2025-11-06 06:32:24
The number one thing everyone at the Curtis Sliwa election night watch party could agree on was loving Curtis Sliwa. The number two thing was hating Andrew Cuomo. Aside from that, it was kind of a mixed bag.
Last night, dozens of Sliwa supporters packed into the basement of Arte Cafe, an old-school Italian haunt on the Upper West Side, to mark the end of a historic New York City mayoral race. Sliwa—the cat-loving, red-beret-sporting Republican nominee for mayor, best known for founding the vigilante crime-fighting group the Guardian Angels in 1979—was always a long shot for Gracie Mansion. Still, he stayed in the race until the bitter end, resisting repeated calls (and, he claims, offers for up to $10 million) to drop out.
The day before the election, President Donald Trump urged his supporters to hold their nose and cast a ballot for former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, claiming that a vote for Sliwa was a vote for “Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani.”
Sliwa supporters in the room decried socialism but couldn’t muster as much hate for Mamdani as they have for Cuomo.
Partygoers at Arte were unfazed by Trump’s Sliwa snub. Supporters bought “Our Heart Beats for Curtis” T-shirts at the merch table. Former Republican Gov. George Pataki showed up, swarmed by news crews and fans. And some danced jubilantly by the bar before the results rolled in. (Not everyone enjoyed this decision: “This is an election party, not a dancehall,” one onlooker grumbled.)
At first, the event felt like a portal to the recent past: an idealized vision of a big tent Republican Party, pre-MAGA takeover. A man in a navy suit tapped my arm to thank me for helping him identify Pataki. “Thanks to you, I was able to get a selfie with him,” he said. The man told me his name was George, and he’d canvassed for Sliwa in Queens.
George wasn’t concerned about his candidate’s likely loss, because, he said, he was a Christian and he voted his conscience. “We need to be concerned about the poor, the homeless, regular people—not just billionaires and millionaires,” he said.
George, like several people I chatted with at the party, wasn’t a fan of Trump.
“He’s doing bad shit, like shooting up boats that he says got drugs on them,” a man named Brad in a God Bless America baseball cap told me. “Like you can’t do that. What if they’re just fishermen or something?”
Others said that they didn’t like Mamdani but were disappointed by Trump’s last-minute endorsement; they could not fathom voting for “Killer Cuomo” who “lost his own primary.” (There were plenty of red berets, but not a red MAGA hat in sight.)
Still, some attendees sported idiosyncratic merch. I saw a shirt that said “Anti Mamdani Social Club” and a red yarmulke with Trump’s face on it. Akiva Mandel, a 30-year-old accountant from Beverly Hills who is now based on the Upper East Side, told me he’d purchased the latter item in Israel. He was “scared shitless” of Mamdani and his supposed threat to Jews in New York City, because the democratic socialist has said he’d arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes if he visits.
Mandel admitted that he did not know much about Sliwa’s policies. But his father, a native New Yorker, had instructed him to vote for anyone but Mamdani. Still, he just couldn’t bring himself to turn that into supporting Cuomo.
“One of my best friends happens to be an African American woman. Her father was in a nursing home,” Mandel said. “Her father was unfortunately literally killed because of Andrew Cuomo.” (Cuomo has maintained that he followed federal guidelines when responding to the Covid-19 pandemic. New York’s Attorney General found that his administration undercounted nursing home deaths by several thousand.)
Mandel called himself a “die-hard” Trump fan, but said he would “call [Trump] out when [he doesn’t] like what he does”—like when the president said there were “some very fine people” on both sides of the white supremacist Unite the Rally in 2017.
I asked Mandel if he’d heard about Mamdani’s pledge to increase funding to combat hate crimes.
“Anti-hate? This dude is full of hate,” Mandel said. “He doesn’t like gay people. He doesn’t like Black people.”
I was confused. I asked Mandel what Mamdani had said about Black people. He turned to his friend, Russell Miley, who is Black. “You wanna get this one?” Mandel asked. “Because I don’t remember.”
Miley also didn’t remember.
“Okay, fine, never mind,” he said. “I’m not Black, so I can’t comment.”
I eventually pieced together that Mandel and Miley were part of a sizeable cohort of people at Sliwa’s watch party who knew each other from counterprotesting at pro-Palestine events and drag queen story hours. Some had been arrested alongside Sliwa at the anti-migrant shelter protests in 2023; Brad, who didn’t agree with the Venezuelan boat strikes, told me he’d tried to stop the migrant buses from arriving in New York City because they were filled with people who he believed to be rapists and criminals.
