With Republican candidates going down in flames all around him, Donald Trump spent last night flaming out on Truth Social. “REPUBLICANS, TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER! GET BACK TO PASSING LEGISLATION AND VOTER REFORM!” he wrote, adding that the time had come to “Pass Voter Reform, Voter ID, No Mail-In Ballots.”

Speaking to Senate Republicans this morning, he continued to make the case for them scrapping the filibuster. But he also admitted they may not do it and sounded a bit more introspective about it all. “I thought we would have a discussion after the press leaves about what last night represented and what we should do about it,” Trump said, noting that “the shutdown was a big factor, negative, for Republicans.” (emphasis, ours)

Trump wants Republicans to kill the filibuster to move on from the shutdown. Senate Republicans want to keep the filibuster and keep pressuring Senate Democrats to cave. But after last night, Senate Democrats think they have a stronger political hand than ever, so such a cave seems unlikely. Happy Wednesday.

Happy Days Are Here Again

by William Kristol

Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So let’s sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again.

“Happy Days Are Here Again” was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign jingle in 1932 and became the unofficial ballad of the Democratic party for the next several decades, until it was quietly retired as too old-school at the party’s 1992 convention.

Maybe it’s time to bring it back.

Okay, okay. My inner Joe Btfsplk is telling me: No so fast. Don’t get carried away. Happy days aren’t yet here again. Donald Trump will be president for the next three years. Republicans will still control Congress, at least for the next year. Many things will continue to get worse, before they get better.

But last night was a good night for the Democratic party and for democracy. Good enough that even I have a spring in my step this morning.

My steps may be particularly spring-ish because I’m in Virginia, the epicenter of yesterday’s blue wave. The Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Abigail Spanberger, won with 57.5 percent of the vote, the best showing for a Democrat in a governor’s race here since 1961—and the best showing for any gubernatorial candidate since 2009. And her 15-point victory is not only an improvement on Kamala Harris’s six-point win in the state in 2024. It outpaces Joe Biden’s ten-point victory in 2020.

But Spanberger’s victory was merely the crest of a remarkable Democratic wave. The Democratic lieutenant governor won comfortably. The deeply flawed Democratic attorney general candidate even defeated a reasonably popular Republican incumbent by five points. More striking still was that the Democrats, who currently enjoy a 51–49 margin in the House of Delegates, picked up at least 13 seats in the chamber. In the modern party era, since 1994, Democrats have never had more than 55 members in Virginia’s lower house. Now it looks as if they’ll have at least 64.

One notable footnote to the Democrats’ victory here in Virginia: Remember the set of issues around transgender individuals that are widely, and maybe correctly, thought to have hurt Democrats in 2024? This year, more than half of the Republican spending on ads in the governors’ race was devoted to anti-trans messaging. Spanberger rebutted the attacks skillfully, and indeed framed the issue as one of bigotry and turned it against her opponent. And in House District 22, a Democrat, Elizabeth Guzman, who’d authored pro-trans legislation in the legislature in 2022, defeated a Republican incumbent who made this issue the center of his campaign.

Some Democrats have learned how to fight back more successfully against Republican culture-war demagoguery. Perhaps Democrats elsewhere can learn the same.

In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill prevailed by 13 points over a Republican candidate who’d come within three-and-a-half points of defeating the Democratic incumbent four years ago. And in New York City, Zohran Mamdani completed the Democratic big-race trifecta by defeating former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was running as an independent, by nine points. All three of these races featured strikingly high turnouts.

Meanwhile, in California, the referendum permitting congressional redistricting is winning easily. And in a variety of other statewide and local races, from Pennsylvania to Georgia and even in Mississippi (where the party broke the Republican’s supermajority), Democrats won significant races and exceeded their recent showings.

So yesterday showed us what a wave election looks like. And what was the best predictor of the vote, and the probable source of the wave? Donald Trump. Take a look at the correlation of his approval rating in the exit polls in these states and the actual vote. In Virginia, Trump’s approval rating was 41%; his disapproval was 56%. The GOP candidate lost by 42–57%. In New Jersey, Trump’s approval/disapproval was at 43–55%; the GOP candidate was defeated by 43–56%. In California, Trump’s approval/disapproval was 34–63%; the anti-Republican referendum was winning 64% to 36%.

2025’s off-year elections were, to a remarkable degree, a referendum on Trump. And this bodes well for 2026. Mid-term elections are almost always a referendum on the incumbent president, especially if his party controls the Congress. And Trump is clearly unpopular enough to produce, all else being equal, a good Democratic year.

But of course, all else is never equal. There are many reasons for caution in extrapolating too much from a few state and local results this year. Things could change. Next year is . . . a year away. That’s a long time in politics, especially in today’s politics.

Still, we can look ahead, for just a minute, over the horizon to not just 2026 but 2028. We can see a Democratic convention that will have nominated a ticket of Spanberger and Sherrill (or will it be Sherill and Spanberger?—they’ll have to work that out!). The nominees will have insisted on restoring to its rightful place at the convention the old anthem that Democrats sang when they were a majority party.

And so one can imagine Josh Shapiro and Zohran Mamdani clasping hands and Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dancing in the aisles, as thousands of diverse and patriotic delegates celebrate, and all join together to “sing a song of cheer again / Happy days are here again!”