What
goes around comes around, and on Tuesday, karma came for President
Trump and his Republican acolytes. From Washington to Maine, New Jersey
to North Carolina, Trumpist ugliness was met and vanquished, sometimes
by the very targets of right-wing scorn.
In
January, a local New Jersey Republican politician, John Carman, mocked
the anti-Trump Women’s March by asking on Facebook whether the protest
would be “over in time for them to cook dinner.” That so upset Ashley
Bennett, a 32-year-old health care worker, that she challenged Mr.
Carman for his seat on the Atlantic County Board of Chosen Freeholders.
“Elected officials shouldn’t be on social media mocking and belittling
people who are expressing their concerns about their community and the
nation,” she said during her campaign. If Mr. Carman does it again, it
will be as a private citizen. Ms. Bennett defeated him on Tuesday.
In Hoboken, N.J., Ravi Bhalla became the state’s first Sikh mayor by triumphing over an ethnic smear campaign using fliers with his turbaned image and the message, “Don’t let TERRORISM take over our town!”
Plagued by division over a law that restricted transgender people’s access to public restrooms, and anger over the police shooting
of a black man named Keith Lamont Scott, Charlotte, N.C., elected Vi
Lyles, a 66-year-old former city administrator, as its first black
female mayor.
In
New York, Nassau County Republicans have seen their fair share of
corruption and controversy, but Jack Martins was unable to overcome that
legacy with race-baiting tactics
in which he accused his Democratic opponent for county executive, Laura
Curran, of wanting to “roll out the welcome mat” for the vicious MS-13
gang. Ms. Curran will be only the third Democrat in 80 years to hold the
post.
Democratic
victories were not just a matter of diversity overcoming division,
though. Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Ralph Northam, beat an ugly
campaign of Trumpian immigrant bashing and Confederate nostalgia run by
his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie. Yet he also had, in the end, a
progressive economic program, as did Phil Murphy, the victorious
Democratic gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey.
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Voters
in Virginia said health care was among their top issues. In Maine,
voters answered Republicans’ repeated efforts to slash their health care
coverage under the Affordable Care Act by becoming the first state to approve expanding Medicaid through a ballot proposal, which won
by 59 percent to 41 percent. About 80,000 low-income residents will
gain access to health care in a vote that was a slap at Gov. Paul
LePage, a Republican who has vetoed Medicaid expansion bills five times.
With Virginia’s legislature possibly falling to the Democrats, Medicaid
expansion may be in Virginia’s future, and activists and lawmakers in Idaho and Utah are trying to put it on next year’s ballot.
Mr.
Northam and down-ticket candidates energized voters on issues big and
small — and knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors to translate
outrage into votes.
Tuesday
was the strongest sign yet that the politics of division can be
rejected. Both parties could take a lesson from Danica Roem, a
transgender woman who ran for the Virginia House of Delegates. She
campaigned on issues like traffic congestion, but she unseated Bob Marshall, the self-described “chief homophobe”
who sponsored the state’s transgender bathroom bill. Mr. Marshall
refused to debate Ms. Roem or refer to her as female and ran attack ads
accusing her of lewd behavior. After she won, Ms. Roem said: “I don’t
attack my constituents. Bob is my constituent now.”
What
welcome inclusiveness at a time when the president stews in a
hate-filled bubble, appealing only to the shrinking fraction of
Americans unrepulsed by his behavior.
“We live in a very diverse society,” Mr. Northam reminded us after his victory. “It is getting more diverse every day. It is that diverse society that makes this country great.”
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