I woke up with some anxiety this morning. There could be many reasons for it, but I will ascribe it to today’s elections. I am very impatient waiting for the results, even though I know they won’t come for the next 12 hours or so.

Politics make strange bedfellows, they say. Take our president, Donald Trump. Yesterday, he came out in support of Andrew Cuomo for mayor of New York City. Let’s get some things straight. Cuomo is a Democrat running as an Independent (should this word be capitalized?), and Trump is an Independent masquerading as a Republican (much like Hitler was an Austrian masquerading as a German – ok, enough with the Hitler analogies). But Trump as a Republican, and as the unabashed and unchallenged leader of the Republican Party, does have, you would think, an obligation to support Republicans, right?

Well, there is a Republican in the New York mayoral race, a long time Republican named Curtis Sliwa. But Trump had previously advised this Republican, a life long Republican, to drop out of the race, and as of yesterday has endorsed Democrat/Independent Cuomo (a man no one really likes – for good reason) as mayor in the hope of peeling off sufficient votes from Zohran Mamdani to keep Momdani out of that job. It was, to be sure, a ringing endorsement: New Yorkers should vote for Cuomo he said, because better a “bad Democrat” than a “Communist”.

Now, there is no way that anyone with a half rational mind could conclude that Mamdani is a Communist. He isn’t even a pure socialist, just a Democratic Socialist, which is (agree with their principles or not) a thing unto itself. But Trump’s hope, of course, is to convince New Yorkers that a vote for the Democratic candidate is a vote for Communism. And I am sure that he will succeed to some extend.

There are others who don’t support Mamdani, including a sizeable portion (maybe the majority) of New York’s Jewish population. They are wary of Mamdani not only because he is a Muslim, but because he has been relatively outspoken about the plight of the Palestinians living under Israeli operation, has pretty much refused to renounce the slogan “Globalize the Intifada”, has said that if elected mayor, he would have Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu arrested if he entered the city, and has recently said that he wants to examine the partnership between Cornell University and Israel’s Technion, which relates to space occupied by Cornell on Roosevelt Island and which I assume is on city owned land.

All this may be worrisome, to be sure, but there are a lot of New York Jews of a progressive persuasion and many whose age is similar to Mamdani’s (he is 34) who agree with Mamdani on many of his positions regarding Israel. This, of course, does bring up the continuing question as to whether you can condemn Israel’s government (and it is the government Mamdani criticizes; he has never, to my knowledge, suggested that Israel should not exist as a state) without being antisemitic. Mamdani insists he is not antisemitic, his many Jewish supporters take him at his word on this, but the Jews who are holding their nose and voting for Cuomo, or those of a largely orthodox persuasion who will vote for Sliwa without holding their noses, do not believe him.

And, to make matters worse, Trump, in pure Trumpian fashion, has said that if Mamdani wins the election, the federal government will simply cut off all funding to New York City. Of course, we all know that he can’t really do this, but then again, he is Donald Trump and, as he sort of says, “only he can screw this up”. There is a lot of mischief he will be capable of doing.

Then there is Virginia, where I am confident Abigail Spanberger will be the next governor and that the Democrats will be successful in all positions with the possible exception of Attorney General, I think that candidate Jay Jones (that is his name?) disqualified himself when he wrote that the VA Speaker of the House and his children should die. Period. Full stop.

But I also don’t want to see a Republican in that position. Polls this morning show Jones ahead but within the margin of error. No matter who wins, I will be unhappy.

Other races? I don’t understand why the New Jersey governor’s race is so close. If Democrat Sherrill loses, it will be quite a wake up call, to be sure. And in California, it appears clear that redistricting will be approved.

The other wild card, of course, involves Trump sending “election monitors” at least to California and New Jersey. They can create quite a mess and tie things up in the courts for years.

As I said, I woke up anxious. Now you see why.