Ralph Northam rather handily won what had otherwise been expected to be a very tight gubernatorial race with Republican Ed Gillespie, defeating him by a comfortable margin of nine percentage points.

And it looks like Northam had coattails. Democratic legislative candidates obliterated the GOP's 32-seat majority in the House of Delegates and depending on the tallying of provisional ballots in three districts, appear poised to perhaps take control of that body.

P.S. to Jeralyn: Vi Lyles is the first African-American woman to be elected Mayor of Charlotte, NC. The first African-American to hold that post was Harvey Gantt, who was elected back in 1983. Some may remember him from his ill-fated 1990 Senate campaign against incumbent Jesse Helms, who successfully parried Gantt's surprisingly strong challenge with a now-notorious racist ad called "Hands."

Yesterday saw Progressives push back against that trend.

From Washington State, where the Democrats are on the cusp of controlling all three branches and pursuing a very progressive agenda and where Seattle elected its first female Mayor since the 1926 and 6 of its 9 council members will be women, to Colorado where progressives now control the 3 largest school boards and a slew of progressive issues passed, to Maine with its Medicaid expansion, yesterday was a good day.

Have they figured out that tRump isn't going to do anything for them or was it simply necessity over ideology. Time will tell.

John Heilemann, who I like a lot in spite of his past relationship with Halperin,  just said something that shoe horns nicely with my fear -

".....everything we now see....this investigation is metastasizing.  It's getting bigger.  There are new names coming in all the time. The date windows seem to be getting larger and larger and wider and wider.  With the Paradise Papers we are now looking at a huge corrupt shadow banking system....that the global elite, not just the one percent but the .0001% engage in.....this story is getting bigger, more consequential and more wide ranging every day.  ....it's gets bigger and more serious not just for Trump but the whole complex of Trumps orbit and in fact how we gather intelligence..."

I completely agree.

When you mix that in with a clearly mounting wave that will sweep them out of power and many of them down the river,  well,  let's just say I do not expect a cadre of the richest and most powerful people in the world to, shall we say,  go quietly.

What will they do?  Who knows.  What COULD they do?  Honestly there is almost no limit to what they could do.

One thing that comes to mind is nuclear war.  That would be a pretty good reason to "delay" the election and refund Mueller.

If you think that sounds alarmist, well, honestly so do I. But I also think Trump and a bunch of powerful connected billionaires will not go quietly.

The Desert Sun | November 8, 2017
An all-LGBT council in Palm Springs takes charge - "For years -- starting with the election of Ron Oden, an openly gay man, in 1995 and then the passage of a domestic partnership ordinance -- LGBT voters and their allies had been making slow but steady progress at Palm Springs City Hall. Then in 2008, after the passage of a statewide initiative to ban same-sex marriage, the community erupted in anger. Hundreds of frustrated residents took to the streets. It was an awakening for many of the area's gays and lesbians that would transform the city's politics. They organized and strategized. Tuesday's blowout victories by Lisa Middleton and Christy Holstege were the peak of that decades-long climb. The council that will be installed in December consists of three gay men, one transgender woman and a millennial woman who identifies as bisexual."

Hopefully, in ten years' time this sort of news will be treated with a big yawn. Members of the LGBT community care about good and competent governance, same as everybody else, and Tuesday's results bear that out.