The other day, I was listening to a post-election episode of The Brian Lehrer Show analyzing the election of 34-year old-democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as New York City’s next mayor. Given the scale of Mamdani’s victory (he captured over 50% of the vote in a four-way race when most polls showed him with a ceiling of the high 40s), Lehrer asked for voters who supported former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary but switched their vote to Mamdan in in the general election to call in and share their perspective. A caller from The Bronx named Jim said that he had voted for Cuomo in the primary, but decided to flip to Mamdani on Election Day due to an interview in which Cuomo said that his number one priority was… public safety. 

“As important as public safety is right now, that is not the hot issue,” Jim said. “The fact that he said public safety yesterday just showed how out of touch he was with what’s going on right now in our city. Everybody’s struggling.”

Considering the kinds of conversations we were having four years ago, Jim’s insistence that focusing on public safety made Cuomo “out of touch” is surprising, if not startling. In 2021, the newly elected Mayor of New York was a retired police officer who distinguished himself from his more progressive primary opponents by opposing calls to defund the NYPD and actively advocated for the return of the controversial “stop and frisk” practice that he had previously opposed during his time in the New York State Senate. In deep blue Seattle, voters elected Republican Ann Davison to serve as City Attorney, replacing reform-minded incumbent Pete Holmes. In Minneapolis, ground zero of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer, voters rejected a referendum that would have replaced their maligned police department with a Department of Public Safety by a nearly 13 point margin. 

Indeed, in 2021, it was the Democrats who either ignored public safety or insisted on pursuing some of the more far reaching reforms discussed in 2020, who were then considered “out of touch.” So too were Democrats who pursued progressive education policies or tried to downplay parental involvement in schools, like Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, who lost to Republican Glenn Youngkin in what was in part considered a referendum on “critical race theory,” lingering COVID restrictions, and the expansion of trans rights in schools. A Democratic overperformance in the ensuing 2022 midterms made some of these victories seem like a blip, but 2024 made clear the lessons of 2021 were: voters were done debating social issues. They wanted crime rates and prices to be lower and their schools to focus on preparing their children for college and careers, not debates on racism and intersectionality. Any appeals to racial or gender equality were luxuries that they couldn’t afford, and they voted for the candidates (primarily Republicans) who promised that they’d move past the identity-focused debates of the late 2010s and early 2020s and focus on combatting inflation and the increased cost of living instead.

My, what a difference a year makes. Democrats bounced back in a major way last Tuesday, winning all of the major offices up for election, and winning them big. Former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger easily reclaimed Virginia’s governor’s mansion from Republicans by dispatching Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, helping flip 13 seats in the commonwealth’s House of Delegates in the process and giving Democrats their largest majority in the chamber since the late 80s. In New Jersey, Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill vastly outperformed her polls, trouncing Republican Jack Ciattarelli by a 13 point margin and prevailing in previously Republican-leaning territory like Morris County and South Jersey. In Georgia, the two Democratic candidates for the Public Service Commission notched their party’s first non-federal statewide wins since 2006 in convincing fashion, winning over 62% of the vote against Republican incumbents. Democratic coattails extended all the way down into local races, as well. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which cast 59% of its votes for Donald Trump last year, elected four Democrats to its county council – enough to flip control of the chamber. In the southeastern part of the state, Bucks County, which narrowly went for Trump in 2024 and is consistently red downballot, elected its first Democratic district attorney since the 1880s, as well as a Democratic sheriff. All nine seats of the Central Bucks School Board, which was seized by Moms for Liberty-backed candidates in 2021, were swept by Democrats. And Ann Davison, whose victory in Seattle signaled that even the most liberal polities were growing skeptical of criminal justice reform, was blown out by Democrat Erika Evans. 

In the coming months, pundits and analysts will pour over this week’s results to try and divine how, exactly, the Democratic Party, which had been all but left for dead after Trump’s reelection, staged such a miraculous comeback, and what the implications might be for 2026 and beyond. Given that these elections occurred in both suburban Pennsylvania counties and the nation’s largest city alike, there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of reasons why certain races went the way they did. But my pet theory at this early hour is simple: the Woke Wars are over, and the Republicans don’t realize it yet. 

Take, for example, the aforementioned Georgia Public Service Commission race. The PSC is a regulatory body that adopts and enforces standards concerning telecommunications, transportation, electricity, and gas services. It’s the kind of boring but vital government organization that makes serious but unsexy decisions that nonetheless has a huge effect on people’s quality of life. After all, it’s hard to develop an opinion on abortion or gay rights if you can’t turn your lights or get to work on time. 

And that’s what the Democratic candidates, Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard, focused on – they pledged to find ways to reduce Georgians’ monthly energy bills, especially in the face of the strain placed on the grid by planned data centers and AI facilities. Republicans, by contrast, couldn’t help themselves – they tried to stoke fear among their base that Johnson and Hubbard would implement a “woke” energy policy, and incumbent Tim Echols went as far as calling Johnson, who is Black, a “DEI candidate.” When faced with candidates who actually discussed the issues at hand and those who reverted to racebaiting, voters selected the latter by an overwhelming margin, so much so that Echols himself was left wondering why he went “full MAGA.”

A similar phenomenon played out in New Jersey and Virginia. After Youngkin found success with an anti-trans message in 2021, Earle-Sears tried to lean into a similar message in 2025, criticizing Spanberger for pro-trans comments she made in the past. Spanberger brushed them aside, and instead focused on affordability and the economy – an especially potent issue in Virginia, given the recent layoffs of federal workers, many of whom live in the vote-rich Northern part of the state. Sherrill too, focused on energy costs, and lambasted Trump, who Ciattarelli said deserved an “A” grade, even after he paused funding for the Gateway Tunnel project. 

