Virginia won. Here’s why that’s also a warning.

You probably know the good news.

The polls say MAGA is shrinking. Democrats keep overperforming in special elections. And on Tuesday, they essentially won the redistricting wars Trump foolishly started, when voters in Virginia said yes to new maps that make sure Trump’s meddling in Texas and elsewhere doesn’t hand the GOP a House majority.

Here’s why I’m paranoid.

The history of third-wave autocratization says the first electoral cycle is when you either stop it or you don’t. 2026 is technically our chance to make one of those U-turns that 70% of democracies that experience a third-wave autocratization episode eventually manage — a route back to self-rule.

BUT! So was 2020. The United States is the only case on record in which the movement came back a second time with the same infrastructure, the same party, and zero accountability, which means the historical success rate is not as reassuring as it looks.

That means we are in a historical situation with no reliable data or precedent. Our institutions, especially our Republican Supreme Court majority, have proven especially pliable to fascism. And given the withering of all our democratic safeguards and the right-wing rigging of our media, voters cannot be counted to be the check an informed and empowered citizenry should be in the one institution that seems to be holding up the best: counting actual votes.

That’s why I’m overjoyed by Tuesday’s results. But also worried, for three reasons voters cannot afford to stop thinking about.

The three threats that make Tuesday necessary but not sufficient

First: Musk will reprise 2024, and other billionaires will join right in. If a Virginian saw Obama’s face in the last month, there was a good chance that ad was lying to them about the former president opposing the ballot measure.

And that wasn’t the only place voters were being lied to.

“Beginning in early March, Virginia voters, particularly members of the Black community, began receiving mailers that compared a proposal by Democrats to temporarily redraw the state’s congressional districts to the Jim Crow era,” Mother Jones’ Ari Berman reported earlier this month.

And that fuckery—combined with both sides’ focus, by necessity, on Donald Trump—seemed to have some effect, according to this analysis from Sabato’s Crystal Ball.

Loudoun County — the D.C. suburbs, one of the wealthiest and most educated counties in America — went 63-37, and the Black majority districts around Norfolk and Virginia Beach held at nearly three-to-one. The margins were there. The bodies weren't: urban turnout dropped 13 points or more while the Shenandoah Valley — deep red, now facing being split four ways under the new map — held its vote total or grew it.

Then there's Chesterfield County, a Richmond suburb that was deep-red territory until recently — the kind of place that gave Harris a 2.5-point win in 2024 and promptly decided that was enough democracy for one decade. Its reddest precincts flipped back to No by 1.5 points.

The Shenandoah Valley knew exactly what it was voting against — four new Democratic districts carved through its backyard — and it showed up. Urban Virginia didn't.

Thiel’s deceptions operated with the same phishing attack philosophy as Elon Musk’s $45 million false-flag campaign in Dearborn in October 2024 — mailers disguised as Harris material telling Muslim voters she backed Israel, telling Jewish voters she wanted to cut arms shipments, simultaneously, both from the same funder: Musk. It’s even more reminiscent of the parallel efforts the Trump campaign and Russian operatives ran in 2016 to depress Black support for Hillary Clinton.

That Democrats cannot win without the overwhelming support of Black voters is something Vladimir Putin and every other wannabe trillionaire alive knows. In Virginia, Peter Thiel spent at least $7 million opposing the referendum, running mailers in Black majority districts bearing Barack Obama’s name and face that the NAACP called deliberate voter suppression. He lost. The template did not.

Second: Alito is preparing to gut the Voting Rights Act, and 19 seats hang on that ruling. The Supreme Court is sitting on Louisiana v. Callais, a case that could effectively end Section 2 of the VRA — the last bulwark against racial discrimination in redistricting that hasn’t already been struck down. An analysis by the Black Voters Matter Fund found that gutting Section 2 could hand Republicans at least 19 additional safe House seats. Alito’s concurrence in a March case was a preview — he’s already writing the opinion. The Roberts Court has been methodically eviscerating the VRA for two decades; Callais may be where the project completes itself, just in time for November.

Third: The regime is already inside the election machinery. Trump’s DOJ has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia demanding unredacted voter rolls — Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, dates of birth — the holy trinity of identity theft — and has finalized a deal to run that data through a DHS citizenship verification system known for inflated false-positive rates. The plan, per the Brennan Center: have the feds identify voters for removal, then order states to purge them within 45 days. Common Cause and the ACLU filed suit this week to stop it. The DOJ’s own filings warn that without the data, the “security and sanctity” of the 2026 elections cannot be guaranteed — laying the pretext for contesting whatever results they don’t like.

So let’s dig in

Virginia voted Tuesday to take the power to draw its own congressional maps away from politicians. It passed 51.5 to 48.6. The new map, if it survives the legal gauntlet — the same Tazewell County judge who tried to block the vote has already ordered the results not be certified, and the Virginia Supreme Court will have the final word — would flip Virginia’s congressional delegation from 6-5 Republican to 10-1 Democratic.

