The reports of the Democratic party's death are greatly exaggerated!

Last night proved that claims made by our hyperbolic media--and by some pearl clutchers inside the party-- that the Democratic "brand" is destroyed and the party is in chaos have been way overblown.

On Tuesday night, Democrats surged in key special elections, galvanized in taking on Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the GOP, as well as the brutality and extremism they’ve thrust upon our country. And it all proved that the rhetoric about how the Democratic Party will supposedly be the wilderness for years and until it finds a new “message” has been a lot of bullshit. (We’ll get to that in a minute.)

These elections showed that people in the Democratic base, and independents and others, are revved up. And yesterday they also saw a fighter on the floor of the U.S. Senate, Cory Booker giving the longest speech on the Senate floor in history, railing against Trump and breaking the previously held record by the racist promoter of segregation, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who held a filibuster for over 24 hours in fighting against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. (We’ll get to that in a minute too).

The most-watched race last night was in Wisconsin for a Supreme Court seat, in which liberal candidate Susan Crawford trounced against MAGA-made Brad Schimel, ensuring the court’s liberal majority remained.

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Crawford won in the face of over $20 million poured into the race by Elon Musk—a key test of his power in attempting to buy elections—who also engaged in literally buying votes, handing out money to voters, including one million dollar checks to two individuals who attended a speech he gave on Sunday night in Green Bay. The race was already about his reckless attack on our government. But he then planted himself, like the egomaniac that he is, right there in Wisconsin for all to see.

And Crawford didn’t just win; she won by double-digits,10 points. That is unheard of in Wisconsin, where elections are always razor thin—except for the last Supreme Court race, in which liberal Janet Protasiewicz in 2023 won by 11 points, flipping the court to a liberal 4-3 majority. Wisconsinites knew the stakes—redistricting, gerrymandering, abortion rights, and so much more were in the balance. And they turned out in big numbers for a special election, almost nearing a mid-term. The GOP base turned out too, reaching the expectations Republicans had. But it wasn’t enough.

In Florida, in two ruby red districts that Donald Trump won by over 30%, the Democratic candidates over-performed impressively even as the GOP candidates prevailed; the races are surely putting the fear of god into the GOP.

Democrat Gay Valimont, running for the seat vacated by Matt Gaetz, surpassed Kamala Karris’s margins by 23 points in a district Trump won by 37 points. Josh Weil, running in the seat vacated by Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Waltz, surpassed Harris’s margin by 16 points in a district Trump won by 30 points. Neither of these races in severely gerrymandered Florida should have been remotely that close.

The GOP saw it coming, as the Democrats had raised massive amounts of money in Florida, and internal polls gave Republicans the jitters. And that was why Trump withdrew New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s nomination as ambassador to the United Nations. Trump won her district by 21 points, much less than the two in Florida, and Democrats would likely have flipped the seat.

All of this comes off of other special elections in the states in recent weeks, in which Democrat James Malone flipped a Pennsylvania state senate seat from red to blue in a district Trump won by 15 points, and in Iowa, where Democrat Mike Zimmer flipped a seat in the state senate in a district Trump won by 21 points.

Now, let’s be crystal clear: Trump won the popular vote in 2024 by just 1.4%, and, at 49.8%, he didn’t even get a majority of votes. It was the smallest popular vote margin for a Republican in a quarter of a century. Most of the battleground states were close.

And yet, we’ve seen postmortems that have claimed Democrats had crashed and burned, out of touch with average Americans and completely in disarray. These stories have been regurgitated over and over for months. A lot of it includes finger-pointing by those who made mistakes, as well as consultants positioning themselves opportunistically, pushing for a “moderating” tone and dumping transgender rights and other positions associated with “the left.”

These people wrongly buy into the GOP’s “war on woke,” arguing a tired old Third Way strategy that basically claims that the way you beat Republicans is to become more like Republicans—which makes no sense.

Are there issues Democrats need to look at regarding 2024? Surely, as in every losing election. But that doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In an environment in which incumbents around the world lost elections after the pandemic, and in which Harris had only a few of months to put a campaign together, you put it all in context.

