More than anything, people want Dems to fight

Too much has been made of the differences between Abigail Spanberger and Zohran Mamdani.

The contrast of a staid yet confident former intelligence officer in her 40s and the trailblazing Assemblyman in his 30s with a Hollywood smile is meant to stand in for the divide in the Democratic party between embracing poll-driven “moderation” and passionate progressivism designed to move the polls.

But that misses what the two big winners from Tuesday night have in common, which is what voters have been craving most: Their fight.

In the latest episode of NEXT COMES WHAT, Andrea Pitzer uses history and broader context to illuminate an issue where both candidates offered a way forward for how to take on the politics of panic that many credit for Republican victories in 2024—specifically, trans panic.

Nervous Democrats have pointed to the vicious “They/Them” ad as being the death blow to Kamala Harris’ campaign, blaming “the groups” and other champions of social justice for putting words in the nominee’s mouth that allegedly make her unelectable, even though she had been on a ticket that beat Donald Trump by 7 million votes.

Critics usually make this critique without noting the defining factor that may have made that ad and the Trump campaign successful, namely that the richest man on earth with a personal axe to grind against trans people, including his own daughter, was willing to apply upwards of $45 billion for two he reasons: 1) To make sure Trump won and 2) To ensure the public saw the embrace of trans rights as the Democrats’ fatal flaw.

This analysis also fails to note that if trans panic had not been the issue, it would have been some other panic. And I’d argue that the panic around immigration that Democrats fed into by crying about Mean Mr. Trump not letting them pass his wonderful border bill was far more decisive.

What this convenient narrative that trans people cost Democrats the 2024 election does most effectively is to elide the two fundamental problems Democrats still face. (Though both challenges seem far less pressing when facing a historically unpopular president doing historically horrible things that please nothing but billionaires and the worst sadists in his base.)

Those problems are:

1. Journalism and media have been broken, mostly purposefully.
   Because of this, most voters only get their information about the news and Democrats ambiently and usually through the filter of the two worst possible sources: a) Republicans and b) pollingism-brained Democrats who are trying to “solve” our problems by imagining there’s some “centrist” yogic contortion that Democrats can assume that will somehow silence the power of the multi-billion dollar propagandana machine built to spew targeted lies.
2. People think Democrats won’t fight for them.

The legendary Anat Shenker-Osorio has been screaming about that second point as a spine of voters’ discontent with the party in her focus groups since back when it could have prevented a second Trump term. She wrote in June 2024:

Where we run into problems is that when voters learn for the first time of these horrors, many wonder why Democrats don’t seem to be speaking out about them or fighting back. In an online group across battleground states on June 11, one swing Latina participant summed up these sentiments, saying that “the Democrats have to step it up. Where is the counter agenda?” More darkly, Asian-American disaffected swing men the same night didn’t like MAGA’s plan but noted that at least they have one.

If I understand her correctly, Trump’s two huge advantages with key voters were intertwined. Voters didn’t think Democrats had their back, and they didn’t believe Trump could be as awful as his promises—or the promises of Project 2025—seemed. And if his plans were really that bad, he’d never execute them. Because if they were actually possible, WHY WOULDN’T DEMOCRATS BE FIGHTING MORE!

Trump has solved the belief part!

People are starting to get it. At least, the people of Chicago are beginning to get it. And the polls show that most Americans understand how evil this regime is (though those polls come mostly from when Trump refused to fund the government and decided to punish America for Democrats’ willingness to fight viciously; we’ll see if those numbers change now that Democrats have caved).

Both Spanberger and Mamdani understood the assignment when it came to the Democratic problem of not looking like a fighter.

Spanberger faced a trans panic attack that was cribbed entirely from the Trump/Musk 2024 playbook by her opponent, Winsome Earle-Sears. And rather than let those attacks go unanswered, she turned them into a broader fight about her opponents’ lust for discrimination, putting her actual responses from the trans rights part of the debate in a commercial.

We don’t know if that defense was decisive or if attacks based on targeting vulnerable groups just aren’t effective when coming from a Black woman, or if Republicans were just doomed in Virginia, given that the Trump regime has essentially declared war on the state’s workers and economy.

But we know that the trans panic at the very least didn’t help Earle-Sears, at the very least.

Mamdani took a route that aimed even higher. Critics would say he could feel safer doing so, given that he was running in an overwhelmingly Democratic city, primarily against a Democrat, even if his opponent was the political equivalent of repackaged recalled beef. But NYC has had Republican mayors for much of the last thirty years, and the current Mayor is a former cop whose only notable accomplishment is selling out the city for Trump’s favors.

He used trans icon Sylvia Rivera’s story to make a broader point that defined his campaign, as Andrea noted:

In February 2025, Zohran Mamdani made his position clear, and he never deviated on this point afterward. “You need not even know a trans New Yorker to stand up for trans New Yorkers,” he said. “This is a trial of all of us to see who we are willing to give up. And our answer is ‘no one.’”

That’s the kind of fight that voters crave. It’s the kind of fight that breaks through media silos and lets voters know who’s got their back.

And for Democrats who want to win, there are only two options: 1) never let vicious attacks go unanswered, and 2) get caught fighting, ideally for everyone.

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