In what can be seen as a major rebuke to Trump and his policies, the Democrats won big last night. Below are the NYT headlines from this morning; click each to see an archived version:

Every vote that was seen as “close” turned out to be, as you can see from the figures above, not very close.  Democratic Socialist Mamdani became mayor of NYC, beating Cuomo by nine points, Mikie Sherrill won the governorship of New Jersey by 13 points, and Abigail Spanberger became Virginia’s first female governor, beating her Republican opponent by 15 points.  Perhaps the most lopsided win was in California, where Proposition 50, designed to created more Democratic seats in Congress via redistricting, won by nearly 28 points.

For each race I’ve quoted the NYT:

New York City

Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old state lawmaker, was elected New York’s 111th mayor on Tuesday, riding a historic surge of enthusiasm as the nation’s largest city embraced generational and ideological change.

The Associated Press called the race just 35 minutes after polls closed, cementing a stunning upset that took root in June’s Democratic primary. Then and now, Mr. Mamdani handily dispatched former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the scion of a New York dynasty, and the big-money super PACs backing him.

Tuesday’s results underscored how thoroughly Mr. Mamdani has built his own new coalition of support, uniting younger voters with working-class immigrant enclaves in Queens. But he also made gains in working-class Black and Latino communities compared with the primary.

New Jersey

The race was expected to be close. In fact, it was a blowout.

Representative Mikie Sherrill beat Jack Ciattarelli by a wide margin, becoming the second woman to be elected governor of New Jersey.

Ms. Sherrill, a Democrat, made her opposition to President Trump the cornerstone of her campaign against Mr. Ciattarelli, a Republican who crisscrossed the state with fervor, trying to replicate the inroads Mr. Trump made with Latino and Black voters in New Jersey last November.

Mr. Ciattarelli, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump in May, had gambled that his new alliance with a president he once called a charlatan would help him run up the score, even in a left-leaning state.

The risky strategy fell apart for several reasons.

Virginia:

California:

At a time when Democrats have been searching for a win against President Trump, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California gave them one.

California voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly supported Proposition 50, Mr. Newsom’s measure to create more Democratic congressional seats, countering a similar redistricting effort pushed by Mr. Trump in other states to protect Republican control of the House next year.

The result has sharply lifted Mr. Newsom’s political profile at a moment when he is considering running for president. And it has provided what many Democrats praised as a road map on how to fight for a party that remains adrift one year after Mr. Trump captured the White House.

“It shows that he can get stuff done,” said the chairwoman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, Christale Spain, who hosted Mr. Newsom on a swing through her state in July. She added, “Democrats want somebody to fight back. He’s pushing back and fighting back. That is what is helping him break through.”

The election has now freed Mr. Newsom, whose term as governor ends in January 2027, to turn his attention to elevating his presence on the national stage, presenting himself as a leader who scored a high-profile electoral win for Democrats at a bleak moment for the party.

I am no pundit, but my view is that the two governorship victories, both by centrists, are a sign of what Democrats really must do to win, while Mamdani, whose programs are impractical rather than centrist, and whom I see as somewhat of an antisemite, is (I hope) a one-off.

I’m hoping that last night’s results will be a sign to Trump to stop futzing around and trying to get us into foreign wars, and instead concentrate on the problems of the electorate (and that does not mean more tariffs).  I’m not a huge fan of Newsom, but I’ll take him over Vance—or any Republic candidate—any day.

All in all, it was a good night for the Democrats, particularly for the more centrists ones like me.  The road to victory travels along Sherrill and Spanger Streets, not the Mamdami Highway. As for Newsom, he’s now much more viable as a candidate, and if he runs he should take a lesson from New Jersey and Virginia. Americans will be dubious of a left-wing governor from California, but he’s already been creeping towards the center.

Finally, as for Congress, well, it will remain relatively powerless so long as Trump is President and has veto power, but if the President continues his antics and narcissism, both houses may flip in next year’s midterms. I do think the results last night will force an end to the government shutdown, now the longest in American history.

Coleman Hughes, a rising star in journalism (he’s only 29 years old), has been snapped up by The Free Press, where he writes regularly.  He’s a clear and eloquent writer, and, more important, he seems a lot more objective than people who write what are essentially opinion pieces in the MSM.  And today we have one of those pieces: an analysis of why both left and right are distorting the history and effects of slavery. (In that respect it’s like the inimical effects of left and right on science.) While Trump is trying to remove any mention of the inimical effects of slavery from American life, “progressives” blame the residual effects of slavery on nearly all aspects of America, maintaining that the history of America should begin in 1619, and engaging in antiwhite racism as instantiated by an offensive poster in the Smithsonian created by wokies long before Trump (see below).  Further, the left ignores the contributions of African blacks and Arabs, which were considerable, to the slave trade, as well as the fact that Native Americans in the SE also had slaves, with five such tribes taking the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War.

