The marquee results in Virginia and New Jersey were what was expected: Democrats won the governorships in Blue states. Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral victory in New York City also tracks along the same lines, an exceedingly Blue electorate putting a Democrat into office. It is what is going on behind these victories, however, that perhaps provides useful clues regarding the direction of our nation in general—and the Democrats in particular.

We learned this past Tuesday that, unsurprisingly, Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is still a very effective motivator for Democrats. New Jersey Democrats could have run virtually anyone with Big Blue “D” after their name and won in a state where illegal Immigrants are still considered a protected species and Drag Queen Story Hours are common family entertainment for many residents. In Virginia the loss of federal jobs and contracts due to DOGE-driven cuts in federal employment and spending eliminated a lot of cushy positions throughout the state and allowed the Democrat candidate, Abigail Spanberger, to sneer her way to victory by waving her followers’ preferred bogeyman in their faces. The long government shutdown, fueled by the refusal of Senate Democrats to simply keep the government open while continuing to negotiate, also served to ramp up local paranoia. Now that this tactic has served its purpose, expect a quick vote to reopen the government because leveraging economic pain into votes will no longer be necessary. 

The victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City was likely the result of two distinct factors: the simple fact that the quality of life for its residents has, except for the super-wealthy, continued to collapse toward Mogadishu-like levels and, perhaps as a consequence of both this hard reality and their own indoctrination at elite colleges, young people are once again infatuated with Communism in a way that eerily tracks the same worldwide phenomenon roughly a century ago. Never mind that Communism has failed in every country in which it has ever been attempted and led directly to the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people; these historical truths are lost on the highly-educated fools, also known as “useful idiots” in Leninist parlance, who raced to vote for a collective suicide that will, should Mr. Mamdani be able to follow through on his plans, increase crime, bankrupt the city, drive taxes through the roof, and prompt the mass exodus of businesses today offering well-paying jobs to New Yorkers.

However, what should worry us most about the election results is the manner in which TDS is morphing into an interest in—and even a lust for—political violence as a means to an end. The chilling glee of so many Democrats after the recent public assassination of commentator Charlie Kirk (Google “Charlie Kirk Halloween costume 2025” if you want to be appalled) is a warning we should all heed. For years Democrats ranging from Nancy Pelosi to Chuck Schumer to Kamala Harris to Gavin Newsom to Hakeem Jeffries have advocated for street violence and confrontation to push their agenda. The new Virginia Attorney General, Jay Jones, has openly fantasized about the murder of his political opponents and their children, and that State’s new Governor instructed her supporters to “Let your rage fuel you.” Chillingly, a recent poll found that 24% of American now believe there are instances where political violence is justified, and 68% are hesitant to openly discuss their views—likely because they well understand there are a lot of hair-trigger nut jobs roaming our nation.

Americans have, of course, voted for uncountable numbers of daft political candidates proposing equally daft ideas since the dawn of our Republic, so we should not be surprised by today’s flirtation with—or open embrace of—bullets and bombs instead of debate and discussion by so many Democrats, which we can readily trace directly to their cheerleading for the George Floyd arson, looting, and riots that scourged our cities in 2020. Nonetheless, this must not be their Party’s default rhetorical and political tactic. History has taught us that calls for violence tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies, and the easily-excited and nakedly-opportunistic will always be happy to take advantage of inflammatory language from Democrat leaders to wreak havoc and take the lives of those whom they are instructed to hate, so they are—quite literally—playing with fire when employing TDS-driven uncontrolled anger and wild accusations to win votes.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who served in the first part of the 20th century, famously observed that “The US States are our laboratories of democracy.” The winds of extremism now wafting through many states are concerning because experiments sometimes go quite horribly wrong, and the aftereffects can be difficult to contain. 

Looking across the broad expanse of our nation today, are we talking about carefully calibrated experiments in governance and economics with quantifiable results, or are we stitching together ideological corpses in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab and producing a monster that will run amuck and destroy what we have spent nearly 250 years building? This is the question we must answer.