The Democratic donkey just bucked — and Trump was in the way
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This was a deafening message — and Trump knows it
The Democrats may have just become the winners of the fight to reopen the government, too.
Trump’s ratings dropping sharply
Sixteen years ago, then-President Barack Obama was staggered by Republicans winning the governorships in Virginia and New Jersey in the 2009 elections.
The message was indelible: voters wanted to put a check on Obama and his wide-ranging agenda, from health care to global warming. Many Americans wanted him to cool his jets, including on what would become his signature achievement, Obamacare.
The following year, in the 2010 midterm elections, the Democrats lost more than 60 seats and their majority in the House. For the next six years, Republicans had a veto over whatever bills Obama wanted Congress to enact.
With Democrats now winning the governorships in those two states, Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have just been sent the same message: you need to be checked, too.
Going into Tuesday’s elections, Trump’s approval rating in one major poll was just above 40%, and his disapproval rating just under 60% – the highest it’s been since the January 6 2021 attack on the Capitol.
Independent voters, who swung Trump’s way in last year’s election, are now disapproving of his performance by a 69–30% margin.
Trump’s leadership of what he calls the “hottest country in the world” is falling short in voters’ eyes on a number of key issues: inflation, management of the economy, tariffs, crime, immigration, Ukraine and Gaza.
What’s at the heart of the continued stalemate?
The US government has also been shuttered since October 1. Government agencies have been closed to the public, and hundreds of thousands of government employees are going without paychecks, while thousands of others have been laid off.
Millions of Americans have been affected by flight delays or cancellations due to air traffic controller staffing issues. And food stamps to 42 million Americans have been suspended, with the Trump administration only relenting to provide partial payments in response to a court order.
Closing the government was not solely the doing of Trump and the Republicans in Congress. After nearly a year of laying prostrate and appearing pathetically ineffective in responding to Trump and his agenda, the Democrats finally got off the mat to fight back.
Of all the issues with Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” – which contained huge tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, huge spending cuts for Medicaid, huge increases in spending to control immigration, more funding for fossil fuels and an increase in the debt ceiling – Democrats seized on one glaring omission from the legislation.
At the end of this year, subsidies are due to expire that more than 24 million Americans rely on to purchase health insurance under Obamacare. As a result, millions are projected to lose their health care coverage.
That is the cross Democrats chose to die on. They’ve told the Trump administration: you want to keep the government open? Keep the insurance subsidies flowing. Fix it now.
Republicans in Congress have had no interest in caving to Democratic demands. They’ve argued Democrats must agree to reopen the government before discussing the subsidies. Their calculation: voters will turn on the Democrats for the turmoil caused by the shutdown.
Trump wanted nothing to do with any such negotiations either. Two days before the elections, he said he “won’t be extorted”.
But a recent poll shows 52% of Americans blame Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown, compared to 42% who blame Democrats.
The wins in Virginia and New Jersey drove this message home. Yes, the Democrats triggered the current shutdown. But the president owns the economy. For better or worse, Trump will own the economy going into next year’s midterm elections, too.
What happens next?
How can the Democrats get out of the shutdown box with a win? With the leverage they just gained in the elections. Republican stonewalling after these election defeats will hurt them even more.
There are two routes forward.
First, Democrats could reach an agreement with the Republicans on a fix to the health insurance issue, with a vote in Congress by Christmas to get the subsidies restored. A bipartisan compromise appears now to be in the works.
Second, if such an agreement cannot be reached, the Democrats can introduce a bill to restore the subsidies on their own, with an up-or-down vote in both the House and Senate. If this was voted down, the Democrats would then have a winning issue to take to the midterm elections next November. The voters would know who to blame – and who to reward.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has prevented the House from meeting for more than six weeks, but it has to come back in session to vote to reopen the government at some point.
Trump is also insisting the Senate change its rules to allow a simple majority to be able to reopen the government – without any compromises on health insurance subsidies. But this is not a viable political option after these election results.
Two other Democrats take centre stage
There were two other big Democratic winners on Tuesday. California voters approved a redistricting plan intended to partially offset Republicans’ gerrymandering of congressional electorates across the country for the midterm elections.
It was a high-risk strategy by California Governor Gavin Newsom, and it paid off handsomely: Newsom is now considered the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.
