Good morning. It is November 5th. It's a cloudy-ish morning in New York City with some clear patches breaking through. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

It's always been a pleasure to talk to you in the mornings about what's going on and how the press is covering it. But honestly, ever since the first Tuesday of last November, getting up in the morning and immediately surveying the state of current events has been pretty discouraging. Pretty much every day, the news has been that things are bad and they just got worse. Yesterday, however, people perceived that they had the opportunity to do something about that, and they went out and did it in genuinely astonishing numbers. More than a million people in New York City voted to make Zohran Mamdani the next mayor. With 91 % of the vote tabulated, there's a chance that he could end up collecting more votes than all the candidates put together did in the previous mayoral election. And the voters did this after Donald Trump threatened to punish the city if people elected Mamdani. In his victory speech, Mamdani told Donald Trump to turn up the volume and listen, and declared, “New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this, to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.” 

In the New Jersey and Virginia governor's races. Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger both recorded blowout Democratic victories. 13 seats in Virginia's House of Delegates flipped from Republican to Democratic control. Mississippi Democrats gained two seats in the state's special legislative elections, breaking the Republicans' supermajority in the legislature there.

63.8 % of California voters agreed to adopt a retaliatory gerrymandering measure allowing the state to respond to the wave of mid-decade gerrymandering maps in Republican controlled states, designed to wipe out Democratic seats at Donald Trump's behest, with a new California map designed to eliminate five Republican seats. 

Basically from coast to coast it was a bloodbath for anyone affiliated with Donald Trump, except in Nassau County, New York, where the Trumpist County executive won re-election. 

In a completely unrelated matter, after Republicans were routed yesterday by Democrats running on the message that things are too expensive and that the president is abusing his powers, journalists covering oral arguments at the Supreme Court today reported that a clear majority of justices, including Republican appointees, appeared hostile to the notion that Donald Trump has the power to impose tariffs as he pleases, in pursuit of an open-ended trade war with no congressional authorization. Chief Justice John Roberts went so far as to suggest the tariffs run afoul of the major questions doctrine, a doctrine that the Roberts Court invented for the purpose of declaring that Democratic presidents regulatory schemes exceeded the scope of their congressional authorization, but which had vanished from the court's jurisprudence once Donald Trump was the person who was making drastic regulatory pronouncements until now. 

On the front of the print edition of this morning's New York Times, Zohran Mamdani gets the full width of the page. “MAMDANI IS ELECTED MAYOR, CAPPING ASCENT.” There's a four-column photo of the smiling candidate on his way to being the mayor-elect out on the street yesterday surrounded by cameras. The sub-headline is, “First Muslim to Lead the City — A Triumph for Progressives.” 

“Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a once-unheralded state lawmaker from Queens whose affordability platform and charisma fueled a meteoric political rise, was elected on Tuesday as the 111th mayor of New York, according to the Associated Press. The victory by Mr. Mamdani, 34, a democratic socialist, placed a final stamp on the astonishing ascent of an assemblyman who rose from anonymity to defeat better known rivals like former governor Andrew M. Cuomo, first in the Democratic primary and now again in the general election. His win,” the Times writes, “represents a major triumph for progressives, empowering a new coalition of younger voters and immigrants who volunteered for his campaign, filled its coffers with thousands of small donations, and flocked to the polls to elect the city's first Muslim mayor. When Mr. Mamdani takes office on January 1st, he will become the highest-ranking Muslim elected official in the United States, a breakthrough for many Muslim Americans who feel pride in his success and anxiety over the Islamophobia his campaign has stirred nearly a quarter century after the September 11th attacks.” 

That reads like mostly a solid summary, with the exception of one little racecraft-style reversal of who did what on the question of Islamophobia. Mamdani and his campaign in no way stirred Islamophobia, but spent the whole election season running an assertively universalist campaign and downplaying his status as a pioneering Muslim politician, until the relentless bigotry of the attacks against him from Andrew Cuomo, the consortium of billionaires trying to put Cuomo over, and the political press, drove Mamdani to issue an affirmative defense of Muslim participation in civic life. Islamophobia was a giant and horrifying problem in the mayoral race in New York, but it was not Zohran Mamdani's problem. It was the problem of people who, unable to find any other reason to urge people to vote for Andrew Cuomo, decided it might be a winning strategy, and the all too many people out there walking the streets with the rest of us, who chose to listen to that message. But numerous as they were, they lost. And even as prominent national Democrats like Pete Buttigieg are leaving Mamdani out of their litanies of yesterday's democratic successes, more than a million voters rejected that poisoned worldview and also voted for free buses. 

