JD Vance Wants to Pretend Republicans Didn’t Lose in Reddest Districts

Vice President JD Vance has finally reacted to the significant Democratic victories in Tuesday’s election, downplaying the wins while also mimicking the rhetoric of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in his diagnosis of the GOP’s election night failures. 

“I think it’s idiotic to overreact to a couple of elections in blue states,” Vance wrote in a post on X rather condescendingly, before going on to emphasize the need for Republicans to focus on voter registration and the inflation making life unaffordable for so many Americans.

Vance’s comment about “a couple elections in blue states” ignores the reality of the situation. Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Georgia all saw big wins for Democrats Tuesday night, and they aren’t exactly blue states. And even within those states (and in bluer ones like New York and New Jersey), Democrats won in red districts.  

Democrats in Georgia made history by winning two statewide races for public service commissioner, their first nonfederal statewide wins since 2006. In Erie County, Pennsylvania, which went for President Trump in 2024, Democrat Christina Vogel won the county executive race by 24 percentage points. In Virginia’s 66th state House district, Democrat Nicole Cole beat 36-year Republican incumbent Bobby Orrock, the longest-serving GOP delegate in Virginia. And in ruby red Mississippi, Democrats were able to break the GOP state Senate supermajority, flipping three seats after 13 years of Republican control. 

These local victories, combined with Proposition 50 in California, the Democratic gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey, Trump’s very low approval rating, and what may be a significant Latino exodus, should certainly have Republicans more worried than Vance is in the thoughts he shared. And cutting SNAP benefits and triggering inflation while the president enriches himself and his family is quite a ways away from “working to make a decent life affordable in this country.”

After Zohran Mamdani’s win Tuesday night in New York City’s mayoral election, some top city officials are heading for the exits.

FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker announced Wednesday that he will resign, and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Kaz Daughtry will likely follow, the New York Daily News reports. Tucker sent an email to Mayor Eric Adams only hours after Mamdani’s victory, saying that he will step down after December 19.

“Between now and then, I will continue to lead the greatest fire department in the world and will ensure an orderly transition,” the email said, according to the Daily News.

A fire department source told the newspaper that Tucker, who is Jewish and a Zionist, didn’t feel able to work well with Mamdani’s administration due to the mayor-elect’s views on Israel and Palestine. What that has to do with fire safety in New York is not clear, and Mamdani has unequivocally condemned antisemitism multiple times, including on Wednesday morning.

Last month, Mamdani told a Jewish congregation in Brooklyn, “I’m going to have people in my administration who are Zionists, whether liberal Zionists, or wherever they may be on that spectrum.”

Tucker, however, has political ties to Adams that seem to blur ethical lines. He owns a private security company that made some oddly timed donations to Adams without the required disclosures, before being appointed FDNY chief in 2024. He is currently traveling to Israel to meet with the Israel Fire and Rescue Authority, and may speak publicly about his resignation when he returns to New York.

Regarding Daughtry’s departure, the Daily News cited an unnamed source stating that the deputy mayor, as a member of the previous administration, didn’t see a future with Mamdani. Another Adams official told the Daily News that many other Adams staffers would likely resign in the coming days, as well.

President Donald Trump issued a nonsensical prophecy Wednesday for democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s term as New York City mayor.

While giving a speech at a forum of business leaders in Miami, Trump cited Mamdani’s victory as a means of criticizing congressional Democrats—though one of the party’s mainstream leaders never even endorsed Mamdani and didn’t appear to vote for him.

“If you wanna see what congressional Democrats wish to do to America, just look at the result of yesterday’s election in New York where their party installed a Communist as the mayor of the largest city in the nation,” Trump said, eliciting a round of tepid boos from the audience.

Trump went on to laud the city’s history of accepting refugees from Communist regimes—but quickly started fearmongering over the stunning results of New York City’s mayoral election the night before.

“Now the Democrats are so extreme that Miami will soon be the refuge for those fleeing communism in New York City. They flee, they flee!” Trump ranted. “Where do you live? ‘New York City, but I’m trying to leave because I don’t want to live in a Communist regime!’”

Trump continued to lament the supposedly rising tide of communism in the United States.

