One of the main media takeaways from the 2024 election was the much-discussed “vibe shift”. That is, a resurgence of cultural conservatism and a backlash to the shifting cultural attitudes on race, LGBTQ+ rights, immigration and the “wokeness” of the Obama and first Trump eras. The conservatives were in control not only of the White House, but, more importantly to them, the culture. Corporations, media outlets, and even Democratic politicians who had sought to portray a tolerant, inclusive image rushed to match this new vibe.
Of course, the evidence for this shift was scant. Trump had won the election without a popular vote majority, and a closer look at the results showed a more conventional explanation: voters, rather than yearning for the days before there were interracial couples in television commercials or demanding a military crackdown on their cities, thought that they were working too hard for too little and maybe Trump would change it. They wanted lower prices, higher wages and a feeling of security. A year into Republican government and its top-down imposition of a new vibe, perhaps the reaction shows there finally is a vibe shift. Just not the one they planned on.
The first electoral message of the second Trump era was an extremely strong one. Democrats beat Republicans up and down the ballot by shocking margins. In blue cities, progressives and democratic socialists beat moderates. Turnout was unprecedented for an off-year election. Democrats won the races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia by significantly more than both the 2024 results and the polls projected. Democrats won 64 out of 100 seats in the Virginia house of delegates. They also won over 60% of the vote in statewide races in Georgia and Pennsylvania, states that went for Trump in 2024.
Democrats broke a Republican supermajority in Mississippi. Colorado voted by massive margins to increase taxes for free school meals. Maine voted for new gun control measures and against restrictions on absentee voting and new voter ID requirements by over 25%. Even scandal-tarred Democrats like Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones, who joked about murdering Republicans, won easily, by more than Harris carried the state a year ago.
In California, voters passed a proposal essentially nuking most of the state’s Republican house delegation. Counties that voted for Trump last year voted by double digits to eliminate their own Republican representatives in response to Trump’s demands that Republican states eliminate their own Democratic seats. And in New York City, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani followed up his shocking primary win by winning a majority of voters in the general election, winning over a million votes, nearly as many as voted at all in the last mayoral election.
Will this send a message to the White House and the right? Will it send a message to the Democratic establishment? While the Trump administration is clearly taken aback by the scale of the rejection, it is unlikely they will change their behavior. Indeed, they may even increase their aggression toward most of the country. For the Trump administration, backlash was anticipated. They knew everything they did would be unpopular, and they made the calculation that what they could do in two years with control is more valuable than whatever they lose.
Their assault on the government and constitution cannot easily be rolled back. The entire political project is based on winning with minority support and using that power to further entrench minority rule. All of their actions have been aimed toward cementing minoritarian rule, and if anything, the scale of electoral backlash will cause them to accelerate their project. There’s a reason it’s called Project 2025, not Project 2027.
What they’ve brought to the country is chaos and authoritarianism. Masked secret police kidnapping people in broad daylight, sending them to prison camps for life without charges or trial. Armed troops occupying major cities. Massive cuts to science and academia, even cancer research. Open graft and corruption. Gleeful cruelty, videos of immigrants and protesters being brutalized shared with pride. Under Republicans, even the air and the water are less clean. It’s no wonder people are upset, from base Democratic voters to working-class Latino voters who pulled the lever for a Republican for the first time in 2024.
How do people resist a regime that is overtly anti-democratic as a principle? And why didn’t polls catch the scale of the Democratic wins? The answers to these questions are connected and can be seen in the historic Mamdani campaign. The Democrats won, in large part, from voters who do not like the Democratic party. The party’s favorable ratings are at historic lows. Huge majorities disapprove of the party’s leadership, and in particular, their lack of resistance to Trump.
This is a wholesale change from 2017, when angry and upset Democrats rallied behind their party and its leaders. The second wave of resistance is far more anti-establishment, strident and left-wing. Rank-and-file Democratic voters now have far more positive views of democratic socialism than party leadership. These feelings opened the door for the Mamdani campaign, but the campaign showed how to harness them and provide real resistance.
Trumpism is built on the disintegration of working-class institutions and civil society. Only a society with fraying bonds can produce a movement built on fear and resentment like this. The key to stopping it is rebuilding these institutions and this community. While many have known this for years, actually showing a path was easier said than done. Many campaigns have sought to bring the disaffected back into the political process in huge numbers. Mamdani’s was the first to succeed.
In both the primary and the general, Mamdani reshaped the electorate, bringing hundreds of thousands of non-voters out to the polls, from young people to left-behind immigrant communities. For the first time, the electorate who came out to vote actually reflected the city’s demographics, rather than being predominantly older homeowners. Mamdani also built a coalition based on class, winning the city across races, powered by the lower-income renters and public transit users who make the city run, while losing among wealthy liberals and conservatives alike.
But the most important number from Mamdani’s campaign is 100,000. That’s the number of people who actively volunteered for the campaign, knocking on doors, talking to their neighbors and co-workers. That’s one in every 10 people who even voted for Mamdani. They recognized politics as a living, breathing act of being in community, beyond just showing up to tick a box every few years. This has been foreign in this country for decades, but the Mamdani campaign and the Democratic Socialists of America are trying, and succeeding, in rebuilding this community and solidarity – in rebuilding working class political agency. To defeat Trump and the far right, this is what is necessary, across the country and on a massive scale. That’s the vibe shift we are just starting.
