Bulwark Takes - Sam Stein: Voters Chose Reality Over Trump’s Lies

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Democrats notch big wins from New Jersey to Virginia, including a historic first woman governor. Sam Stein joins Nicole Wallace to explain how affordability, real-world prices, and a fading culture war reshaped the map.

Hey, everybody. I just finished doing a recording with Nicole Wallace. Always a pleasure to go on her program. That sounds pretty good. We talked a lot about last night's election results, which were a smashing success for the Democrats. A couple of things we talked about that I guess I really hadn't settled in for me in the moment, but now that I think about it is pretty cool and worth talking about. One was the historic nature of the wins for the two female governors, Mikey Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger last night. First female governor in Virginia history, that state's been around forever. It's like 73, 74 governor. She's the first one. And I saw her victory speech.

I hadn't seen it last night because I was doing that live show where she referenced being able to tell her daughter what it was like to be a governor and the possibilities, the imagination that it opens up for young women and daughters. I just thought that was pretty cool. And then secondly, as we talked a little bit about Donald Trump, which is, you know, on everyone's mind. And I don't think it's really settled in that, like, this guy had a great Gatsby-themed Halloween party where there were burluss dancers in big martini glasses gyrating around rich dudes at the same time that Democrats are running campaigns saying, hey, the cost of living is out of control. So, you know, I think that might have had a factor in the election.

I'm just going to go out on the limb and say that. Anyways, we talked a little bit about that, what Democrats have in mind for the future. We previewed, it'd be to mention it, but we're kind of previewed what's coming up in our opposition newsletter from Lauren Egan about how Democrats are not really seriously thinking about the possibilities of flip in the Senate, which seems so remote not so long ago. But, hey, when you win seats like they did in New Jersey and Virginia, You can start to think about things like that. Well, look, listen to the clip for me and Nicole and a couple other panelists. Subscribe to the feed because you got great content here. Thanks for tuning in.

Talk to you later. Sam, your thoughts to these big wins last night in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City? Well, I mean, they're just mammoth wins, right? Across the board, we're talking about margins that Democrats on their most optimistic day would have loved. And yet they got them. And as you know, they got them from a variety of different directions, right? You have sort of moderates here. You have Mamdani, who's obviously not a moderate.

You have state races in Mississippi and Georgia, so not just blueish states, but swing states and even red states. You obviously have the redistricting battles, which is not just in California that matters, but because of the margins in Virginia, you're very likely to see redistricting in that state that will net Democrats two to three seats. And I think if there's sort of a unifying theory of the case, it's that, one, Trump is deeply unpopular in ways that I think people don't fully grasp, even though the polling data shows that he's unpopular. And two is that all these candidates, to a degree, did focus on affordability. They focused on pastoral goods, the economics of the moment, and whether they were a Democratic socialist or a former fighter pilot turned moderate Democrat. That was the main theme. And it worked up and down. the ballot. So a smashing success night for Democrats. And as we've talked to them throughout the day today and late last night, they are now looking at, you know, new possibilities for the map in 2026 because of this formula. Sam, you've got a heavy assist in what is either Donald Trump's ignorance or lies. I'm not going to play it, but I'm going to read you his answer to

Nora O'Donnell when she asked about about the thing that Donald Trump ran on, which was, quote, lowering the prices of the grocery. Maybe he didn't realize we bought plural groceries. Maybe that's the problem. But Nora says, people who are not invested in the stock market and he says, sure, but, but Nora says they've seen their grocery

prices go up, inflation. Trump, quote, no, you're wrong. They went up under Biden. He's been president for, he won a year ago. He's been president for nine months. And even Donald Trump conceded during the transition between his victory,

which was one standing in front of melting groceries at Bedminster and a news conference taken by every network, including this one, where he promised that everything behind him would go down, everything has gone up. So it is either saying something that he knows isn't true or the quality of information making its way to him, being told things that aren't true.

Either way, the results last night show that the lived experience has gotten to the American people in a way that either debunks Trump's or renders them irrelevant to the political equation. How do you see that proceeding over the next 12 months ahead of the midterms? I think it's the lived experience thing that you're talking about, right? I mean, you can BS your way through a lot of stuff. You can spin, you can, you know, use channels of disinformation or misinformation

to your advantage. But at some point in time, people do buy groceries, and they go into the grocery store, and they recognize that the prices haven't gone down, and in some cases they've gone up. We know this because this happened with Joe Biden, right? Like, people live the experience. No matter what the Biden and White House was telling them, they knew that the prices were not going down as fast as they wanted them to go down.

Now, in this particular case, there's an added element here, which is you have a president saying, no, don't believe your own eyes, but also you have a president who is simultaneously building a new ballroom for himself, a gilded, a gold-crusted White House Oval Office for himself, that, you know, has a great Gatsby party on Halloween with women dancing in martini, made big martini glasses, and there is a real disconnect. Now, I don't know if every voter saw these images and said, you know what, I'm going to vote for the Democrats, but I do know that those images didn't help.

They created a terrible contrast, and nor did it help that Donald Trump is presiding over a government shutdown. And finally, I would just say one other thing. What worked very well for Donald Trump in 2024 was that he was able to use cultural issues as a wedge in addition to going after Joe Biden on issues of inflation. He's able to say, look, the border is open, the cities are filled with crime, transgender rights are run amok, things and things and things like that. Now when you're in power, those cultural issues aren't, you can't use them as effectively as a wedge issue anymore.

And we saw that in Virginia, for instance, and even in New Jersey to a degree. So those aren't at his disposal, and on top of that, he can't spin away the issues of inflation. These were fantastic victory speeches, they all are. Mondami, too, I was making my way from the studio to home, so I watched some of that in replay. But the sort of contagious vibes of all the winning, how long do those last, do you think? I don't know. I honestly don't know. certainly Democrats feel really giddy about what happened last night

you can see a future in which they feel like the map has expanded where candidates see possibilities that didn't exist before where a D plus 8 electorate actually opens up real chances for the Senate that's contagious right if you're talking about contagious that's the way it's going to go

there's be special elections between now and then there always are but obviously everything comes down to the midterms and if this climate holds And that's a real question. But if this climate holds, that could end up being, you know, something that even redistricting by Republicans can not overcome. That could, in theory, be something where Democrats do net the Senate. They would need to get to 51 seats.

So that's what you're talking about this morning the night after what we just saw.