And Mamdani, a Muslim socialist, was elected the Democratic mayor of New York City. Trump will no doubt continue to rubbish him as a communist radical extremist and follow through on his threats to cut federal funding for the largest city in the US.
Mamdani’s victory also places him on the national stage, but not centre stage. The Sinatra doctrine from his hit song New York, New York — “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere” — does not quite apply in this situation.
To take back Congress next year and the White House in 2028, the Democrats will need all kinds of flowers to bloom — not just Mamdani’s bouquet. In 2028, the party is going to have to shop in a bigger greenhouse.
Bruce Wolpe, Non-resident Senior Fellow, United States Study Centre, University of Sydney
A clear trail of clues betrays Trump's ultimate plot
Today, with talk of “domestic enemies,” “rapid reaction forces,” and “nuclear demonstrations,” the groundwork is being laid again, not to protect America, but to control it.
Why is it that dictators and wannabe dictators — both historic and now Trump — always attack their own countries’ people while saber-rattling about war against other countries?
Back in 1964, Americans were worried that Barry Goldwater — with all his anti-communist rhetoric — might start a nuclear war with the USSR. Lyndon Johnson exploited that with his famous “Daisy” advertisement, where a little girl plucked petals off a flower as the countdown to a nuclear bomb sounded in the background. In the end, over video of a nuclear bomb going off, Johnson’s voice said:
“These are the stakes: to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the darkness. We must love each other, or we must die.”
The ad ended with “Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” It only ran once, but had such an impact that it turned the election and kept Johnson in office.
When I was a child we had “duck and cover” under our desks in elementary school, and lived in fear of nuclear war. My dad seriously considered building a fallout shelter in our basement; his concern wasn’t outside the mainstream.
When Ronald Reagan ran for president, people called him “Ronnie Ray Gun” because he was widely seen as the trigger-happy cowboy who might start the next world war. He reminded us of characters in the Dr. Strangelove movie.
Many folks also worried that both Goldwater and Reagan might use the intelligence and military services of America to go after their “socialist” enemies in America. Those old enough to remember can tell you how, on May 1, 1970, California Governor Ronald Reagan called students protesting the Vietnam war across America “brats,” “freaks” and “cowardly fascists,” and added, as The New York Times noted at the time:
“If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement!”
Three days later, on May 4, 1970, Reagan got his bloodbath at Kent State University when 28 National Guard soldiers opened fire with live ammunition on an estimated 3,000 student protestors.
Over a mere 13 seconds, nearly 70 shots were fired. Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder and Sandra Scheuer were killed, and nine others were wounded. Schroeder was shot in the back, as were several of those injured.
Trump, it appears, intends to out-Goldwater and out-Reagan both of those two old cold warriors and take us fully into Putin-style leadership territory.
The top two headlines on Drudge Report on Thursday were: “TRUMP ORDERS NUKE TESTS and HOW HE LEARNED TO LOVE THE BOMB” with a graphic reminiscent of Slim Pickens.
They were followed by six subheads:
Pentagon readying thousands of ‘reaction forces’ as DOMESTIC missions widen...
Troops across country being trained for civil unrest...
Top White House Officials Moving Onto Military Bases...
The Don Swaps Decorated Admiral With 33-Year-Old DOGE staffer...
DOD can’t say who it killed in military strikes against ‘drug smugglers’...
Dems excluded from briefing...
Wednesday, Trump told reporters that he’s ordering his military to prepare for demonstration explosions of American nuclear weapons. (“Tests” is an euphemism; there’s no doubt our bombs work just fine. Exploding them is more appropriately called a “threat.”)
Later in the day we learned that he’s ordered all 50 state national guards to prepare “rapid reaction forces,” not to fight a foreign enemy but to turn their tanks, drones, and automatic weapons of war on Americans who dissent from Trump’s coming crackdowns on “the enemy within.”
I’ve written before about how in 1798 Federalist President Adams used the Alien and Sedition Acts — precursors to the Insurrection Act that came a decade later — to shut down the nation’s roughly 20 Jefferson-aligned Democratic newspapers and imprison anybody who spoke out against him (including Newark’s town drunk, Luther Baldwin).
When Jefferson became president in 1801 he let most of Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts expire, but today Trump appears hell-bent on reviving and invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 that replaced them.