“After last night’s results, the decision facing all Americans could not be more clear: We have a choice between communism and common sense. Does that make sense to you?” Trump said.

No, it doesn’t, because much like failed Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, whom the president had labeled a “Commie,” Mamdani isn’t actually a Communist. He’s a democratic socialist advocating for free city buses, cheaper groceries, and rent freezes—issues that ignited New York City’s electorate and garnered the most popular support of any mayoral candidate in the city’s history.

“And as long as I’m in the White House, the United States is not going Communist in any way shape or form, we’re gonna stop it,” Trump said.

“You know, I said [as] they were voting last night, ‘You could have a Communist or a thug,’” the president said. “And they took the Communist, you know? We could’ve done a little bit better in terms of candidates.”

Earlier this week, Trump issued a last-minute endorsement of independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York. After Mamdani’s victory was announced, as part of a wave of Democratic victories Tuesday, Trump took to Truth Social to try to convince his followers not to blame him for his party’s abject failure.

At least other MAGA Republicans didn’t take the loss too hard—oh wait, no, they immediately started decrying the imminent destruction of New York.

New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is starting off with a big move: bringing former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to co-chair his transition team. 

Mamdani made the announcement during a speech Wednesday morning at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens. Khan will be joined on Mamdani’s transition team by women leaders from previous mayoral administrations: former First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, nonprofit president Grace Bonilla, and budget expert Melanie Hartzog. Elana Leopold, Mamdani’s campaign adviser and a staffer to former Mayor Bill de Blasio, will lead the team of women leaders as executive director.

Khan is famous for her antitrust expertise, beginning with her work at the New America Foundation and continuing through her time at Yale Law School. When President Biden nominated her as FTC commissioner and later as FTC chair in 2021, she was the youngest nominee ever.   

As FTC chair, Khan was willing to take on major corporations such as Amazon and Microsoft to combat monopolies, earning praise from Democrats as well as Republicans, including JD Vance and Steve Bannon. Khan’s action against Ticketmaster drew bipartisan support for a Justice Department lawsuit against the company in May last year.

Mamdani’s inclusion of Khan for his transition suggests that he’s willing to take on powerful corporate interests as mayor as part of his agenda to make the city more affordable. The question is how much he’ll be able to do from New York City Hall.  

Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs were met with overwhelming skepticism from the Supreme Court Wednesday, as conservative justices joined their liberal colleagues in  expressing serious concerns over the legality of the president’s actions.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch appeared entirely unconvinced by the government’s defense of Trump’s tariffs while sharply questioning U.S. Solicitor General John D. Sauer, the president’s former personal lawyer. 

Barrett asked Sauer how Trump could possibly impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, which allows the president to regulate commerce in case of a national emergency but doesn’t actually include the word “tariff.” 

Barrett, whom Trump nominated to the high court, also pressed Sauer for a single other example of Congress conferring its tariff authority to the president—but the government’s lawyer couldn’t summon an actual response. 

Gorsuch asserted that Congress would never wrest its tariff power back from the executive, suggesting that the Trump administration’s interpretation of the IEEPA was “a one-way ratchet towards the gradual accretion of power to the executive branch.” He also pressed Sauer on what constituted an emergency under the IEEPA, and even got the president’s lawyer to agree that climate change would be a suitable excuse for invoking the rule. 

Roberts took a turn grilling Sauer too, implying that Trump’s tariffs had overstepped Congress’s authority because the “vehicle is imposition of taxes on Americans, and that has always been the core power of Congress.”

“So, to have the president’s foreign affairs power trump that basic power for Congress, seems to me to kind of at least neutralize between the two powers, the executive power and the legislative power,” Roberts continued. 

One expert noted to CNN that Sauer repeatedly used the word “tariff” as a verb, in order to avoid using the word “tax.”

Roberts also noted that IEEPA had never been used to impose tariffs. “It does seem like that’s major authority and the basis for the claim, seems to be a misfit,” he said. 

Democrats have argued for months about how to win young men back into their coalition. New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won them over by a massive margin Tuesday night. 

Early exit polls from NBC had Mamdani winning 18- to 29-year-old men in New York City by a staggering 40 points, easily eclipsing opponent Andrew Cuomo. 