Many of the counterprotesters were introduced to each other through a woman named D’anna Morgan, who was at Sliwa’s event, too. When I met her, she enthusiastically complimented my bangs and I was later disturbed to discover that she’d been arrested in 2022 for breaking into the apartment building of a New York City councilmember and vandalizing his office building with homophobic messages.
As I spoke to supporters, a guy from Infowars circled the room like a vulture. I saw a man in a Hot Wheels baseball cap chat with a blonde woman wearing red leather fingerless gloves, blue eyeliner, and a fur-trimmed jacket. A second person complimented my (normally unremarkable) bangs. Then, I was suddenly pulled into a three-way conversation with Shery Olivo—director of membership of the Washington Heights–based Dominican American Republican Club—and an energy healer named Marilyn, who was holding a chihuahua in a little red coat.
Olivo told me she’d helped start the club to give a voice to the conservative members of her community and demonstrate, “You’re not born a Democrat or Republican. These are decisions you make based on your values.” I asked her to describe those values.
“First of all, we believe there’s two genders,” Olivo said. “We don’t believe in all these genderologies.” She told me she supports Trump because of his policies on immigration. “I won’t allow the Dominican Republic to open its borders to Haiti,” she said, by way of explanation. Then her brash demeanor shifted, becoming more somber. “I lost my nephew eight months ago to gun violence, due to illegal immigrants that crossed the border and are in New York,” she told me. “The people that killed him are out there committing other crimes, while my sister cries every day.”
In light of all this, I asked Olivo how she felt about Trump endorsing Cuomo. “At the end of the day, it’s all politics. Whatever the president does, why he betrayed his party, I have no idea,” Olivo told me, adding that, “Trump is smart, and instead of having a communist, he would’ve preferred Cuomo.” So, I pressed her on whether she ever considered voting for Cuomo herself, if she feared having a so-called communist in City Hall.
“Absolutely not. I am a woman that respects herself. I know my worth,” she said. Marilyn nodded along. “I would never vote for a man who disrespects women. I have no respect for a man who doesn’t know where his hands belong.”
I asked her about the allegations that Trump has also disrespected women—to put it lightly—and how she feels about the Jeffrey Epstein stuff.
“Those are all distractions,” Marilyn chimed in.
“Distractions from what?” I asked.
“Whatever the agenda is,” said Marilyn. “There’s forces behind Trump, and there’s forces behind Mamdani. These are just faces.”
“But what are the forces?” I asked.
Marilyn gave me a knowing look.
“At the end of the day, Trump’s agenda is a national agenda,” Olivo explained, and with that she stalked off in her eggshell pantsuit to strike up a conversation with someone else nearby.
In the end, Sliwa’s exit from the race looks like it would not have made up the difference. Mamdani defeated Cuomo by nearly nine points, and with more than 50 percent of the vote, in an election that saw the highest voter turnout since 1969.
Sliwa began his concession speech ahead of schedule, at 9:24 p.m., when most major news outlets had not yet called the race for Mamdani. During his address to us, he spoke highly of the record-breaking voter turnout and railed against unnamed figures for trying to bribe him out of the race.
“From the time I declared my candidacy, the masters of the universe—the billionaires—decided that I should not have the right to represent all of you,” a teary-eyed Sliwa proclaimed. He recounted how someone had told him, “‘C’mon Curtis, everyone has a price.’” But he reiterated his commitment to representing the people that make up his movement: First on the list were “animal lovers,” which were then followed by “people who’ve been disenfranchised, people who have been pushed to the side, whose voices have not been heard, the homeless, the emotionally disturbed, the veterans, the people who ride the subways.”
Here was his version of the Republican Party as a big tent.
It’s hard not to find Sliwa’s eccentric delivery, and his old-school New York bonafides, a little endearing. Sliwa did not name Mamdani, but he noted, “I wish him good luck, because if he does well, we do well.” Still, before I could start feeling too warm and fuzzy, Sliwa issued a warning: “If you try to implement socialism, if you try to render our police weak and impotent … we are mobilizing and we will become the mayor-elect and his supporters’ worst enemy.”
Those threatening words didn’t really match the vibe of many Sliwa supporters in the room, who decried socialism but couldn’t muster as much hate for Mamdani as they have for Cuomo. Even Miley and Mandel, of the far-right counterprotest crew, conceded to me that Mamdani is “polished” and “a good-looking dude.”
