Democrats won... and so what?

It changes literally nothing.

I watched, as we all did, the Democrats “run the table” last night.

In the polite precincts of punditry, the champagne flowed like holy water at Lourdes.

Even here in my own backwater, only one MAGA-inspired “nonpartisan” simpleton managed to crawl through the ballot gauntlet — a 99% loss for the burn-all-the-books-I-tell-you-wut brigade.

And so today, America’s emergency rooms are full of the righteous and inebriated, victims of champagne corks and self-congratulation.

The faithful, at long last, are convinced that the Republic has been saved by a handful of governor, mayor, and school board elections — as though Rome might be redeemed by repainting the forum.

Here’s the thing: none of it matters.

With the possible exception of Pennsylvania’s judiciary, none of it mattered strategically.¹
None of it mattered electorally.
None of it mattered politically.

There has been no massive shift in priorities.
No massive shift in power.
No massive shift in the direction of the country.

But you wouldn’t know it from your feed — an endless parade of “Democracy Restored!” hosannas, all sung by the same choir of nervous optimists who mistake a flicker for the dawn.

The Off-Year Mirage

Off-year elections are the political equivalent of a funhouse mirror.
They reflect only the people vain enough to stand in front of them.

Turnout hovers around twenty percent — the most conscientious, the most comfortable, and the least desperate.

The mobs who turn rallies into revival tents, who believe Bill Gates controls the weather and the Pope is a hologram, do not vote in off-years.

They don’t even know what year it is.

So Democrats didn’t win because they converted the unwashed.²
They won because the unwashed stayed home.

The MAGA horde isn’t dead; it’s only sleeping — waiting for its prophet to return to the ballot like the second coming of Barnum.

And when he does, all these tidy graphs about “Democratic momentum” will dissolve like tissue in the rain.

The pundits, bless their industrious little hearts, will try to sell you exceptions — a mayoral race in New York, a referendum in Pennsylvania, some heroic Prop 50.

None of it is representative. None of it will survive contact with the general electorate once the circus reopens for business.

Make no mistake: the MAGA faithful — the people who cheer when a child gets punched by ICE and curse when eggs cost nine dollars — will vote.

They will vote not for moderation or sanity, but for vengeance.

They have no other currency left.

They’re not going to start saving money or cutting costs or fixing their own condition.

They are going to buy the same political lottery ticket they’ve bought for eight years — and pray the next drawing pays out in blood.

The Systemic Stalemate

Nothing about last night alters the fundamental truth: America is no longer governed by voters.

It is governed by the machinery that counts them.

Gerrymanders are fixed.
State legislatures are armored plate.
The Senate is a feudal relic.
And the courts — especially the Supreme one — are monasteries for men who think the Enlightenment was a clerical error.

None of that changed last night.

If Democrats were serious, they’d tell every national candidate to pray for rain and plow every dollar into flipping state legislatures.
That’s where the lines are drawn — literally and figuratively.

But they won’t. They never do.

Instead, they’ll spend the next year fundraising on hope, tweeting about fascism, and sending you glossy mailers promising to save democracy one tote bag at a time.

They’re thrilled because they might redraw one map in one state — while six others are being fortified against reality.

The Republicans will sleep like babies. They understand the long game.

Winning a few governorships, legislative seats, or councils changes none of it.

The system is built to absorb and nullify rebellion — to take every cry for change and render it into background noise.

The left mistakes catharsis for change; the right mistakes grievance for power.
Both are wrong.

Both are worshipping at the altar of a machine that no longer believes in gods.

The Real Story

The story isn’t that Democrats “ran the table.”
It’s that there’s no longer a table.

Politics has become ritual theater — a national pageant to reassure the professional class that democracy still functions while the gears underneath grind to dust.

We don’t have elections anymore; we have recurring confirmation ceremonies.

Every cycle, one side declares salvation, the other apocalypse, and the institutions grind on, indifferent to either.

The voters who might once have changed that equation — the dispossessed, the credulous, the angry — are now mere stagehands, brought out for applause every four years and then sent back into the dark.

The Cold Conclusion

So yes, Democrats won last night.

And yes, the good people of polite society will call it proof that sanity still lives somewhere between Philadelphia and Portland.

But if you think that means America is turning a corner, you’re mistaking the echo for the bell.

The Republic’s problems are structural, not electoral — and no number of champagne corks will fix the foundations.

So by all means, drink to the illusion.
Toast the table that isn’t there.

And when the hangover comes — as it always does — remember:

I might be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.

Pour another glass, and prove me otherwise.

PS: I do truly invite readers to “#changemymind” on this. Show me how wrong I am and how democracy, George Washington, James Madison, and John Adams prevailed last night.

1. Pennsylvania was the one contest that actually mattered.

By re-electing Justice Christine Donohue, Democrats preserved a 5–2 majority on the state Supreme Court — the same tribunal that gutted the GOP’s gerrymander in 2018 and slapped down their fever-dream attempt to discard mail-in ballots in 2020.

This wasn’t a symbolic gesture. It was a functional sandbag.
The next time Musk and Trump decide to reinterpret the rules of arithmetic, they’ll run headlong into a bench that has already demonstrated a healthy contempt for their circus.

In short, the Commonwealth just made it harder to steal Pennsylvania by paperwork — a modest triumph in a country where the bar for triumph now sits somewhere between “didn’t burn down the courthouse” and “counted the votes as cast.”

If that’s what passes for victory — that the rule of law didn’t crumble this week — then it only underscores how far gone we truly are.

A patch, not a cure.
The rot still runs deeper than the foundations.

2. The reason Democrats “ran the table” is arithmetic, not alchemy.

When only one in five eligible voters shows up, the whole system becomes a low-volume, high-volatility market — democracy traded like penny stocks in a hurricane. A two-point bump in turnout on one side can look like a five- or six-point landslide.

In that environment, motivation beats ideology every time. The people still angry enough to vote — mostly Democrats — drag themselves to the polls. The people marinating in talk-radio fatalism — mostly MAGA — stay home and blame the lizard people.

That’s not a realignment. That’s drift. It’s what happens when a republic forgets how to govern itself and relies on mood swings to decide who holds the wheel.

Yes, turnout spiked here and there — a hot district, a well-funded race — but nationwide, participation was roughly half of what you’d expect in a midterm. The “exceptions” only prove the rule: in a shallow pool, even a small ripple looks like a wave.

Democrats posted big margins because the math was easier. Fewer voters meant cheaper victories. No tsunami, just a kiddie pool with a tailwind.

Without Trump on the ballot, conservatives can’t rally; without Trump to run against, Democrats can’t capitalize. If their position were truly strong, Mamdani would’ve buried Sliwa by thirty points and Cuomo would still be watching the returns from an undisclosed massage parlor.

But we now hail as “mandate” what used to be “barely more than half.”

Half of two-thirds of those who typically vote. A fraction of a fraction.

Put more bluntly — if my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.

So what?