Democrats just had a resounding victory across the nation. But they’d be remiss to believe that the election results are an endorsement of the party’s creep to the far-left.
Page A230From§Eachthe afternoon edition — 6 November 2026
New York Post credits socialist wave for historic Democratic win, calls same win proof voters reject socialism.
As it ran on the front
My nephew is in his second year of law school, and when he called this week about his car — the transmission again, that car hates him specifically — he ended up telling me about something called judicial estoppel. I wrote the word down twice because I wasn't sure I had it right. He said it's what happens when somebody takes one position in one room and a different position in another room, about the same facts. He said courts tend to notice. I asked him what happens when nobody's under oath, just two pieces in the same newspaper. He said that's not really his class yet.
I had those two pieces open on the table. Both from the same paper, both dated the same day. I wrote them down because I wanted to look at them next to each other. The first says the Democratic Socialists of America "notched historic victories" on Tuesday and sent "a new wave of left-wing lawmakers to Congress." I read that part twice. The second piece, same paper, same page of my notes, says that very election is proof that voters want "moderation, not socialism." I've been sitting with those two sentences for a couple of days now, and I still don't know which one the paper means for me to believe when I turn the page.…
…(cont) Is a wave of new lawmakers also, somehow, the proof that voters didn't want new lawmakers? That's the part I keep bringing to my nephew, and he keeps telling me to ask a different kind of lawyer.
I called the bank this week about my own statement, which I never love looking at, and the woman on the phone told me the number was thin. I stood in line a few days later behind a man refinancing something, and the loan officer looked at a number not so different from mine and told him it was a strong number for a man his age. Same bank. Same kind of number on the page. I'm not saying either one of them was wrong. I'm asking which window you'd rather be standing at when the number comes up.
I went back further, because my nephew says you check the earlier filing before you argue the one in front of you. On October 3rd, a different outlet wrote that the DSA has a believability problem with older Black voters, while younger voters, in their words, want to take more risks. That's a month before the election, one newsroom describing a party splitting down an age line — not a wave, not a rejection, just a split, in October, before anybody had a result to argue about.
I'm not a lawyer, and I want that on the record before my nephew reads this, because he's going to be one, and he'd tell me a fact can sit in two different filings and still be the same fact underneath. He didn't say that about this story. I never told him about this story. He didn't have to.
Oh — before you go. The piece that called the count historic and the piece that called the same count a rejection of what made it historic ran in the same paper, on the same day. I know I already brought this up once, and I'm sorry to come back to it. But I never found the part that says a newsroom can file the wave and file against the wave and still only be reading one number. Did they file against the same count they'd just called historic?
“Same building, same byline page, two different weathermen telling you the storm already passed and the storm never happened. That's not confusion, that's a newsroom running both the receipt and the alibi under one masthead so nobody downstream has to pick a side. The wave is real or it isn't — pick one, and watch which one keeps the donors calm.”
“Look, both pieces are accurate reporting on the same facts, that's just thorough coverage — a wave can be historic in scale and still not be a mandate, those aren't contradictory, they're nuanced. Did I say nuanced? That's not — I mean, obviously if voters wanted socialism they'd have said socialism, they said Democrat, that's — I'll have someone get back to you on this.”
The receipts
Democrats are running an average of 11.5 points ahead of their 2024 baseline across 2026 special elections MultiState Elections, 2026 special-election tracking
DSA wave storms Congress — and radical comments on 9/11, abolishing police and arresting enemies come into the spotlightThe Democratic Socialists of America notched historic victories on Tuesday, sending a new wave of left-wing lawmakers to Congress and raising eyebrows over their past statements.
· The DSA has a believability problem with older Black voters. But young people want to take more risks from the morgue, 3 Oct 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.