“He dresses well, he’s slim. I’ll give him credit,” Mandel said. “But he’s an asshole and an antisemite.”
In the end, Mamdani told NY1 that he didn’t get a congratulatory call from either Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams last night.
But he got one from Curtis Sliwa.
2025-11-06 06:12:47
After Wednesday’s oral arguments at the Supreme Court, it appears that a majority of the justices will vote to halt Trump’s imposition of sweeping tariffs under a 1977 emergency powers act. But a loss for Trump will, in fact, be doing him a favor. And the GOP-appointed justices—who have spent the past 10 months giving Trump virtually everything he wants—surely know this.
An anti-Trump turn is a problem not just for the president, but also for the Republican-appointed justices.
Beginning in February, Trump imposed sweeping and ever-changing tariffs on nearly every nation in the world. The Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to levy tariffs and taxes. But Trump claims an unlimited tariff power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that authorizes the president to respond to “any unusual and extraordinary threat” from abroad. This includes the power to “regulate… importation or exportation of…property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.” The word “regulate,” Solicitor General John Sauer argued on Wednesday on behalf of Trump, must be read to include “tariff regulation,” which he called “the quintessential, most historically-tested method of regulating imports.”
The response from the small businesses challenging the tariffs, as their lawyer Neal Katyal put it during arguments, is that this reading is nonsensical. “It’s simply implausible that in enacting IEEPA, Congress handed the president the power to overhaul the entire tariff system and the American economy in the process, allowing him to set and reset tariffs on any and every product from any and every country at any and all times,” he said.
The three liberal justices seemed to agree, and were joined by several Republican appointees who also showed serious doubts—likely enough to count to at least a five-vote majority to knock down Trump’s tariffs. Chief Justice John Roberts, who has used his position to do Trump a lot of favors, noted that Trump’s use of IEEPA to claim an unlimited tariff authority ran up against the separation of powers. Tariffs are “taxes on Americans, and that has always been the core power of Congress,” he said. Justice Neil Gorsuch, likewise a reliable pro-Trump vote, worried that gifting Trump a vast power to impose tariffs would be a “one-way ratchet toward the gradual but continual accretion of power in the executive branch and away from the People’s elected Representatives.” (This is not a worry Gorsuch expressed when he and other GOP appointees voted to exempt the president from criminal laws Congress wrote, or when they let Trump withhold funds appropriated by Congress, fire commissioners protected by Congress, gut agencies enacted by Congress, and ignore other statutes passed by Congress.) Something about taxes seems to reignite the GOP justices’ appreciation for democracy.
Near the end of Wednesday’s hearing, Justice Sonia Sotomayor voiced the same basic concern: “What we’re forgetting here is a very fundamental point, which is the Constitution is structured so that if I’m going to be asked to pay for something as a citizen, that it’s through a bill that is generated through Congress. And the President has the power to veto it or not, but I’m not going to be taxed unless both houses, the executive and the legislature, have made that choice.” She continued: “The president threatened to impose a 10 percent tax on Canada for an ad it ran on tariffs during the World Series. He imposed a 40 percent tax on Brazil because its Supreme Court permitted the prosecution of one of its former presidents for criminal activity. The point is, those may be good policies, but does a statute that gives, without limit, the power to a president to impose this kind of tax, does it require more than the word ‘regulate?’”
It seems likely that a majority will agree that “regulate” is not enough to transform the world economy and bestow on Trump the kind of erratic and unbound power Sotomayor described to impose tariffs whenever it strikes his fancy.
But in knocking down Trump’s attempt to impose tariffs under IEEPA, the justices who have been so solicitous of his desires would be doing Trump another favor. Of course, the president, whose one consistent policy preference in life has been for protectionism, is unlikely to see it that way. Trump has weaponized tariffs as a means of control, not just over other countries, but as a tool to punish and reward loyalty from powerful Americans. But in doing so, he will make prices go up and employment go down. Those are not the conditions that a winning political party presides over.
It was likely not lost on the justices that hours before oral arguments, Democrats won sweeping victories in off-year elections. In the New York City mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won a resounding victory in what began as a long-shot campaign focused on the soaring cost of living. Democrats likewise won gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey by focusing on affordability and won voters who said the economy was their foremost concern. As Trump builds a ballroom while withholding food aid, voters are increasingly skeptical of the idea that he is putting their wellbeing first.