Fellow Democratic electees also made inroads with young men, but not by nearly as much. Abigail Spanberger won about six in 10 young men in Virginia, according to the AP voter poll,  and Mikie Sherrill won just over half of young men in New Jersey. 

While Mamdani has the advantage of a much bluer electorate—and of course, being a man—his democratic socialist message is markedly more progressive than that of Sherrill or Spanberger. It should come as no surprise that a group that doesn’t expect to ever own a home or pay off their student loans was attracted to a message centered around affordability in the most expensive city in the country. 

Democratic congressional leadership has been lukewarm on Mamdani, at best, but they would be foolish to ignore that Mamdani and his policies resonated deeply with young men. And while they’re quick to point out that what works in New York City won’t work everywhere in the United States, the very issue Mamdani highlighted is a problem everywhere in the U.S. Young men—and most of the city—didn’t respond positively to Mamdani because he made empty platitudes about going back to “kitchen table issues.” They responded so positively because Mamdani presented real, progressive solutions to the most pervasive issue in their lives. 

Federal immigration officers are finding a lot of joy in causing mass misery.

Department of Homeland Security agents have illustrated a remarkable disregard for public safety while deploying tear gas and pepper spray to advance the Trump administration’s agenda, according to court documents obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

But in some situations, agents tasked with crowd control went far beyond the realm of plausible deniability, apparently finding genuine enjoyment out of injuring and assaulting people.

Last month in Chicago, agents used tear gas in residential areas “multiple times without audible warnings,” court documents said, surprising families with the painful chemical irritant. Footage taken by Customs and Border Patrol illustrates the extent of their own gleeful violence, with one agent at one point telling another that they should throw the tear gas canisters “for fun.”

“The gas did not help agents leave; instead, they weren’t able to leave in their cars after using the gas because it overwhelmed them so much that they had to flee the block on foot,” the court documents read. “There was no threat when gas was deployed.”

The state-sanctioned violence has been nearly nonstop in Chicago over the last few months. Just last week, federal agents allegedly tear-gassed a group of school-age children in a residential Chicago neighborhood on their way to a Halloween parade.

But Chicago isn’t the only city suffering. Needless DHS encroachment has become an issue in just about every city across the country that has dared to oppose Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. In some cases, ICE’s presence has made some cities across the country significantly less safe than they were before the feds showed up.

In Portland, Oregon, mistaken friendly fire between federal agents last month escalated their retaliation against anti-ICE protesters, resulting in officers firing a barrage of rubber bullets into a crowd that also contained local law enforcement, according to the city’s police commander.

Following Tuesday night’s resounding victory for Democrats across the country, Donald Trump came up with a long to-do list Wednesday morning that he thinks is the solution to what ails Republicans. And bizarrely, during his postelection meltdown, he claimed that Americans need ID to buy groceries.

The speech to Senate Republicans began somewhat normally, with the president arguing that Republicans should “do what they have to do and terminate the filibuster,” claiming that no legislation would be passed for “three and a quarter years” if the procedure remains.

“We should start, tonight, with ‘the country’s open,’ congratulations, then we should pass voter ID, we should pass no mail-in voting, we should pass all of the things we want to pass to make our elections secure,” Trump continued, calling for an end to the government shutdown.

“All we want is voter ID, you go to a grocery store, you have to give ID, you go to a gas station, you give ID, but for voting, they want no voter ID. It’s only for one reason, and it’s because they cheat. We would pass that in 15 minutes,” Trump ranted, seeming to slur his words at times. “If you don’t get it, you’ll never pass that. You’ll never talk about mail-in ballots. Mail-in ballots make it automatically corrupt.”

Trump’s claim that grocery stores and gas stations require identification shows just how out of touch he is with the average American (and may be a sign of cognitive decline). The president’s crusade against voter identification also belies the fact that many Democratic victories Tuesday night came in states that already require it, such as Virginia and Georgia. And complaining about mail-in ballots makes no sense considering Trump has voted that way in the past and that Republicans were encouraging people to vote by mail earlier this week.