That's the heartening news. Then you flip over to the bottom of the page and, well, there's a big obituary of Dick Cheney, but we covered that yesterday when the news broke. But then the right-hand column is “Trump Weighs Plans of Attack on Venezuela. TheTrump administration, the Times writes, has developed a range of options for military action in Venezuela, including direct attacks on military units that protect President Nicolas Maduro and moves to seize control of the country's oil fields, according to multiple U.S. officials.” Dick Cheney is dead. Dick Cheney lives on. “President Trump has yet to make a decision about how or even whether to proceed,” the Times writes “officials said he was reluctant to approve operations that may place American troops at risk or could turn into an embarrassing failure. But many of his senior advisors are pressing for one of the most aggressive options, ousting Mr. Maduro from power.” 

The administration also announced that it had killed two more civilians at sea yesterday in its 16th unprovoked military strike. This one was in the Pacific and brought the total to 16 attacks in which the administration says it has killed 67 people. 

Inside the newspaper on page A9, there's a news analysis piece looking at how unpleasantly unclear it remains what Donald Trump was talking about when he declared that he wanted to restart nuclear testing. “Trump pushes tests with a nuclear bang. A top aide says, non-nuclear. President Trump,” the Times writes, “has often thrived on vagueness, demonstrating a deep unwillingness to be pinned down on specifics and to forego maximum leeway in future actions. But one area where precision matters a lot is when presidents talk about their plans for American nuclear weapons. And last weekend, the president and his energy secretary, who oversees the development and maintenance of the nuclear stockpile, contradicted each other on the critical question of whether the United States is about to break the three-decade taboo on explosive testing of nuclear weapons. In short, Mr. Trump has doubled down on the concept that he has ordered a resumption of explosive nuclear testing, which the United States has refrained from for 33 years, to match what he contends were secret nuclear underground detonations, presumably by Russia, China, and other nuclear-armed states. But that claim has been rejected by many nuclear experts and Mr. Trump's own nominee to lead the U.S. Strategic Command, which is responsible for America's ground-based undersea and bomber-launched nuclear weapons.”

Saying that Trump has “doubled down on the concept that he has ordered a resumption of explosive nuclear testing” does not seem to be the in-short way of saying it. The short version would seem to be that the president insists that he wants to resume explosive nuclear testing. The basis he cites for doing that, may be a false one, but a quick survey of Trump administration policies in action, makes it clear that no substrate of truth is required for him to do something. This may in some formal sense be a story about two different people contradicting one another, but only one of those two people is the one with legal and constitutional authority to use nuclear weapons. And that's the one who says he wants an explosion. 

And that, unfortunately, is the news. Thank you for listening. Thank you for all the listening that you've done. I don't know if we have any listeners fixated enough on details to have noticed that a while ago, the part of the outro where I asked people to subscribe or send tips to keep us going stopped appearing. That is because we have reached, for the indefinite future, the end of the Indignity Morning Podcast as you've known it. Tomorrow morning, instead of sitting down at a microphone with my morning newspaper, I'll be commuting to the offices of CNN where I am beginning a full-time features editing job that will be pretty much inherently logistically and institutionally incompatible with also recording 10 minutes or so of potentially pungent criticism of major media organizations each weekday morning. It has been fun and educational reading the paper together with all of you out there, whoever you may be. Apologies for wrapping this up with a somewhat cruddy voice, but long-time listeners have heard worse, and this time around, it's just a transient side effect of some routine medication. There'll be some more details about the changes to Indignity in the newsletter proper today, thank you once more for supporting and taking an interest in our long pursuit of PODCASTING ADEQUACY. To the extent we've reached it, it's because the Indignity Morning Podcast has been edited by Joe MacLeod.

The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho You, the listeners, have been the reason we've done it. Take care of yourselves. Be well. Don't believe everything you read in the newspaper. And, inasmuch as life is inherently, certainly in the medium or long term, one great succession of unexpected things getting in the way, we may very well talk again, but probably not for a while.