As their discontent grows, an anti-Trump turn is a problem not just for the president, but also for the Republican-appointed justices, who may see their own majority on the court dismantled if Democrats return to power in 2028. Moreover, the Republican justices are firmly embedded in the larger project of elevating the interests of the GOP’s wealthy, white, and conservative Christian stakeholders. They have gone to bat for these interests again and again, including in their embrace of Trump. Letting Trump go wild with tariffs might, ultimately, help unravel that project.
One of the keys to cementing authoritarianism is to preserve a sense of normalcy while consolidating control. The way to do this—to allow most Americans to go about their days as they did before—is to make sure the economy stays on track. But Trump’s predilection for tariffs, and the levers of power they give him, make him an economic menace. Reining in Trump’s ability to issue tariffs in such a disruptive manner would ease his immediate economic impact, while still allowing him to impose some tariffs under other authorities. Roberts and some of his fellow conservatives on the Court may understand that to win the war, Trump must lose the battle.
There is another element to the GOP wing’s political calculus. The ultra-wealthy donors who have spent millions create the court’s conservative 6-3 majority oppose these tariffs. The Koch network and its allies lean libertarian, and groups they support to pursue deregulatory and anti-labor agendas have signed on to represent the anti-tariff position in this case. Given that, a potential loss for Trump should not be taken as a simple win for liberals or the separation of powers, but primarily as a win for the plutocrats that the Roberts court has empowered and enriched for 20 years. They aren’t opposed to Trump, but they want to curb his anti-capitalist impulses. If they win, it will show they retain significant sway in the Republican firmament.
But if instead, after all the skepticism the justices showed for Trump’s tariffs, they grant him sweeping tariff power under IEEPA, it will demonstrate just how much sway he has over the justices—despite their better judgment.
2025-11-06 05:29:53
Though it was hardly a national focal point of the 2025 elections on Tuesday, Maine became the twenty-second state to adopt a “red flag” law for regulating guns, with the approval of nearly 59 percent of voters. Starting in January, Maine will allow families to petition a judge to remove firearms temporarily from a family member who appears to pose a threat to themselves or others. It’s a notable development in a state with a strong gun and hunting culture, where even the Democratic governor, Janet Mills, opposed the measure.
The new policy stands as a clear response to the devastating mass shooting that took place in Lewiston, Maine, in October 2023 at the hands of a profoundly troubled man, whose worsening condition had long alarmed those around him. As I reported previously:
Army reservist Robert Card, the 40-year-old suicidal perpetrator who killed 18 people and injured 13 others at a bowling alley and a bar on October 25, displayed numerous warning signs far in advance. His erratic behavior going back months included complaints he was hearing voices, angry and paranoid claims about being smeared as a pedophile, punching a colleague, and threatening to shoot up the Army base where he worked. Some of his family members and supervisors sounded the alarm. After a two-week stay and a psychiatric evaluation in July at an Army hospital, Army officials directed that Card should not possess a weapon or handle ammunition.
Despite the fact that people close to Card felt he was becoming dangerous, they had little possible recourse; at the time, the state had a weaker “yellow flag” law in place that allows only law enforcement to seek removal of guns—and only after the person of concern has been given a medical evaluation. As Card’s case showed, though, that is a high bar to taking action. A few weeks before the massacre, as I further reported, “the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office, which had communicated with family members and Army authorities since May, attempted a wellness check at Card’s residence.” Unable to locate him, they alerted other agencies that he was “armed and dangerous” and should be approached with “extreme caution” based on his reported behaviors.
In other words, opportunity for intervention at an earlier stage of Card’s downward spiral, flagged by family members and others, was already gone. An investigation later published by the New York Times revealed that Card had suffered from serious brain injury connected with his military service.
As red flag laws have spread throughout the country in recent years, research in California and beyond has shown that they can be effective for preventing suicide and mass shootings. (A majority of mass shootings culminate with the perpetrators ending their own lives.) California led the way with the policy in the aftermath of a 2014 mass killing near University of California, Santa Barbara. During my recent two-year investigation into that notorious case, violence prevention experts at the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office told me that in the decade since, the state’s red flag law has become “a key tool in a lot of, if not most of, the threat management cases that we’ve worked.”