Meanwhile, his demand to end the filibuster has been resisted by Senate Republicans because they know that Democrats could soon take control of Congress and push through their own legislative priorities. Will Republicans see the president’s demands as extreme, or will they immediately fall in line and attempt to make him happy?

Republican lawmakers in Kansas killed a weeks-long effort to expedite redrawing their state’s congressional map, delaying President Donald Trump’s push to gerrymander red states ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Republicans needed to secure a two-thirds majority approval in both chambers to call a special legislative session—circumventing Democratic Governor Laura Kelly’s refusal to do so—but it looks like they couldn’t quite manage it.

House Speaker Dan Hawkins announced Tuesday night that Republicans would not vote to call a special legislative session. “Planning a Special Session is always going to be an uphill battle with multiple agendas, scheduling conflicts and many unseen factors at play,” he said in a statement.

Republicans had planned to target Kansas’s 3rd congressional district, which has been led by Representative Sharice Davids, a Democrat, since 2019. But it seems that the state’s GOP lawmakers just couldn’t get behind the mid-cycle redistricting effort that Trump had demanded, with some concerned redistricting could make red areas more competitive.

State Senate President Ty Masterson quickly promised that redistricting would be “a top priority” when the legislature resumed in January next year.

Davids, who has reportedly been eyeing a Senate run, said in a statement: “We’ve won the first round in this fight against gerrymandering.”

This isn’t the first of Trump’s redistricting schemes to fall apart in a red state. In Indiana, Governor Mike Braun happily called a special legislative session last week, but it still seems that mid-cycle redistricting lacks crucial Republican support. And in California, a Republican fretted that redistricting elsewhere could end up costing him his seat.

While progressives celebrated a historic victory in New York City Tuesday night, their MAGA counterparts were not so jazzed about the mayoral election results. But their anger wasn’t only channeled toward Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who secured more than 50 percent of the citywide vote.

MAGA also fixated on the Republican candidate in the race, Curtis Sliwa, whom they accused of splitting the vote away for a chunk of change.

“You split the fucking vote for $7 fucking million dollars [sic], you are a scumbag. I hope every New Yorker spits in your fucking face every single day,” said David Rem, Donald Trump’s childhood friend. “You fucking sold out like fucking Judas sold out fucking Jesus.… Go fuck yourself.”

Where Rem got that cash figure is not exactly clear, but Sliwa could have made more by dropping out: The Guardian Angels founder told The New Yorker Monday that he had been offered $10 million across seven different bribes to step aside in the race.

By Wednesday morning, it was clear that the results of the mayoral election wouldn’t have changed all too much even if Sliwa had stepped aside. Disgraced ex-Governor Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent in the race after he was squarely beaten by Mamdani during the Democratic primary, acquired 41.6 percent of the vote, while Sliwa pulled 7.1 percent. Added together in a best case scenario for Cuomo, the ousted politico still wouldn’t have had enough citywide support to squash Mamdani’s enormous win of 50.4 percent.

But MAGA Republicans couldn’t squint to see that reality.

“Fuck you @CurtisSliwa I HATE YOU, your dumb wife, that stupid Beret of yours and all your fucking cats!” posted another disgraced ex–New York lawmaker, George Santos, who left prison early last month after Trump commuted his sentence. (Santos once falsely claimed he founded an animal rescue nonprofit that saved 2,400 imaginary dogs but just 280 imaginary cats—so maybe he just hates felines in general.)

But even Santos, who pleaded guilty last year to credit card fraud and illegally receiving unemployment benefits among other crimes, found Cuomo hard to palate.

“Cuomo was by far a flawed candidate. A terrible human being,” Santos said in another post, in which he suggested that he was going to move out of the city while Mamdani is mayor.

Even people outside of the city were irate at Sliwa for daring to shoot his shot in a democratic election. Pro-Trump sports broadcaster Charly Arnolt—who does not seem to maintain a residence in New York City—also lamented the mayoral outcome, tossing vitriol at Sliwa from hundreds of miles away.

“I truly hope Curtis Sliwa is shunned in NYC,” Arnolt wrote on X. “He is a disgrace, a coward and a traitor and should no longer be welcome to walk the streets he claimed to support.”