The Donald McDonald Election
After pretty much a clean sweep win for Dems and a rebuke of Trump at the polls on Tuesday night, Americans are left with one nagging question: You want fries with that? Why that question? Because this was in many ways the McDonald’s election. At about the same time we got election results, we were getting the latest earnings from Mickey D’s. While the earnings were pretty good, the Golden Arches are being somewhat flattened by our bifurcated economy. “The chain can’t do much about the larger economic trends that see high-income U.S. consumers spending freely, while households earning $50,000 or less are forced to pull back on the occasional McDouble. In this sense, earnings reports from the Golden Arches capture a new normal — a world in which even a snack wrap may be a kind of luxury good.” Both McDonald’s earnings and the 2025 elections were in large part about one issue: Affordability. There were other factors as well. If affordability represented the two all-beef patties of election 2025, then freedom and democracy made up the special sauce, strong (and very different) candidates were the lettuce, cheese, pickles (I’ll let you decided who’s who), and the government shutdown was embodied by the onions (that have been left out for 37 days). Sandwiching all those factors was the ubiquitous, puffed up, slightly stale sesame seed bun: the Hamburglar himself. Trump, by his own design, is everywhere and everything in American politics, so everything that happened everywhere on Tuesday was about him. It’s a safe bet that Ketchup was thrown. Yes, this was just one off year election. And there are still plenty of warning signs when it comes to midterms and a lot of damage that can be done between now and then. But we can talk about that later. You deserve a break today.
+ Josh Marshall: “The clearest read of what happened last night is that, as far as I can tell, Democrats won every race that was in meaningful contention anywhere in the country. That’s not just high-profile races in New York, New Jersey and Virginia or the redistricting proposition in California. It goes way down into races only obsessives or local observers were watching in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Mississippi and a bunch of other places. Democrats won everywhere, and just about everywhere they won by larger margins than even optimists were expecting.” A Few Day After the Election Thoughts. Josh gets it right on the supposed civil war among the Mamdani progressives and Spanberger moderates: “That doesn’t seem quite right to me. They have a pretty good model: find candidates suited to their constituencies and focus on cost of living issues and opposition to Donald Trump’s autocracy. Full stop.”
+ “Off-year elections are never quite the crystal ball for midterms that political junkies want, but one thing that last night’s results seem to convey clearly is that many voters are unhappy with President Donald Trump.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Anti-MAGA Majority Reemerges.
+ “So what’s behind Democrats’ big win? Well, surely lots of factors — but, to pick one, it’s affordability.” Dig into the numbers with G. Elliot Morris: Seven data-driven lessons from the 2025 elections.
+ “Analysts in both parties have wondered for months whether the public dissatisfaction with Democrats that is evident in poll after poll might offset the mounting doubts about Trump’s performance. On Tuesday, the answer was clear.” Ron Brownstein in Bloomberg (Gift Article): Election Day Sent an Unmistakable Warning to Republicans.
+ The most coverage of the night, predictably, went to the NYC mayoral race. NYT (Gift Article): How Zohran Mamdani Beat Back New York’s Elite and Was Elected Mayor.
+ Democrats set historic records on election night. Here are six of the firsts they accomplished.
+ Democrats’ 2025 election wins go beyond big races to places like Georgia, Pennsylvania.