Evolving policy nationally on gun regulations and violence prevention remains a mixed picture, particularly since Donald Trump returned to the White House. He quickly issued executive orders aimed at rolling back years of progress on red flag laws, “ghost guns,” and more, and he has gutted key violence-prevention programs within the federal government.
Some Republican allies of Trump at the state level have moved in a similar direction, including in Texas. That state has suffered several of the worst gun massacres in recent memory, from a Walmart in El Paso to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, but nonetheless, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the state GOP’s Anti-Red Flag Act into law in June. In stark contrast to Maine’s new policy, the use of such violence-prevention strategies—once backed even by Abbott himself—is essentially no longer an option in Texas.
2025-11-06 04:58:12
When Curtis Sliwa called me on Wednesday afternoon, the failed New York City Republican mayoral candidate sounded chipper, even a bit boastful.
“Everybody loves Curtis,” Sliwa told me. “It’s just a question of getting them to vote for you.”
But everybody does not, in fact, love the red beret–wearing subway vigilante turned mayoral candidate. His unusually optimistic stance, despite his resounding loss to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, came amid a sustained fury against him from those who see Sliwa as directly responsible for Andrew Cuomo’s loss. That includes Republicans turned reluctant supporters of the former New York governor and conservatives who claim Sliwa siphoned votes from Cuomo.
There was disgraced ex-Rep. and recently commutated felon George Santos, who wrote on X: “Fuck you [Sliwa] I HATE YOU, your dumb wife, that stupid Beret of yours and all your fucking cats!”
“You fucking sold out like fucking Judas sold out fucking Jesus,” David Rem, former failed mayoral and congressional candidate and a self-described “childhood friend” of President Donald Trump, was also recorded shouting at the Cuomo watch party.
But Sliwa is, in a word, unbothered. He dismissed Santos as “the most corrupt of all of our recent electeds—and that’s saying a lot.” As for the allegations that he split the anti-Mamdani vote, Sliwa resents the implication he should have stepped aside for the man he repeatedly called “the Prince of Darkness.”
When I asked if he really believed he had a chance at winning, Sliwa replied emphatically: “Of course!”
As Sliwa, who took home about 146,000 votes, compared to Cuomo’s approximately 855,000, and many political pundits have pointed out, even if he had dropped out and all his votes went to Cuomo—an unlikely prospect in itself—the tally would still fall at least 35,000 votes short of Mamdani’s 1,036,000. To Sliwa, that’s because Cuomo ran a minimal ground game. “He was entitled, and he didn’t run a race,” Sliwa said. “He doesn’t run races, do retail politics. I treat the public like a mosh pit. I was down in the subway every day.”
“Friends or foes, I love people,” he continued. “I’m a happy warrior. Cuomo thinks he’s above it all.”
For Sliwa, such pompous thinking could be attributed to Cuomo’s heavy backing by “the most powerful people in the world”—namely, the billionaire Bill Ackman, who reportedly backed Cuomo to the tune of nearly $2 million as of late last month.
“He’s a hedge fund guy,” Sliwa said, referring to Ackman. “They always hedge. This guy lives in Chappaqua. He doesn’t know anything about the streets.”
Then, there are the wealthy Cuomo backers whom we don’t know. When I asked about his previous claim to the New Yorker that he had received seven bribes trying to get him to drop out, Sliwa painted a picture of a rather dramatic bidding war. “Each offer would be topped by another offer until it capped out at 10 million, and that’s when I basically put everybody on blast and said, ‘This better stop, because this sounds criminal to me.'”
Sliwa still refuses to identify who offered the alleged bribes—”I’m a man of honor…they spoke to me in confidence”—but he claimed that they were from childhood friends dispatched by the Cuomo campaign.
“This is classic Cuomo,” Sliwa said. “He is a muckraker. He is nefarious.” In a statement provided to Mother Jones, Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi called Sliwa “a liar, a fool, and a clown. New Yorkers saw it for themselves, which is why his voters deserted him in droves.”
So, what does Sliwa think comes next for Cuomo? “He is like Napoleon. He will return to his island of Elba, called the Hamptons, to his billionaire friends, and he will spend every day plotting a return one way or the other. That’s all he does.”
As for Mamdani, Sliwa says he plans to be “the loyal opposition.” “The problem that I know is going to come about is the fantasy of everything he advocated,” he said. “All sounds good, but the money ain’t there.”
For now, though, Sliwa plans to lie low. “Every mayor is entitled to a grace period.” Mamdani, he added, “won a mandate.” (Sliwa was the only candidate to call Mamdani to concede, the mayor-elect said.)