Perhaps the most striking example of this dynamic played out in New York City. As a Muslim immigrant, Mamdani’s background would have been especially attractive to the Democratic Party of Trump’s first term, which was energized by the opposition to his Muslim travel ban in 2017. As a Muslim immigrant who’s made critical comments about Israel and policing, he’s also the kind of candidate that would have the Republican Party of the Biden era licking its chops, hoping to use him to paint the Democrats as the party of dangerous radicals. While Mamdani didn’t face serious Republican opposition in his race (GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa only received 7% of the vote), his Trump-endorsed opponent, Andrew Cuomo, labored to paint him as an Islamist-sympathizer who wanted to defund the police and threaten the safety of New York’s Jewish population. While Mamdani addressed Islamophobia during his campaign, his almost monomaniacal focus was on affordability. He recorded campaign ads in multiple languages, yes, but not because he was virtue signalling – instead, he was speaking to the renters and small business owners of the city in languages that they literally understood, and in the process built a coalition that spanned from the college-educated progressives of the so-called “Commie Corridor” to South and East Asian immigrants in Brooklyn and Queens and working class Black and Latino voters in The Bronx. The material for Mamdani to craft a “woke” campaign was there, but he wisely rejected it, and moved to the center on certain key issues to reassure voters that, despite his socialist affiliations, he wasn’t going to turn New York into Moscow-on-the-Hudson. 

In his article about Virginia Republicans’ attempts to turn the clock back to 2021, David Weigel of Semafor writes that the Trump Administration’s aggressive anti-trans and anti-DEI policies inadvertently helped Democrats by taking “race and gender issues off the board.” I think there’s some truth to that, but it’s not the entire story. The Trump Administration has also hurt Republicans by trying to tie every little issue – from commercial airline crashes to the state of the military – back to the “woke” or “DEI” policies of the Biden Administration. It’s the kind of rhetoric that might be helpful on the campaign trail, but once you’re in power, it seems like a deflection. If Pete Buttigieg blamed the East Palestine train derailment and chemical spill on structural racism, he’d rightfully be pilloried by Republicans and Democrats alike. But, emboldened by the apparent “vibe shift” signaled by Trump’s return to office, the GOP has fallen into a similar trap. “Woke” and “DEI” have become magic words that they can use to describe their shortcomings, to wave away concerns that they may not actually know what they’re doing or, worse, that their plans are unrealistic and ineffective. 

This rise of the “woke right,” as some commentators have smirkingly labeled such a mindset, might not be so poisonous to Republicans if Trump’s policies weren’t also so counterproductive. Out of office, he railed against inflation – in office, he has pursued inflationary policies like tax cuts and tariffs, further growing the federal deficit. He and Elon Musk’s “DOGE” crusade was ostensibly aimed at cutting waste and fraud in the federal government. Instead, it was a solutionist cockup that targeted spending deemed “woke” without any consideration for the soft power implications of, say, dismantling USAID, and resulted in a convoluted firing and rehiring process for federal employees who, it turns out, were pretty important to keeping things running smoothly. The dramatic ramp up in interior border enforcement has ensnared U.S. citizens in its grasp, inexcusable errors that the administration refuses to acknowledge. The deployment of National Guard troops to major metropolitan areas has become an embarrassing side show, repurposing soldiers meant to respond to emergencies as streetsweepers and transit police. Trump’s China hawkery has all but eliminated the second-most populous country in the world as a market for American agriculture products. Meanwhile, the administration authorized a $20 billion bailout of the Argentine economy, whose own farmers have stepped in to fill the space left by American exporters. 

I could go on, but the point is that while the Trump Administration tries to convince Americans that it’s actually important we bring back the name “Department of War,” they’re also making everyone’s lives more difficult, and refusing to take responsibility for it. While I think the Biden Administration operated under purer intentions, there’s a clear comparison to the way that they were slow to respond to public frustration around inflation and the way that Trump continues to poo-poo concerns from Americans that their life has not gotten materially better since he returned to office.

Trump’s reaction to this frustration is beginning to mirror Biden’s as well. In a recent 60 Minutes interview with Norah O’Donnell, Trump insisted that grocery prices were down and that “we have no inflation,” claims that run counter not only to economic data but to the daily life experience of the average American. It’s reminiscent of Biden’s 2022 claims that, despite rising inflation, the economy was strong and GDP was through the roof. Even though parts of Biden’s claims may have been technically true, the fact that he even made them carried the appearance of dismissiveness. Like Kitty Baxter’s murder victim, both presidents have found themselves asking voters “[y]ou gonna believe what you see or what I tell ya?”

During his presidency, Biden and the Democrats made the bet that voters would either come around on the economy, or that the Republicans’ insistence on doubling down on Trump would come back to bite them. This strategy bought them some time in 2022, but completely fell apart in 2024. Now, Trump and the Republicans are making a bet that the bad will generated by Democratic overreach on social issues will give them license to make some overreaches of their own, and that they’ll be flashy enough to distract voters from their own economic shortcomings. But if last week’s election results imply anything, it’s that people don’t care who wanted to defund what or who considered who a woman four years ago. They want their lives to be easier, and they’ll vote for the candidates who are saying that they’ll make it happen. If Republicans can’t find a way to adjust, then they, like the modern American consumer, will be left paying a high price.