— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) March 26, 2025 at 10:35 AM
In January, Democrats flipped a Trump +21 district from 2024 in Iowa’s special elections, and last night in Pennsylvania, they pulled off an even more impressive feat just north of Lancaster. East Petersburg Mayor James Andrew Malone beat Republican Josh Parsons in a Trump +15 district, but that figure does not even begin to describe how difficult it is for Democrats to win here. Iowa’s State Senate District 35 had flipped blue as recently as 2018, but Pennsylvania’s 36th district has voted for a Democratic president just once since 1856 (Lyndon Johnson narrowly won it in 1964). Ryan Aument, the Republican who vacated this seat to take a job in the Trump administration, won his 2014 election by a margin of 44.6 percent, 2018 by 32.8 percent, and the Democrats didn’t even bother running someone against him in 2022 here. No Democrat has won the district in the last 40 years since its current form was molded. Until now.
As The Downballot notes, this was not some triumph of milquetoast moderation, as “Malone focused his message heavily on education and cuts to the federal government that he’s had to deal with as mayor of a small town, specifically calling out Musk for slashing ‘benefits for veterans, retirees, and students.’” 21st century voters very clearly want fighters and Malone advertised himself as such, asserting he was “an extra Democratic voice” who could bring balance to the GOP-controlled state Senate.
The Downballot has an excellent special election tracker they (and I) encourage you to bookmark, and so far this year in 14 races, Democrats are running 10.3 percent ahead of their 2024 presidential margin. Again, it should be noted we are still working with a very small sample, and no data scientist would extrapolate any grand conclusions other than some folks seem to be really pissed off right now.
Whether this endures will be decided by a lot of known factors, like if the Democratic Party will choose a new path that actually aligns with the one its voters want to take, or if it will continue to disappoint them and lie to them, which will ultimately depress turnout like it did in 2024. It will also be decided by unknown factors, like how we all woke up one day to learn that Trump’s entire national security team violated every national security law known to man in a shameful fuck-up that in its basic nature, is eminently understandable to a wide swath of the electorate. Initial polls suggest that even clear majorities of Republicans think that the Yemen war texters are a bunch of idiots.
There is some indication already that the Democrats are willing to at least point themselves in the same direction as the fight their voters are undertaking on their own, as Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries has actually taken the layup in front of him for once and called for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s resignation or termination. Between the nationwide Tesla protests that definitely have Elon and company spooked at least a little, what Bernie Sanders described as his largest rally ever in Denver last weekend with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, and the nascent special election season, there is plenty of reason to believe that a large and serious opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism exists. The main question doesn’t lie in the public’s support for this fight, but whether they will get any backing from America’s cowardly and greedy elites who have largely spent the years since 2017 either enabling or capitulating to Donald Trump, and are continuing to do so to this day.
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