It appears that Trump’s plan to either sabotage or completely suspend the election of 2028 (with 2026 as a testing ground) is straightforward, a play in three acts.
First, he’s having his ICE and CPB people engage in as provocative behavior as possible, trying to produce a violent response from the citizens of Chicago or any other city where they can pull it off.
The apparent reason for this and his many lies about cities in flames and chaos is because he wants an excuse to declare an insurrection, invoke the Insurrection Act, and either lock down or suspend altogether for the duration of the “emergency” the next presidential elections in 2028.
Steve Bannon is already claiming Trump will be president in 2029; Governors JB Pritzker and Gavin Newsom have both specifically referenced this possibility.
And it appears the corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court may be planning to help him out with his project of using the military to end democracy in America. There’s now a debate about whether the phrase “regular forces” in the law Trump’s using to deploy troops includes ICE, local/state police, federal police agencies like the FBI, or military forces. The Court has asked for further arguments from both sides on the issue, with filings completed by Nov. 10th.
Second, once Trump’s thugs have stirred up enough opposition in the streets of one or more major cities to justify it, he’ll then drop the hammer with troops in a way that may well make Kent State look like a high school play.
The resulting violence and chaos will give him the excuse he needs to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, something he has repeatedly referenced in the past few months.
Third, with the authority of the Supreme Court and the Insurrection Act behind him, he’ll suspend the elections “until the present emergency subsides” and essentially declare himself king for life.
And now he’s ordered his so-called Department of War to begin testing nuclear weapons. He’s not only trying to lock down America and turn us into a dictatorship, but he clearly has serious plans to use the threat of nuclear war to further solidify his hold over America; presidents during or on the edge of a time of war have extraordinary emergency powers.
Just ask the descendants of Eugene V. Debs, who President Woodrow Wilson threw into prison for opposing World War I (then called “the Great War”) and who then ran for president from his jail cell.
The question then becomes: “Who will he choose as America’s allies?”
Will it be Europe, Ukraine, Australia, and the democracies of Asia (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea)? Or will it be the authoritarian and nearly-authoritarian regimes of China, India, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Russia, and Israel?
Is Trump leading America into a new Allies vs Axis conflict where the “allies” are the countries run by authoritarians who praise and fund him and his family? If so, is there any doubt he’ll replicate their domestic strategies for political repression and holding power? He’s already echoing Putin’s rhetoric about the “lying press” and “the enemy within.”
Is there any part of Trump‘s behavior that we’ve seen in the last decade that causes us to think he might join with France or Ukraine instead of with Putin or Xi, if given the chance? Just ask Volodymir Zelenskyy or Taiwan’s people about that.
Adding a final touch, Trump announced this week that he’s ordering the National Guard to create “Quick Reaction Forces” in all 50 states specifically to deal with domestic unrest.
He apparently wants a dozen violent Kent State-type events that he can use as an excuse to militarize the entire country, and a shocking number of elected Republicans and rightwing media celebrities are explicitly cheering on such an authoritarian crackdown.
California Gov. Newsom is telling anybody who will listen that the 2028 presidential election will be a “Putin [style] election” if Democrats don’t “stand up” and fight back now to block Trump’s plans to militarize the country and declare an insurrection.
“I’ll tell you what,” Newsom told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl in an interview Wednesday, “we won’t have a country. We won’t have an election that’s fair and free if we don’t stand up, we won’t. There will not be a fair and free election — it’ll be a Putin election.”
Trump appears well aware of his weakness, his collapsing poll numbers, and the precipice the American economy is teetering at the edge of. He sees the same disaster coming in next week’s elections — and its presaging the GOP’s 2028 losses — just as clearly as the rest of us do.
And it appears that he has a plan to deal with it, a plan that takes John Adams’ imprisoning newspaper editors, Nixon’s Kent State massacre, and LBJ’s Vietnam War up to such Putin-like levels of intimidation, repression, and violence that the 2028 elections are at risk.
If we let him.
Who loses most from redistricting? Clue: it's not Dems or the GOP
But in 2025, breaking from standard practice, President Donald Trump has asked Republican states to redraw their districts mid-decade to provide a greater Republican advantage in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.