But for all his critiques of Mamdani, Sliwa can’t help but sound like him sometimes. “I’m a populist Republican representing the working-class people,” he continued. “This was people power, democracy in full effect. The people united will not be defeated. You don’t hear those words from a Trump Republican.”
2025-11-06 02:41:56
Democrats won big on Tuesday night, with victories in high-profile races across the country, including that of 34-year-old Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral race, centrists Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill in, respectively, Virginia’s and New Jersey’s gubernatorial races. On Wednesday, Dems celebrated their victories on social media, while Republicans grappled with their losses. Some chalked up their defeat to strategic errors, blaming their party for overemphasizing culture war issues and failing to address voters’ affordability concerns. President Donald Trump insisted on Truth Social that the government shutdown was to blame, as well as the fact that he was not on the ballot. But the far-right had some different takes.
First up, the TheoBros, a network of mostly millennial self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastors and influencers who have fashioned themselves as the shock jocks of X. One of the most outspoken, Texas pastor Joel Webbon, had this to say:
In recent weeks, Webbon, who whines regularly about the 19th Amendment, has been responding to women who challenge his views with the kind of pie he thinks they should be baking—instead of speaking.
Webbon isn’t the only TheoBro perturbed about the enfranchisement of those pesky women. In response to a post about how women’s votes contributed to Democrats’ wins, Brian Sauvé, a podcaster and pastor in Ogden, Utah, tweeted to his 74,000 followers:
But women were not the only GOP headache for Christian Nationalists and the far right. Others waxed melancholic about the Great Replacement, the conspiracy theory that blames the US government for deliberately allowing white Americans to be replaced by immigrants. Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, tweeted to his 1.6 million followers, “Understand what our immigration system has done to us.”
Arizona pastor Dale Partridge, author of a book titled The Manliness of Christ, offered:
Auron McIntyre, who hosts a show on the rightwing network The Blaze, told his 236,000 followers on X, “Really need the GOP to understand that Mamdani did not win because he won the argument, because he convinced people that communism works,” he continued. “He won because NYC is flooded with immigrants who don’t care about fleecing the country they came to.”
“Really need the GOP to understand that Mamdani did not win because he won the argument, because he convinced people that communism works. He won because NYC is flooded with immigrants who don’t care about fleecing the country they came to.”
William Wolfe, a Christian Nationalist who served in the first Trump administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon and Director of Legislative Affairs at the State Department, blamed immigrants for Mamdani’s win. “Due to intentional mass replacement immigration, New York City is now a third-world metropolis wearing the Big Apple as a skin suit,” he posted to his 82,000 followers. “Americans didn’t elect Mamdani, foreigners did.” Kevin Dolan, convener of the pronatalist conference NatalCon, posited that the remarkable upset victory in New York could portend the same for Texas, where he lives:
Could American foreign policy be the reason for the dismal election outcomes? Calvin Robinson, an Anglican pastor in Michigan with 445,000 followers on X who was defrocked after he gave an apparent Nazi salute last year, certainly thinks so. “Republicans should study this before the next election,” he tweeted. “If you cannot put America first, you may well lose to a commie Mohammedan implementing Taqqiyah,” the Muslim principle of concealing one’s faith in times of danger. Clint Russell, host of the far-right podcast Liberty Lockdown, posted a clip of “groyper” extremist Nick Fuentes talking about the importance of “America First” foreign policy. “My message to every MAGA Inc talking head who ignored what the America First people have been saying,” he posted to his 268,000 followers. “Oh, you got swept tonight? Good. Keep ignoring us at your peril.”
For Fuentes, on the other hand, the Democrats’ victories were not a cause for reflection or casting blame. Riding the high from his wildly antisemitic discussion with rightwing broadcaster Tucker Carlson, Fuentes took to the far-right platform Rumble, where he has 477,000 followers, to portray Republicans’ loss as an opportunity for groypers to win over MAGA loyalists. “Approval ratings in the toilet, Epstein files covered up, blue Wave just happened,” he said. “But the groypers are jubilant.”
“Don’t say the word ‘Jewry,’” he said. Instead, he advised, “Put on your mask and conceal yourself.” He instructed groypers to use the growing divisions within the MAGA movement as wedges to further infiltrate the Republican party and American institutions. “Charm them, kill them with kindness, endear yourself to them, make yourself indispensable and always, always conceal what you’re really about,” he said. “And then get into the damn Capitol.”
