Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.
Let’s fire up the not-so-way-back machine and return to November 4, 2025, when Democrats and their supporters were preparing for the off-year elections with all the emotional stability of Titanic passengers who had just spotted the iceberg. Donald Trump was barely ten months into his second, nonconsecutive occupation of the Oval Office, having already engineered an administration so unpopular that his approval ratings were circling the drain. By the end of November, Gallup would have him at a miserable 36 percent. Trump had practically done everything short of personally driving Democrats to the polls, handing them ballots, and reminding them to bring identification. Yet Democrats were approaching Election Day like they were entering a hostage negotiation.
Naturally, the Democratic Party responded to this gift with the composure of a Victorian aristocrat discovering a mouse in the parlor.
I vividly remember the discourse that autumn, mostly because it required an industrial-strength sedative to endure. Pundits and consultants were hyperventilating on cable news, convinced that Mikie Sherrill might self-destruct in New Jersey, Abigail Spanberger was facing political catastrophe in Virginia, and Zohran Mamdani might hand New York City over to Andrew Cuomo—a political Lazarus running on an independent vanity line while Republicans performed interpretive dance routines begging voters to support him. Trump eventually joined the spectacle, urging New Yorkers to vote for Cuomo, proving that MAGA’s ideological principles have roughly the same shelf life as a gas-station hot dog.
My cousin in Jersey, who lives in a predominantly Black, middle-class neighborhood, phoned in a cold sweat, complaining that she hadn’t seen a single Sherrill yard sign but had endured enough Jack Ciattarelli commercials to induce photosensitive epilepsy. She was practically convinced her neighbors were secretly preparing to vote Republican. The way she was talking, you would have thought every Black household on her block had a Ciattarelli sign hidden in the garage, waiting until nightfall to sneak it onto the front lawn before the neighbors could catch them committing political treason. She had seen the commercials, absorbed the atmosphere, and diagnosed an electoral catastrophe before anybody counted a single vote.
What actually transpired was an electoral bludgeoning.
Sherrill defeated Ciattarelli by approximately 13.5 percentage points. Spanberger demolished Winsome Earle-Sears by more than 15 points. Mamdani dispatched Cuomo by nearly nine points, becoming mayor of America’s largest city while conservatives continued waiting for the municipal apocalypse they had promised everybody. New York City remained standing, much to the disappointment of people who seemed genuinely convinced that affordable housing proposals would cause Manhattan to collapse into the Hudson River.
And do not even get me started on down-ballot contests in regions so deeply ruby-red they make a cardinal look malnourished. Democrats broke the Republican supermajority in Mississippi’s state Senate. In Iowa, a state Trump carried by roughly 13 points, they flipped Republican-held legislative seats in districts that had supported him by substantial margins. Oklahoma produced additional Democratic gains, while Georgia voters unseated two incumbent Republicans on the Public Service Commission, delivering the party’s first statewide victories for state-level offices since 2006.
Democrats were outperforming Kamala Harris’s 2024 numbers by double digits in special elections. They were winning contests that national consultants had practically classified as acts of divine intervention. To call this an overperformance is a linguistic crime against understatement. Democrats absolutely kicked proverbial ass.
Yet a remarkable amount of the political establishment continued behaving as though losing was the natural order of things. Every competitive race prompted another lecture about historical voting patterns. Every promising Democrat received a detailed explanation of why their campaign was probably doomed. The institutional anxiety had become so ingrained that some people seemed more comfortable predicting defeat than entertaining the possibility of victory.