Not to be outdone, the Democrats have responded by starting a redistricting effort in California to offset the Republican gains in Texas. Californians will decide whether to approve those changes in a ballot measure on Nov. 4, 2025.
As other states join the fray, this battle for control of the U.S. House of Representatives has escalated to what the media has called a “Redistricting War.” In this war, the control of the House may be determined more by how each party is able to redistrict states they control and less by how citizens vote.
The media and politicians focus on which party is winning or losing seats. But are the citizens winning or losing in this conflict?
Studies have shown that districts contorted for political purposes make it more difficult for constituents to know who their representatives are, reduces representative-citizen interactions and lowers voter participation in elections.
Changing a resident’s congressional district will sever any existing relationship or understanding of who their current representative is and how to seek help or share policy concerns. This forces residents to navigate unfamiliar political terrain as they figure out their new district, who is running, and what the candidates stand for. This added complexity discourages residents from voting.
More importantly, it diminishes their faith in the democratic process.
Staggering scale of changes
Just how big are the changes already enacted in Texas and proposed in California?
The University of Richmond Spatial Analysis Laboratory, which co-author Kyle Redican directs, has analyzed the impact of the mid-decade redistricting changes. The number of redistricting casualties — residents reassigned to a new congressional district — caused by these mid-decade changes in Texas and California is nearly 20 million. That’s about 6 percent of the overall U.S. population.
The scale of the changes is staggering: 10.4 million Texas residents, about 36 percent of the state’s population, and 9.2 million California residents, about 23 percent of the state’s population, will find themselves in new, unfamiliar congressional districts.
Only one district in Texas, of 38 total districts, and eight districts in California, of 52 total districts, remain untouched, making this a pervasive upheaval, not a surgical adjustment.
Most dramatically, nine districts in California and eight districts in Texas will have more than 50 percent new residents, fundamentally changing the overall composition of those districts.
The 41st District in California will have 100 percent new residents, while the 9th District in Texas will have 97 percent new residents, essentially becoming entirely different constituencies.
Making a change of this size mid-decade, as opposed to once every decade, will be highly disruptive and represent a major tear in the fabric of representative democracy.
Lawmakers picking their voters
So who exactly is being moved? The demographic patterns reveal the calculated nature of these partisan manipulations.
In Texas, Black and Hispanic residents are disproportionately shuffled into new districts compared to white residents.
Minorities constitute 67.1 percent of Texans who have been moved into a new district, while minorities constitute only 56.4 percent of Texans who get to remain in their same district. By moving more minorities out of a district and into another reliably Republican district, partisan mapmakers are able to reduce the likely Democratic voter share in that district and swing it to be a Republican-leaning district.
California follows the opposite playbook: White residents are disproportionately moved.
There, 41.2 percent of those moved into a new district are white, while only 32.7 percent of those who get to remain in their same district are white. In this case, California is moving likely Republican voters into another reliably Democratic district, which reduces the Republican voter share in the original district and swings it to be a Democratic-leaning district.
In either case, legislators are making deliberate decisions about which residents to move to achieve a political goal.
Yet fundamental to a representative democracy is a simple principle: The people choose their representatives. It’s not that representatives choose their constituents. The founders envisioned the House of Representatives as the people’s house, representing and accountable to the voters.
In the current mid-decade redistricting, the legislators are handpicking their constituencies.
Mocking the fundamental idea
Does the redistricting battle ever end?
If mid-decade redistricting becomes an accepted way to win elections, each time a party wins control of a state legislature and governorship they will have the incentive to redistrict. Each of these future redistrictings will continue to negatively affect citizens’ participation in the representative process and mock the fundamental idea that citizens should choose their representatives.
It’s entirely possible that redistricting could happen every two years — though that is an extreme outcome of this competition.
Texas and California have fired the opening shots in the redistricting arms race. Other states — Missouri, North Carolina and Virginia — are joining the fight, each time diminishing the public trust in our democratic process.
Today, it’s 20 million Americans caught in the crossfire. Tomorrow, it could be 100 million as this conflict spreads from state to state. With tit-for-tat redistricting offsetting gains in seats, who is really winning?
For sure, we know who is losing — the people and representative democracy.
- Spatial Analysis Lab intern Ryan Poulsen worked on the block data processing for this story.