It will do you good to read this article, which you can do by clicking on it below.  (You’ll need a subscription to the FP, as their articles can’t be archived.)

Some excerpts, with Hughes beginning with The Problem:

If you’ve been following American politics for the past five years, you may have noticed an unhealthy pattern: The left, which controls most cultural institutions, uses soft power to shape them in an ever more progressive direction. The right, which controls few cultural institutions but does possess political power, passes vague and heavy-handed policies intended to undo the left’s handiwork (and then some).

Core to this pattern is the fact that the left tends to view the institutions it controls as politically neutral when, in fact, they are stamped throughout with their own sacred values. The right, in turn, tends to see their scorched-earth responses as justified by a sense of powerlessness over the leftward direction of American culture.

Perhaps nowhere has this pattern been more perfectly illustrated than in the fight over depictions of slavery in our national museums.

The fight began when President Donald Trump issued the executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” on March 27. The executive order was intended to fight the “corrosive ideology” that I call “neoracism” in my book—an ideological outgrowth of critical race theory that demonizes whiteness, elevates blackness, and argues that America is white supremacist in its very DNA.

As the order explained, this ideology “seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light,” and reconstructs America’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”

But blame devolves on the left, too:

Starting about a decade ago, neoracism began to sweep through America’s elite institutions. As I explained in a recent essay, journalistic outlets began to blame just about everything on the legacy of slavery, including Excel spreadsheets, gynecology, tipping, mass incarceration, the Second Amendment, prison labor, Jack Daniel’s whiskey, fine dining, abortion bans, coffee, the word cakewalk, and the obesity crisis.

You may remember this poster that the Smithsonian put up; I wrote about it at the time (2020). After a huge public backlash, the Smithsonian removed it.  It’s racist—and offended both blacks and whites. Fortunately, you can still see the extent of virtue-flaunting that followed the death of George Floyd. Get a load of this; my earlier post, linked above, gives some details:

The Smithsonian is pretty woke (go look at its Human Evolution exhibit), and this is one reason Trump singled it out—in a way that Hughes thinks is probably illegal:

One of the many things Trump has done to fight this strategy is direct the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents to “prohibit expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy.”

It does not take a linguist to understand that this order is vaguely worded and bound to produce confusion—one man’s “divisive” ideology is another man’s common sense. Nor does it take a constitutional expert to understand that Trump does not have the authority to force the Smithsonian to do anything. By law, the Smithsonian is run by a Board of Regents, and that board is composed of the vice president, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, three senators appointed by the president pro tempore of the Senate, three House representatives appointed by the Speaker of the House, and nine citizens appointed by a joint resolution of Congress. In other words, Trump can’t just take a wrecking ball to the institution without violating the separation of powers and the rule of law.

Unfortunately for Trump, the law requires–and rightly so–displays at the Smithsonian about the history of slavery in America, and this was done in 2003, when Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate as well as the Presidency:

By law, the museum must have “permanent and temporary exhibits documenting the history of slavery in America” as well as other aspects of African American history. This was all a bipartisan effort—not an example of the left forcing something down the right’s throat. If Republicans had a problem with it, they could’ve thwarted it at the time.

But Hughes, as did other black intellectuals, points out issues with the Smithsonian’s depiction of slavery:

This is not to say the Smithsonian’s slavery exhibit is without flaws. As John McWhorter pointed out in The New York Times earlier this year, the exhibit could have done more to highlight African participation in the transatlantic slave trade. He is echoing an argument made some 15 years ago by Henry Louis Gates Jr., who wrote an infamous New York Times op-ed called “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game.” In it, Gates pointed out that, for whatever reason, Africans are the one group of people that have mysteriously escaped history’s harsh eye despite being enthusiastic participants in the transatlantic slave trade.

“The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred,” he wrote.

The backlash to the op-ed was fierce. As Gates put it: “People wanted to kill me, man.”

In the end, what is Hughes’s point? Simply this: he wants a “compromise” position that emphasizes the horrors of slavery but also facts that don’t fit the narrative, like Native American ownership of slaves. In other words, he wants the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth:

The Trump administration has accurately diagnosed a problem area in American culture. But its attempt to fix it should not focus on minimizing the ugly facts of American slavery. Instead, it should focus on broadening the scope of facts that we allow into the conversation. In this way, Americans can have a more complete, more accurate, and less racially divisive picture of our own history—without compromising the truth.