From Philly to Colorado Springs, America voted no on extremism Tuesday

It’s morning in America ... on May 16, 2023. Unlike the star-spangled sunrise of Ronald Reagan’s iconic 1984 reelection TV ad, this day’s national forecast is cloudy and dark.

In Florida, one day after its authoritarian GOP governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a draconian bill to curb diversity efforts and anti-racism teaching at public colleges that he wants to stick to “the basics,” a grade-school teacher went on TV to say she’s under fire for showing kids a Disney movie with a gay character. In Washington, D.C., warring Republicans and Democrats at the White House made little or no progress on a simple debt-limit bill, as the federal government careens needlessly toward default. In North Carolina, as the sun was setting, GOP lawmakers rammed through a 12-week abortion ban opposed by a majority of citizens.

Finally, nightfall came — and the people were heard from.

In Pennsylvania’s Delaware County, in a special state House election that would determine whether lawmakers in Harrisburg would have the votes to put their own version of an abortion ban before voters, a surge in mail-in ballots was the first sign of a landslide victory for the pro-choice Democrat. Just north in Montgomery County, Republican primary voters decided they’d finally had enough of right-wing county commissioner Joe Gale, a rabid Donald Trump supporter who’d wanted to ban mail-in ballots and survived calls for his 2020 ouster after labeling Black Lives Matter “a hate group.”

It was a bad night for extremists all over America. In Colorado Springs, Colo., known for conservative politics (and as the site of six high-profile mass shootings since 2007), Yemi Mobolade, a Nigerian immigrant, shocked the local Republican establishment to become the city’s first elected Black mayor. In Jacksonville, Fla. — the nation’s largest city with a GOP mayor, run mostly by Republicans for 30 years — the candidate backed strongly both by DeSantis and the ultraconservative, book-banning Moms for Liberty lost to Democrat Donna Deegan in a huge upset.

Philadelphia, in its own unique way, captured this national zeitgeist. In a hotly contested Democratic primary on the road to the 100th mayor of the city where American democracy was forged, the candidate endorsed by left-wing firebrands Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lost, but so did the candidate backed by the Fraternal Order of Police. Instead, Democrats in the sixth-largest U.S. city stayed in the center lane by nominating former City Council member Cherelle Parker — propelled by the same middle-class Black homeowners who launched President Joe Biden into his current orbit in the winter of 2020.

Indeed, history could look back on Tuesday not just as the date of an interesting election in Philadelphia — although it was — but as a day when Americans in a lot of diverse places, in cities and suburbs, in “red states” and “blue states,” seemed to stand up in unison and vote no to the extremism blasted into their living rooms every night.

There were, of course, outliers here and there. Pittsburgh, for example, once the birthplace of the so-called “Reagan Democrat,” continues to surprise as one of America’s most progressive cities. But mostly, Tuesday’s election seemed very much a ratification of the calming political trends of the 2020s that have defied the national mood of high anxiety and resulted in Biden’s 2020 victory and 2022′s coast-to-coast rejection of Trump’s Big Lie.

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Jacksonville’s Deegan — a former veteran TV news anchor who founded a nonprofit to fight breast cancer, yet was labeled “a radical” by GOP rival Daniel Davis — may have best captured the moment when she told her cheering supporters she’d decided early on that “we were going to lead with love over fear. We would not go with division. We would go with unity.”

But one key difference so far in 2023 — at least here in Pennsylvania — is that Republican primary voters are also rejecting some of the most extreme choices. In addition to Gale’s ouster in Montgomery County, statewide GOP voters turned back a surprisingly strong bid for a Supreme Court nomination from ultraconservative Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough, aligned with the movement of 2022 gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano.

It remains to be seen whether this was a Keystone State fluke. But there were several other Tuesday takeaways that loom large heading into 2024, yet another national contest in which the fate of U.S. democracy will be on the ballot:

Abortion rights still reign in the suburbs. Voters in the Delco special election, which allowed the Democrats to cling to their 102-101 edge in the state House, were in no mood to punish Democrats for the sexual misconduct scandal that had forced the previous State Rep. Mike Zabel to resign. Instead, the fear of handing Harrisburg Republicans the power to restrict abortion rights meant the race was over before it started. Upper Darby voter Martha McHale told The Inquirer on Tuesday that “I’m not interested in going back 50 years.”

Identity politics matters. In Philadelphia, in the end, voters in Northwest and North Philadelphia, where Parker racked up her biggest margins, were more likely to voice elation at electing the city’s first Black female — OK, first woman of any kind — mayor in its long history than to discuss the nuances of her stop-and-frisk policing plan. But the Democratic primary for five at-large Council seats was also instructive. Voters ignored big-time spending on a pro-business slate — all three lost — to nominate the would-be first openly LGBTQ Council member in Rue Landau, as well as the first-ever South Asian American in Nina Ahmad.

The Biden way wins again in Philly. The sisterly affection that ruled in the City of Brotherly Love was a powerful echo of how Biden won the party’s primaries three years ago. Like the incumbent president, Parker beat back challenges from the party’s left wing by appealing to the voting bloc of middle-class Black voters, especially women, which is very much the core of the 21st-century Democratic Party. So maybe it’s no accident that Parker’s most noteworthy policy pitch — to hire additional beat cops — also sounded Biden-esque, as did her close ties with blue-collar trades unions and her long contact list of powerful city Democrats.

Sometimes the Philly mayor’s race is a predictor of the coming presidential showdown, like when Frank Rizzo’s law-and-order win in 1971 preceded a Richard Nixon landslide. Often it isn’t; the city’s left turn in 2015 with Mayor Jim Kenney was immediately followed by Trump, after all. But it’s hard to look at Tuesday’s wider results, extending from the Delaware River all the way to the Rocky Mountains, and not conclude that the average American wants what the ill-fated Warren Harding famously promised as “a return to normalcy.”

Turn on the news, though, and you’ll see the chaos caused by everything that’s gone wrong with democracy in recent years — the gerrymandering, the implosion of the Voting Rights Act, the rank corruption of the U.S. Supreme Court, and more. On Tuesday, even if your candidate lost, we all saw a lot of what’s right with democracy in America. Nights like this are why so many of us are fighting so hard to save it from ruin.

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