Greg Sargent has this 100% right. The carnage to our democracy and carnage to our economy require the same message:

The Democratic Party’s blowout wins on Tuesday night underscore a fundamental reality about the Donald Trump era: Anti-Trump politics is affordability politics, and affordability politics is anti-Trump politics. It’s not just that there is no need to choose between attacking Trump’s lawlessness and addressing the “price of eggs,” in the hackneyed shorthand for costs and inflation. It’s that the two missions are inseparable from one another.

In the weeks leading up to the elections—in which Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races by 15 points and 13 points, respectively—a strange, contrary media trope took hold. Various news analyses suggested that Spanberger and Sherrill were erring by obsessing over Trump rather than focusing on what actually matters to voters. Some Democrats fretted that while attacking Trump was “seductive,” an opportunity was being missed to offer a substantive “alternative.”

Tuesday’s results decisively refute that false-choice narrative.

Start with this finding in the updated exit polls: Both Spanberger and Sherrill entirely erased the GOP advantage with voters who lack a four-year degree. Spanberger tied her Republican opponent among them, with each getting 50 percent, a huge swing from four years earlier, when Glenn Youngkin won them by 59 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, Sherrill also tied her GOP opponent among non-college voters by 50 percent to 49 percent.

And here’s a striking nuance: While both Democrats lost non-college white voters by large amounts—a demographic the party continues to struggle with—Spanberger did reduce that margin relative to 2021. Critically, both made up for that by winning huge margins among non-college nonwhite voters: The spreads were 85–15 for Spanberger and 75–23 for Sherrill. Given that Trump’s 2024 victory unleashed a hurricane of analysis about his inroads with the nonwhite working class, those margins are heartening indeed.

True, there are nuances and caveats here. Virginia and New Jersey are blue-leaning; turnout differentials could help explain these shifts; they might not hold in a higher-turnout presidential election; exit polls are not the final word; and so forth. But still, such success for Democrats with non-college voters—relative to recent performances in the same states—suggests they may be starting to repair the damage Trump did to their coalition.

There’s a bizarre tendency in our political discourse to treat criticism of Trump—including his lawlessness and consolidation of authoritarian power—as somehow evading the “real” issues that working-class voters actually care about. Tuesday’s results sorely test this false dichotomy. On one front after another, the Democrats’ attacks on Trump were directly linked to voters’ material concerns.

For instance, many of Spanberger’s ads attacking Trump were also about the economy. One ad ripped her GOP opponent as a Trump stooge while decrying soaring costs and rising unemployment due to his policies. Another ad labeled her GOP foe a “MAGA Republican”—that’s just Resistance talk, right?—while decrying rising grocery prices and health care costs under Trump. Yet another ad attacked MAGA while casting Trump’s big budget bill as a giveaway to “billionaires.”

Meanwhile, Sherrill’s labeling of her opponent the “Trump of Trenton” was sometimes treated as little more than anti-Trump obsessiveness. But Democrats ran ads that tied her GOP opponent to Trump while also blasting Trump’s massive Medicaid cuts and his tariffs for the economic harms they’re inflicting. When Trump killed the tunnel project connecting New York and New Jersey, in an authoritarian move designed to inflict pain on only Democrats, the party’s ads blasted this as a job killer, and Sherrill also forthrightly called it “illegal” and vowed to “fight” it.

Trump’s tariffs, his killing of the tunnel project, his potentially illegal federal-worker firings, his DOGE bloodbath, and more show that the economic carnage he’s unleashed is inseparable from his consolidation of autocratic power. Democrats can say these things are bad because they’re both authoritarian abuses of power and have terrible economic consequences, while vowing to stand up to that lawlessness—and do well with the working class.

It is a false choice to say that Democrats should focus on “kitchen table issues.” Sure, they should talk about the shitty economy constantly — and place the blame on Trump’s corrupt, authoritarian, policies. People will get it. It’s not that hard. He’s destroying us, one self-serving, undemocratic decision at a time.

“This firewall that exists in the punditry between Trump and economic messaging—that is not how working-class voters thought about these issues,” a Democratic strategist familiar with strategic thinking in both gubernatorial races tells me.