic nominee for allowing him to commit crimes. His spokesman shared a comment from a pro-Trump influencer calling Mamdani a “terrorist.” His top surrogate in the final days—the disgraced sitting mayor—evoked the spectre of “Islamic exstremist” in Nigeria and said that a vote for Mamdani would turn the city into Europe. At a debate, Cuomo explicitly appealed to Sunni Muslims to reject a Shiite candidate whose views, he said, were “haram.”
In the final hours of the race, Cuomo even tacitly welcomed the endorsement of Trump himself (while also, with characteristic forthrightness, denying he was doing so) by asserting that the best way to avoid an authoritarian crackdown would be to vote for the candidate the authoritarian preferred. To the end, he never learned to say his opponent’s last name.
Mario Cuomo, the candidate’s father, famously said that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. But that, as it happens, is a false choice. An epitaph can be both.
2025-11-05 04:21:43
A little more than four years ago, Zohran Mamdani announced from a lectern in Manhattan’s City Hall Park that he was about to go on hunger strike. He hoped that, by doing so, he would push politicians to provide debt relief for New York City cab drivers. “I will be on strike for as long as it takes,” Mamdani said. “We are going to be moving all of my meetings. All of my calls. All of my office duties. I will be taking them from this protest site.”
As I stood in the park that day, it wasn’t clear just how long “as long as it takes” might mean. Or if it would be enough at all. Mamdani had been an Assemblymember representing Astoria, Queens, for less than a year at that point. Fresh off a birthday, he was only three days clear of his twenties.
But when I spoke with Mamdani and taxi driver Richard Chow a few minutes after both stopped eating, there was uncommon resolve and humility. “What I will go through pales in comparison to what Richard is going to go through and what so many other of the drivers are going to go through,” Mamdani told me. “The face of this hunger strike are people who have ruined their bodies for the city. Sitting in a chair for up to 16 hours a day.”
Looking back, all the key elements of Mamdani’s mayoral campaign were there. Debt relief for taxi drivers who’d been the victims of financial schemes was, in many ways, a fight for a more affordable city. Then there was the already obvious charisma. The specific knowledge of New Yorker’s struggles. The message discipline. The moral core of solidarity rooted in leftist organizing. The contagious optimism. And, most importantly, the belief that he could win.
Five days later, Mamdani had traded his suit for jeans and a New York Taxi Workers Alliance sweatshirt. In an act of civil disobedience, he and other New York elected officials then sat down to block traffic in Lower Manhattan. With cameras watching, NYPD officers lifted them to their feet, zip-tied their hands, and loaded them into a waiting police van.
The next time I returned was Day 13. Chow, then 63 and living with diabetes, had started using a wheelchair. “We don’t have a choice,” he’d told me nearly two weeks before. “I don’t know how long I can stay here. This is our last moment to fight.” The fight was one tinged with tragedy for him. In 2018, Chow’s brother had died by suicide after purchasing a medallion for more than $750,000 and ending up deeply in debt.
It was not clear then, but the end was in sight. Two days later—on Day 15 of the hunger strike—the taxi drivers won.
Reversing course, Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed to a deal that capped debt loads at $170,000 and monthly payments at about $1,100. At the protest site, Mamdani took the bullhorn. “This is just the beginning of solidarity,” he shouted. “We are going to fight together until there is nothing left in this world to win.”
Moments later, Mamdani, Chow, and other hunger strikers broke the fast as they bit into halves of avocados. Chow stood briefly, then returned to his wheelchair—a fist raised in solidarity. Others celebrated with unrestrained joy.
Years later, in May 2025, I ran into Chow and his fellow taxi drivers again. This time, at a Williamsburg music venue, as they waited for Mamdani to take the stage at the first major rally of the campaign.
Mamdani was still the underdog at that point, but they’d seen him overcome the odds before. And soon did so again when Mamdani beat former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the primary.
On Thursday night, as his campaign came to a close, Mamdani was back where he began—with members of the Taxi Workers Alliance.
“Hello, Mr. Mayor Mamdani,” Chow said as they embraced. “I love you. We miss you.”
“I miss you, too,” Mamdani replied.
2025-11-05 03:22:14
As the government shutdown slouches toward a historic milestone for the longest in US history, the high-stakes battle over SNAP—the country’s largest and most critical food aid program—once again devolved into chaos on Tuesday after the president issued his latest social media rant.
“SNAP BENEFITS, which increased by Billions and Billions of Dollars (MANY FOLD!) during Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office (Due to the fact that they were haphazardly ‘handed’ to anyone for the asking, as opposed to just those in need, which is the purpose of SNAP!), will be given only when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before!” he declared on Truth Social.
At first, the post appeared to be a stunning reversal of what had transpired almost exactly 24 hours earlier: On Monday, the Trump administration had said that it would comply with federal court orders to send at least partial payments to SNAP beneficiaries—after missing scheduled payments this weekend for the first time in the program’s 61-year history. (The administration, however, refused to use additional sources of funding that could provide full payments to the nearly 42 million Americans—39 percent of whom are children—who depend on the program.) Two judges last week found the government’s claim that it could not use any emergency funds to keep SNAP benefits flowing amid the shutdown to be meritless, with one ordering the government to draw up plans by noon on Monday for how it would restore payments.
So did Trump’s Tuesday social media post indicate that his administration was again reversing course and would now defy multiple federal judges? Asked to clarify on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the administration still intended to “fully comply” with the court order. Leavitt said that she had spoken with the president and that—contrary to the plain meaning of his words—he was actually referring to future SNAP benefits once the contingency funds are exhausted.
One could argue that Trump’s Truth Social post was yet another effort to sow confusion, or that the president of the United States was once again posting without control—that it was harmless incompetence, even worth ignoring. But look closer and it distills the degree to which Trump and his Republican allies have been talking out of both sides of their mouths, as they lambast SNAP and its beneficiaries with misleading and often racist attacks, while arguing that it’s Democrats who are to blame for the pain.
Trump’s post also appears to evince his central stance in the fight over SNAP—that he is unwilling to help those in the greatest need purely because of politics, even when he is legally required to do so and when his own administration has already agreed to comply. That amid horrendously long lines at food banks around the country, the president is willing to let Americans go hungry.
