From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to free expression from the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal. I'm Jerry Baker,

editor at large with the journal. Thanks very much for listening. I hope you're a subscriber. If you're not,

please do subscribe. I'm coming to you this week from California where there's a Wall Street

Journal conference. I'm recording this on Wednesday morning, morning after the night before,

as far as the little mini kind of election day that we had obviously yesterday, the off-year

elections. And I think it's fair to say that those election results were pretty startling.

The overall headline is that

maybe the reports of the death of the Democratic Party had been greatly exaggerated. A party made gains

from coast to coast, obviously winning the big marquee contests. As expected, Democratic Socialists,

Zoran Mamdani, won his contest to be mayor of New York City.

But perhaps more interestingly, results in neighboring New Jersey where Mikey Sherrill, the Republican

candidate, won the governorship, Virginia, where Abigail Spanberg, a Democrat won, the

governorship.

Both of those won by unexpectedly large margins,

double-digit margins. Democrats also won very, very big. I'm saying I'm coming to you from

California this week here in California in the Proposition 50 vote, the ballot measure that would

allow Governor Gavin Newsom and his Democratic colleagues in Sacramento to conduct a redistricting

of California's

congressional seats, which would hand the Democrats' additional five seats. That, of course,

was in response to the Texas Republicans conducting their mid-cycle redistricting. The Proposition 50

passed overwhelmingly here last night, very, very big majority. And in smaller, kind of lower profile races across

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