Let's talk about the election results and their national implications with USA Today's Washington

Bureau Chief Susan Page, who has called this election a proof of life for Democrats.

I guess that means at least they have a pulse.

Susan also has a forthcoming book called The Queen and Her Presidents, which is going to be published

next April about Queen Elizabeth

and her United States presidents. I guess that refers to, right, Susan? Hi, welcome back to WNYC.

Hey, it's great to be with you. Yes, U.S. presidents and their dealings with Queen Elizabeth.

So was this a collection of local elections or was this some kind of national

election? Well, it was both. I mean, of course they were local elections, but they

almost all went one way. All the marquee races went one way. And that reflected how nationalized

our politics have become. Trump was an issue in the New York City mayor's race, in the two

governors' races in New Jersey and Virginia in the California referendum, in the utility board

elections in Georgia, in the judicial vote in Pennsylvania. So I think it's fair to see this

as sending a kind of national message, although we should always remember that off-year elections are kind of like the Iowa caucuses and that they are an imperfect venue to draw big conclusions about what's going to happen in the bigger elections that happened next year.

Was New Jersey a bellwether in any of the ways that you look for bellwethers?

We were talking with our previous guest about the big swing in Latino voters,

Latino voters who had been trending more toward Trump than in the past in last year's election, swinging way back to

the Democrats, at least in the Garden State. Yeah. So we'll need more analysis to know if

Latino voters who voted for Trump swung to Cheryl, right? Because in some ways, we may have

had a slightly different electorate. In the exit polls

in the state, about nine of ten voters who said they supported for Trump didn't vote for

Cheryl, didn't swing back to the Democratic Party. But this was, I think, encouraging for Democrats

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