As Tuesday night’s blue wave crashed down on Donald Trump, he remained silent for hours, until he could restrain himself no longer.

“TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT, according to Pollsters,” the president blurted defensively on his Truth Social -- just as actually existing pollsters began to explain how very present he was on ballots across the nation even though his name did not appear.

Both Trump and his party suffered a resounding repudiation in every election on November 4, from the marquee contests in New York City, New Jersey and Virginia to statewide contests for judicial and utility commission posts in Pennsylvania and New Jersey to the massive landslide support for Democrats to redraw Congressional districts in California.

In Virginia, both Democratic Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger and her running mate Ghazala Hashmi – the first Muslim woman elected statewide anywhere -- won by landslide margins, but so did the party’s candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones, who ran under the burden of a texting scandal and beat an incumbent. Democrats in the Virginia legislature expanded their majority by more than a dozen seats, ensuring that the state’s Congressional maps will be redrawn.

We shall see in coming cycles whether this promising election, whose results were historic in many respects, was indeed a turning point in America’s struggle to preserve democracy and defeat an authoritarian threat. But while anticipating the future, we can point to significant developments right now.

• 1. The Democratic Party is back –- and more to the point, was never as weak as suggested by its poor approval ratings in recent surveys. What became clear soon after Trump’s inauguration, contradicting those “Democrats in disarray” clichés, was that voters dissatisfied with the party would nevertheless vote for its candidates in election after election. We saw that in elections throughout 2025, notably in Wisconsin where a liberal judicial candidate crushed a radical rightist whose campaign got $20 million from Elon Musk. And we saw it last night across the country, where enthusiastic turnout and swinging “independent” votes drove astonishing margins across the board.
• 2. The touted "Trump effect" on Black and Hispanic voters wasn’t a trend and probably nothing more than a blip. Tuesday’s exit polls showed 68 percent of Latino voters supporting Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and 67 percent voting for her counterpart (and former Congressional roommate!) Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. In California, 69 percent of Latino voters approved Proposition 50, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s Congressional districts to answer Republican gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere, while 90 percent of Black voters supported it.
• 3. More surprisingly, male voters, and in particular younger male voters, moved sharply back toward the Democratic side in nearly every election. In Virginia, 88 percent of Black men and 55 percent of Latino men voted for Spanberger, while in New Jersey 92 percent of Black men and 61 percent of Latino men voted for Sherrill. She won male voters between 18 and 44 by double-digit margins. Younger voters in both states strongly supported the Democrats, as did younger voters (by overwhelming margins) in New York City.
• 4. The political analysts who predicted close elections in New Jersey and elsewhere, based on polling averages that include dishonest Republican-skewed polls, were proved embarrassingly wrong. Don’t hold your breath waiting for those windbags --who constantly predict Democratic doom, even when Democrats are winning -- to confess error or correct course. The rest of us, however, can stop shrieking like Chicken Little every time some such sounds off. Please.
• 5. Focusing on economic issues that unite Americans is path that leads to Democratic victories, whether in ultra-blue New York or purplish New Jersey and Virginia. But Democrats will also come out in enormous numbers to defend democracy and aren’t afraid to fight back, as they proved in California. As Gov. Newsom noted in his victory remarks, Trump’s chief ICE goon Greg Bovino showed up to intimidate voters in his state – and only motivated a record-breaking turnout.

Finally, encouraging as this 2025 blowout is, next year will be very challenging for Democrats, who must reject complacency. Younger white males must still be won over. As Ilyse Hogue of Speaking With American Men (SAM) observed, Trump’s absence from the ballot may indeed have helped Democrats a bit by discouraging the most hostile young males from voting at all.

“The online machine that backed him in 2024 was disillusioned and fragmented,” Hogue told me, as key influencers turned against him and showed little interest in these off-year elections. “While this is obviously great news that [young men] are gettable – and misogyny is not an overwhelming driver in their decision making, I don’t want Democrats to get too comfortable.”

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism (St. Martin's Press, 2024).