And looking at what’s happened in the past few months it’s clear that, no, the party was not in need of an overhaul moving it to center; it needs to in fact follow the base. Yet, after the wins in the states in recent weeks, the same critics in the media and the party tried to claim the candidates were “moderate,” when that wasn’t true. These candidates didn’t pull back on openly discussing LGBTQ rights and abortion rights while also hitting on economic issues and, most importantly, on the dangers of Trump.

The critics, which include Governor Gavin Newsom of California, who called the Democratic brand “toxic” just last week in defense of his weird podcast that lays out the welcome mat for MAGA extremists, are embarrassingly way behind, living in a consultant-driven narrative of weeks or months ago. They’re fighting the last fight (when it wasn’t even as bad as they’re claiming in terms of the numbers), while the rest of us are fighting in the here and now, in the reality of what Trump is doing to the country.

Bernie Sanders and AOC have brought out tens of thousands of people to rallies across the Midwest and the West. Congressional town halls are mobbed by not just Democrats, but by independents and Republicans, all angry with the GOP and Trump. It’s a five alarm fire. People are focused on the danger and don’t have the time for debates on changing positions on trans athletes or giving up on diversity, equity and inclusion—and many find it insulting and counterproductive as well.

Schimel even used anti-trans ads in Wisconsin, claiming Crawford’s positions would harm children—as the GOP had believed anti-trans ads were their new secret weapon, something too many Democrats have fallen for as well—and it failed. Crawford hit back hard and pointed to Schimel’s, “corrupt record of letting child predators and domestic abusers walk with little to no jail time,” and soon enough Schimel dropped the anti-trans ads.

Schimel then leaned into Trump’s endorsement of him, another weapon he—and the media—thought would be potent against Democrats after the 2024 election and Trump’s supposed “mandate.” But that failed too. Trump has shown himself to be more dangerous than ever, and his tariffs, many fear, are sending the country into a recession. His numbers on the economy are in the toilet.

Even on immigration, the issue he’s had the most approval on, many conservative voices are now sounding the alarm about some of the stories surrounding deportations, in which people were given no due process and individuals who’ve committed no crimes were sent to the brutal mega-prison in El Salvador.

But perhaps the greatest failure in Wisconsin, and one that is making Republicans shake, was Elon Musk pouring $20 million into the race and hitting the campaign trail. Republicans believed he really made a difference for Trump in 2024, campaigning in Pennsylvania. But it now looks like he possibly had little or no effect.

And in Wisconsin it may have backfired completely, now that Musk has gone about destroying government agencies. Republicans have been hoping he and his money would save them in the mid-term elections. They believed they could push the envelope more now and count on him as a get-out-jail-free card.

But Musk is toxic. And even worse, with his massive ego, they won’t be able to control him in the future and keep him away from elections.

Even now, however, we see some in the corporate media still trying to cling to their old, overblown narrative. Don’t fall for it. They’re claiming, for example, that special elections can’t be a barometer because they’re often “low-turnout” elections in which only “high-propensity” voters, often Democratic, show up. But this doesn’t work. The Wisconsin race saw record turnout, almost matching a mid-term election, and Republicans reached their goal of turning out GOP voters.

Another claim is that outside money by big donors and groups in these special elections skews the result. But in Florida, where Democrats over-performed, the millions raised came from small-dollar donations and not from outside Democratic groups.

It’s time to put this story of Democrats in the wilderness to bed. As my colleague Dean Obeidallah wrote, “Democrats do not have an identity crisis. We have a leadership crisis.”

And even that is changing. Democrats yesterday pulled off the kind of media-saturating event we’ve been demanding they do. Cory Booker spoke for 25 hours on the Senate floor and was the center of political attention in Washington (except for Mike Johnson facing rebellion by House Republicans, and shutting down all votes for the week). He took the show away from Trump's insane pronouncements briefly, as media focused on Booker’s blistering, marathon attack on Trump.

Booker, who was joined by most Democratic senators to whom he yielded questions during his speech, showed he had fight, and that Democrats had fight. The Senate was shut down for the day, no business as usual. We need a lot more of that. The leadership now sees the base is charged up and ready to fight—in the streets, in Congress, at town halls and at the ballot box.