2025-11-06 00:34:55
Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempt to rig the midterm elections through mid-decade gerrymandering, voter suppression, and weaponizing the legal system took a massive hit on Tuesday. Democrats struck back with their own redistricting efforts, defeated GOP attempts to make it harder to vote, and protected Democratic judges who have ruled against Trump’s election subversion schemes.
The biggest anti-Trump victory came in California, where voters overwhelmingly approved Prop. 50, enshrining a new congressional map through 2030 that could give Democrats five new US House seats in the next election. Beyond the significance of offsetting Texas’ Trump-inspired mid-decade gerrymander, Democrats hope the momentum from Prop. 50 inspires other Democratic states to take similar action. In his victory speech, California Gov. Gavin Newsom called on Virginia, Maryland, New York, Illinois, and Colorado to adopt new maps in response to the GOP’s gerrymandering efforts.
“I hope it’s dawning on people the sobriety of this moment, what’s at stake,” Newsom said on Tuesday night. “We can de facto end Donald Trump’s presidency as we know it.”
Other Democratic states do appear to be getting off the sidelines in the redistricting wars. Virginia Democrats are moving forward with a new redistricting plan that is similar to California’s Prop. 50 and would need to be approved by the state’s voters. That effort received a boost on Tuesday when Virginia Democrats elected Abigail Spanberger as governor and flipped 13 seats in the state’s House of Delegates. That is likely to add momentum to the redistricting push there, which could make it possible for Democrats to win up to four more seats.
Also on Tuesday, Maryland’s Democratic governor, Wes Moore, announced his own redistricting bid, though the Democratic head of the state Senate still opposes that effort. Meanwhile, Kansas Republicans announced on Tuesday night that they were dropping their plan to hold a special session to eliminate the seat of Democratic Rep. Sharice Davids. While Democrats remain behind in the overall gerrymandering arms race, these combined developments put them much closer to parity.
Voters also rejected GOP attempts to restrict access to the ballot. Maine voters overwhelmingly defeated a ballot initiative that would have required voter ID for in-person and mail-in ballots and would have added a number of new hurdles to casting a mail-in ballot. It’s only the second time, following a failed Minnesota measure in 2012, that voters have rejected a voter ID initiative at the polls.
“Once again, Maine people have affirmed their faith in our free, fair, and secure elections, in this case by rejecting a direct attempt to restrict voting rights,” Gov. Janet Mills (D) said of the result. “Maine has long had one of the highest rates of voter turnout in the nation, in good part due to safe absentee voting—and Maine people tonight have said they want to keep it that way.”
Finally, voters in Pennsylvania thwarted an attempt to oust three Democratic state Supreme Court justices, likely keeping a Democratic majority on the state’s top court through the 2028 election. The result has major significance for voting rights—the Democratic justices struck down a GOP gerrymander in 2018, rejected Trump’s attempts to overturn the election in 2020, and upheld no-excuse mail-in voting in 2022. It was also another rebuke of the GOP’s efforts to buy the courts; Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, a top Trump supporter, spent $3.5 million to oppose the three Democratic justices, but they retained their seats with at least 61 percent of the vote each.
In response to these defeats, Trump is certain to double down on his authoritarian tactics. During a speech to GOP senators on Wednesday morning, he called on Republicans to “terminate the filibuster…Then we should pass voter ID, we should pass no-mail-in voting. We should pass all the things that we want to pass to make our elections secure and safe, because California’s a disaster. Many of the states are disasters.”
As Trump and his GOP allies become more unpopular, we can expect his attempts to manipulate the electoral system in his favor to grow even more extreme.
After California voters passed Prop. 50, California Republicans quickly filed suit against the map in federal court on Wednesday, claiming that it was drawn “specifically to favor Hispanic voters,” even though the new map has the same number of majority-Latino districts as the one drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission after the 2020 census. Trump threatened a “very serious legal and criminal review” of the vote on Tuesday, so it’s likely the DOJ will intervene in this lawsuit or file its own.
“They’re gonna try 5x harder to sabotage the midterms after tonight,” Indivisible c0-founder Leah Greenberg wrote on Bluesky Tuesday evening, “and we’re gonna have to organize on a literally historic scale to stop them.”
Correction, November 5: This post has been revised to reflect that California voters broadly, rather than a party itself or party-affiliated voters, passed Prop. 50.
