Democratic candidates swept every major race Tuesday in key state elections. Mikie Sherrill will become New Jersey's new governor, Abigail Spanberger claimed Virginia's governorship, Jay Jones won the attorney general position, and Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old socialist Israel critic, will soon enter Gracie Mansion as New York City's mayor.
Anyone wanting to protest the winners is welcome to remind everyone, for the who-knows-how-many-th time, how terrible and threatening Mamdani is. In the days leading up to the race, the young and inexperienced candidate did everything possible to signal to his opponents that he had no intention of compromising on his most extreme positions. On the contrary, Mamdani spent the race's final stretch in the company of Jeremy Corbyn, who was, as you'll recall, ousted from his position as leader of Britain's Labour Party due to excessive and enthusiastic antisemitism. For the million New Yorkers who voted for Mamdani, all this made no difference. Statements like "When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF," whose sole purpose is blaming Israel for all of America's evils, real and imagined alike, only raised Mamdani's profile.
But the winners are not the story of last night's elections. The story is the losers. What caused Republicans to suffer such a crushing defeat?
In the coming weeks, we'll likely hear explanations galore, accompanied, hopefully, by concrete data on turnout percentages in various races. However, anyone seeking a single reason for the loss doesn't need to work too hard. Republicans lost because, in recent months, they allowed themselves to focus not on issues that interest voters, such as the economy, security, and so on, but on delusional conspiracy theories spread by agitators from within the conservative camp.
Examples are plentiful. Last year, just months before the presidential election, popular conservative media figure Tucker Carlson hosted a social media personality named Darryl Cooper on his show. Cooper has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, where he shares his insights about history. On Carlson's show, Cooper shared with viewers his latest theory from his school of thought. Hitler was the real victim in World War II, while the villain Churchill refused any compromise with the peace-loving German chancellor because a small group of people – we won't specify who they are, but let's just say they control the banks and the media – pressured him hard.
Last month, the same Carlson hosted an even more loathsome personality. Nick Fuentes, a social media influencer who has expressed his admiration for Hitler on multiple occasions.
What led the supposedly conservative media figure to behave as he did? The question is complicated, and at its heart lies the race that began long ago to capture the Republican Party's heart in the post-Trump era. Carlson, Fuentes and company are betting, to simplify a complex matter for a moment, on a strain of populism at whose core is self-hatred (Carlson visited Russia in the past and claimed life there is far better than in the US), defeatism (Carlson harshly criticizes American leaders, including President Trump, but hosted with honor and enthusiasm figures such as Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian), and of course antisemitism.
These positions are, of course, not those of the Republican Party's mainstream or the conservative movement. But Carlson and company managed to incite the entire discussion in their direction. In recent days, for example, the only issue occupying conservative media in the US was the minor scandal that erupted after Kevin Roberts, who heads the leading conservative research institute Heritage, came to Carlson's defense and was forced to apologize after donors and supporters expressed their displeasure.
It's no wonder, therefore, that voters across the US fled from Republicans as fast as they could. President Trump remains, admittedly, popular, but he has done very little in recent months to ensure that the party he leads behaves like a serious, mature party with clear goals. Instead, Trump allowed his supporters to clash with each other, with some – like Vice President JD Vance – standing by Carlson's side, while others harshly condemned the popular broadcaster.
We saw the results of this minor civil war last night at the polls. And since this civil war shows no signs of exhaustion, it's not hard to predict that a similar defeat awaits conservatives in the far more decisive elections next year. One can only hope that someone in the party will read the map correctly and bother to define for voters what exactly Republicans believe in. If that doesn't happen, the party will be left with only the most jarring voices and a shrinking voter base.
