In the days since Democrats swept back to power in Washington, D.C., and in statehouses and gubernatorial seats across the country, the winners and losers have been revealed. Some are obvious, others not so much. Here’s my list.
Losers
Donald Trump. Obviously. And it’s not just that voters issued a rejection of his specific performance and his priorities, but that in his final two years in office he has less leverage over his own party members, many of whom are very angry about being led to their doom on Nov. 3 or, if they survived, having greatly diminished power in the Capitol.
AI investors suffered a $3.2 trillion rout in the capital markets on Thursday after an election in which opposition to AI data centers ranked very high among voters in both parties. AI is here to stay, and investors will still make oodles from it, but citizens — who outnumber AI bigwigs by about 70 million to 1 in this country — are pushing back hard when it comes to being saddled with higher costs as a result of data centers.
Nancy Pelosi will, like AI investors, continue to be influential. But her attempt to take down Scott Wiener failed miserably, a rare swing-and-a-miss for the speaker emerita.
Susie Wiles, whose LinkedIn bio begins “I am a seasoned communications, political & government relations professional with more than 20 years of proven results at the national, state and local level. For better or worse, I have enormous capacity, love variety and thrive under pressure. Above all, I cherish the opportunity to make a difference.” Trump’s now-former chief of staff read the writing on the wall that her boss was blaming her for the GOP losses and quit right after the election, a difference-making opportunity she must cherish.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican, managed to lose the governor’s race in the reliably Republican state of Ohio, waging one of the election’s most despicable campaigns, clearly thinking voters still wanted pedal-to-the-metal venom and mud-slinging. His historic misreading of the room delivered the governor’s seat to Democrat Amy Action.
Winners
Daniel Lurie showed he’s still king of San Francisco’s seven hills with easy voter passage of his ballot measures, the most important of which will make it more difficult to lard up the ballot with more ballot measures. For that alone, we should name a park after him.
Scott Wiener saw off the Pelosi full-court press and won the race to succeed her in Congress.
Catherine Stefani was reelected to the State Assembly seat she first won in 2024.
Matt Haney got an immediate post-election endorsement for the State Senate from victorious U.S. House candidate Scott Wiener, who issued a statement saying, “I’ve seen firsthand how effective [Haney] is at delivering on the issues that matter most to San Franciscans: building more housing, holding powerful corporations accountable, and fighting to lower costs for working families.” And, presumably, not being Nancy Pelosi’s daughter.
Moderate and progressive Democrats racked up wins across the country, meaning there will be more of both in the House of Representatives and the Senate. Both houses will have Democratic majorities large enough to prevent the kind of death-by-Freedom-Caucus that hobbled Congress for the past few years.
Xavier Becerra will replace Gavin Newsom in Sacramento. What he’ll do is largely a mystery, as he avoided a lot of public appearances and pronouncements in his easy race in which he swamped challenger Steve Hilton. We could add Hilton to the list of losers, but it seems like piling on.
Black America faced down the loss of numerous seats in the various mid-decade state gerrymanderings. People feared a loss of Black political influence. Instead, Black voter turnout surged and they won big. Wisconsin elected its first Black governor, as did Georgia and Nevada — and Florida, where a Republican barely survived the Blue Wave to become that state’s first Black governor-elect.
Daniel Lurie showed he’s still king of San Francisco’s seven hills with easy voter passage of his ballot measures.
Stephen Miller, the hardline policy advisor behind the Trump administration’s immigration overreach, is the new White House chief of staff. It signals a commitment by the administration to be combative, not cooperative, with the new electoral reality.
The Bulwark and its band of anti-Trump conservatives (and the conservative-curious) have been in party mode for the past week. They finally got the broad repudiation of Trump from Trump’s own base that they have long sought.
Capitalism — yes, capitalism. The progressives might think the Trump era is one of rampant capitalism, but it is really more like rampant mercantilism. Tariffs, government direct investments in companies, government direction of industries, and market-distorting efforts to fix what the government itself broke (such as tens of billions of dollars to farmers hurt by the president’s agricultural tariffs). Trump’s still there, but it’ll be up to moderate and progressive Democrats to save capitalism once again.
Decency and normality. A week before Election Day, I heard from a friend who was excited to discover that his former pastor, Adam Hamilton, was about to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Kansas, a state that hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, which is 32 years before Hamilton was even born. But Hamilton, senior pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the United States, campaigned on things like decency and loving our neighbors. And he won. (Who says politicians should keep their faith to themselves?) His fellow freshman senator from Texas, James Talarico, did the same, also not being afraid to talk about his faith and highlight the fact that at its core it’s about love, not anger and venom. Talarico is now the first Democrat elected to the Senate since 1988, which is one year before he was born.
