I was all set to come out guns blazing at Fox News for overemphasizing Zohran Mamdani’s victory last night, as part of the network’s never-ending quest to whip the faithful into a lather over its latest Red Scare. So what did I see this morning? A shocking modicum of balance at Fox (see screen capture below) and an absurd overemphasis of Mamdani’s victory at the NYT (see below). Doh! … OK, it’s the Times’s home turf, so they’re playing up the big NYC mayoral election. But to me the big election story from last night was Democrats’ “extraordinary sweep of battleground districts,” as one sane Times reporter puts it, and that was largely accomplished via moderate Dems, not democratic socialists, winning tough gubernatorial elections in NJ and Virginia.

From PBS on the victories by Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey: “Both actively distanced themselves from some of the Democratic Party’s far-left policies and emphasized what Spanberger described in her victory speech as ‘pragmatism over partisanship.’”

The unmistakable loser last night: Donald Trump. It was a solid, early-term, across-the-board rebuke of the president. … Now on to 2026! ….

Update – Some welcome common sense from the Globe’s David Scharfenberg, who writes that the Democratic Party can only win moving forward if Dems remain united, with some key adjustments:  “It has to accommodate both the centrists of Virginia and the leftists of Manhattan. It has to be elastic. The trick is not stretching too far in one direction. And in recent years, the party has done just that, reaching way out to the left and damaging the Democratic brand in the process.”