Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm deputy editor of The Spectator. I'm joined today by Daniel McCarthy, who is editor of modern age, a conservative quarterly journal.

And we're going to be talking about Tuesday's elections and what they say about the state of American politics.

So, Dan, yesterday we had the first election day since Donald Trump won the White House. And it was

nothing but victory for the Democrats, it seems. Should we see this as the day that the Democrats started to bounce back, or is it the beginning of the failure of Trumpism?

Well, it really just has more to do with the basic partisan dynamics of the United States.

So Virginia has been a very difficult state for Republicans for well over a

decade now. It has gone democratic in each of the three last presidential elections, and the

Republicans have not won a gubernatorial race in Virginia since 2001. So it was pretty much inevitable

that the Republicans, I shouldn't say inevitable, but certainly

the deck was stacked against them when it came to winning the governorship and winning the other

statewide offices in Virginia. As for New Jersey, that's an even more sort of liberal state.

And again, there it's not a surprise at all that a Democrat, you know, sort of

won the governorship. So much of this is, you know, sort of par for the course for American politics.

However, that's not to say that there isn't an element here of sort of Trumpism, generating a

certain backlash among moderates and among leftists who are now more energized to come out.

So it's just very hard to parse out, you know, to what extent this is simply the natural pendulum of American politics,

and to what extent this is something that is particular to a kind of anti-Trump backlash.

Well, yes, because I mean I read a lot on conservative websites about how Ed Gillespie, the Republican

candidate for Virginia, was sort of making a great surge in the last few days, and he was going to

show that Virginia still could be a Republican state, but he failed quite drastically. So it feels a

little bit as though people are defaulting to the demographic argument,

...