We should note: this was a weird election. We can either use that to write off the closeness of this race. The current Democratic governor won by about 15%. Kamala Harris carried Virginia by 8%. Trump was more popular — or FAR MORE popular — when we saw those results, before he responded to voters' overwhelming rejection of his candidates on the issue of affordability by starting an unwinnable war that created both an energy shock and a supply chain crisis. Or we can use the peculiarities to help us see what warning signs and lessons we must absorb, because we cannot afford to come out of this election without at least one house of Congress.

So let’s concede the peculiarities.

Constitutional amendments don’t have personalities or bad weeks. They don’t carry baggage from a vote a candidate took six years ago. And voters hate gerrymandering — which Democrats were forced to embrace here, given Trump’s fuckery and the GOP’s refusal to ban it. And

Michigan told us in 2018 that voters hate gerrymandering even more than they love legal weed. Both on the same ballot.

A ballot question, with both sides spending millions, in an off-year April election, is far from a perfect general-election simulator. But it’s closer to one than anything any other race has given us lately. And in some ways, this race became a battle between the images of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, with a lot of the false-flag fuckery that has typified any contest where Trump’s been on the ballot since 2016.

Here’s another peculiarity of this race. “Democrats outspent Republicans by a roughly three-to-one margin,” Politico reports. That will definitely not be the case in November, when it’s possible a single billionaire will outspend every cent Democrats can muster.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent notes that Fox News poll internals show Trump’s approval among non-college whites now slightly underwater, rural voters barely above water, and white men at a clean 50-50. But a shrinking base at 95% turnout still beats a larger coalition that shows up at 70%, and a 3-point margin is a margin small enough to hand to a circuit court judge in Tazewell County and say: here, find something wrong with this.

Close will not be good enough in November

So let me focus on why I think this race was so close compared to recent special elections and the 2024 results: it was a reversion to the status quo. And if you haven’t noticed, the status quo is what gave us Trump.

This race focused on Trump and the defining object of Trump’s hate — the man whose backlash gave us Trump — Barack Obama. And as long as the focus is on Trump as a person, character, and hater, he’s setting the terms of a polarized debate. That polarization freezes the political environment and helps Trump do the thing we must fear most — besides actual electoral thievery — Trump turning out irregular voters, something he has done in a way no politician of our time, except Obama, has.

Like Obama, Trump struggles to make this power work when his name is not on the actual ballot. But in Virginia, it almost was.

Here’s my theory: when we focus on voters’ pain and alleviating it, as both Zohran Mamdani and Abigail Spanberger did in 2025, we win. When we get into a thumbwrestling match with Trump, he overperforms.

So what specifically am I warning against?

The chronic need of many on the left to believe that Donald Trump is the greatest con man ever to live, who can even use their hate of him to his own advantage. And though his popularity has faded, he’s dying, and he’s surrounded himself with clowning fools, he’s still the president of the United States, clothed in immense power and still capable of unconscionable yet effective bullshit at an industrial scale.

I’ll give you a bad example. This whole mishegaas with Trump purposely fucking with people when it comes to percentages. This week, it exploded when Bobby Kennedy Jr. embraced this facetious math in a congressional hearing and then quadrupled down — since we’re using bad math — in the Oval Office.

People who hate Trump loved it. They shared it everywhere.

And for Trump, who is stuck with the realization that he made Iran more powerful, personally raising gas prices, and a general shitstorm his horrendous agenda produced, this was the greatest gift we could give him. Here, he has a genuine Kennedy, looking like a pixelated deepfake of his dad, supplicating before him while selling the same snake oil. And what was the snake oil? The lie that Trump has cut prescription drug prices — an issue Trump has turned to like George W. Bush in 2002, to make his sole “kitchen table” argument to America’s most reliable midterm voters — even though Trump’s greatest accomplishment on drug prices is only partially fucking up Joe Biden’s immense victory of compelling Medicare to negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma. And here I am, helping him too by connecting him to one of the few issues that could help.

That leads us to what we accomplish by fixating on Trump being bad at math but great at conning people: proving we’re nerds who know too much about math. Playing entirely into the image of a know-it-all party more obsessed with dunking on Trump and his dupes than the actual issue that matters to tens of millions.

This is a bad example because it doesn’t matter. This is what I call an inter-choir matter. It’s cud we chew to regulate our emotions. What it is not is anything the choir could be or should be preaching.

Verily, I tell you, we cannot afford to waste much of our energy or focus on anything that helps Trump.

Again, we are in a historically uncharted and perilous position with the entire past, present, and future of American democracy on us to decide.

So what should we be talking about?

Almost anything else.

As the great pollster and data analyst G. Elliott Morris told Greg Sargent:

“The basic shape of this problem is that the president has spent a year and a half now campaigning on four or five major policies that the American people don’t like. Just to name them — mass deportations for people who have been here 20 years, for regular working families: people don’t like that. The tariffs: people don’t like that. Rollback in ACA subsidies: people don’t like that. Tax cuts for the rich: people don’t like that. A war in Iran: people don’t like that.”

If we focus on all that — the pain they cause, and our vision for an America beyond the corruption, excess, and outright thievery of Donald Trump — we will win, and by far more than 3%.

Thanks for finding this. If you like what you’ve found, subscribe to THE FARCE newsletter, join the LOLGOP Studios Patreon, or drop a tip. Free or paid, your support matters.