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When was the last time you remember voting in an election for your public utilities board? Who were the candidates and how much did they win by?
If your answer to those questions is anything but, “I have no idea,” please seek help. Kidding, of course. Most Americans don’t pay attention to these types of elections, let alone things as local as school boards or city councils. But things are a bit different nowadays. Have you noticed?
Taken by themselves, the wins of Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard to become the first Democrats to serve on Georgia’s Public Services Commission — which oversees utility rates — since 2007, don’t amount to much for their implications on the balance of power in Washington. But, as you may have heard by now, Johnson’s and Hubbard’s wins were not the only good news for Democrats last night.
Zohran Mamdani beat up Anthony Cuomo in New York. Democrats took the governor’s offices in New Jersey and Virginia. (They also took the lieutenant governor’s office in Virginia and took even more control of one of their legislative chambers.) Voters in California overwhelmingly turned out in favor of a Gavin Newsom-backed proposal to draw new district lines to help Democrats take control of the House of Representatives.
Across the country, Democrats didn’t just win; they cleaned up.
That includes Georgia’s Public Service Commission, where Johnson and Hubbard beat their Republican opponents by 25 points. It was the first time since 2006 that Democrats in Georgia won a statewide race for a non-federal election, as the AJC’s Greg Bluestein pointed out.
While there are certainly voters who took to the polls yesterday in Georgia who were solely focused on the issue of public utilities — the costs for which have been rising substantially since 2022 — the margin of victory for Johnson and Hubbard points to something else: Americans are fed up with Trump and Republicans, and they will vote for just about any Democrat they can get their hands on.
That’s an encouraging sign heading into next year’s mid-terms, when Republicans will pull out all the stops to both rig the election in their favor and call into question any results that don’t favor the GOP.
More on that soon. But for now, do yourselves a favor and tune into Fox News for a few minutes today to see their hosts being apoplectic over a self-described democratic socialist becoming the mayor of New York in a decisive victory. We’re still a long way from preventing further democratic backsliding, but yesterday was a hopeful reminder that there are many more reasonable, freedom-loving Americans than there are those who support Trump’s authoritarian power grabs.
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