AP (“Democrats dominate as economic woes take a toll on Trump’s GOP. Takeaways from Election Day 2025“):
Democrats dominated the first major Election Day since President Donald Trump returned to the White House.
And while a debate about the future of the Democratic Party may have only just begun, there are signs that the economy — specifically, Trump’s inability to deliver the economic turnaround he promised last fall — may be a real problem for Trump’s GOP heading into next year’s higher-stakes midterm elections.
Democrats on Tuesday won governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, the only states electing new chief executives this year. They also swept a trio of state Supreme Court contests in swing-state Pennsylvania and ballots measures from Colorado to Maine.
Trump was largely absent from the campaign trail, but GOP candidates closely aligned themselves with the president, betting that his big win last year could provide a path to victory this time. They were wrong.
Democrats are hoping the off-year romp offers a new winning playbook, but some caution may be warranted. Tuesday’s elections were limited to a handful of states, most of which lean blue, and the party that holds the White House typically struggles in off-year elections.
My wife and I voted yesterday in a very blue district in Virginia, which has shifted from red to purple to blue in the 23 years since I moved back here. We were literally the only ones in the room other than election workers and our kids, who were off from school.
As I’ve noted before, the nominees for governor in both parties ran unopposed in their party primaries. The Democrat, Abigail Spanberger, has led the race by a pretty wide margin throughout. Not surprisingly, she won, 57.5% to 42.3%. The lieutenant governor’s race was almost entirely off my radar screen. It was notable only because the Democrat, Ghazala Hashmi, made history as the first Muslim woman to win a statewide election in any U.S. state. She won by a slightly smaller margin than Spanberger, 55.6% to 44.2%.
The only race in question was for attorney general. Republican incumbent Jason Miyares got a big break when his opponent, Jay Jones, was discovered to have sent texts advocating the murder of a political rival. It became the Republican talking point for the last month of the campaign, used against Democrats in all of the races. Jones only won 54.2% to 46.8%.
As was noted by Steven and me repeatedly four years ago, Virginia has a longstanding pattern of voting for the party that does not control the White House in these elections; indeed, there has been only one exception in the last 13 elections. Last cycle, Republicans swept these offices after Biden’s 2020 win. This cycle, Democrats swept them after Trump’s 2024 win.
We’ve learned time and again that these low-turnout, off-off-year elections don’t tell us much about subsequent congressional and presidential election cycles.
That does not, of course, stop pundits from punditing.
POLITICO (“Democrats didn’t just rebound. They dominated.“):
For Democrats, Tuesday night felt like 2017 all over again.
Umm, as noted,All across the country, Democrats won big, from the marquee races to the down-ballot contests. Counties that had shifted right a year ago veered back to the left, and the suburbs that powered Democrats’ massive wins in the first Trump administration came roaring back. Exit polls even showed Democrats improved their margins with non-college educated voters.
The strength of the wins hints at Democrats’ appetite to take on Trump as he ends his first year in office and voters’ concerns about cost of living.
Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill cruised to double-digit victories in Virginia and New Jersey. Two Georgia Democrats flipped seats on the state’s Public Service Commission, the first non-federal statewide wins for a Democrat in nearly two decades. Democrats flipped a pair of Republican-held state Senate seats in Mississippi, cracking the GOP supermajority in a deep-red state. And a successful California ballot measure delivered five additional seats for the party’s House margins ahead of the 2026 midterms, offsetting Texas’ redistricting push.
It was an injection of life into a depleted, depressed Democratic Party that had been cast into the political wilderness by Donald Trump’s decisive victory a year ago. Democrats, locked out of power in Washington, have spent the last year soul-searching and data-digging, as their brand sagged to historic lows.
But they also started to overperform in special elections, hinting that the tide was turning. And on Tuesday, their first big electoral test of the second Trump era, they didn’t just match the wins from eight years ago that had been a harbinger of a blue wave in the 2018 midterms — in several key races, they exceeded them.
“Virginians and voters spoke loud and clear that they’re pissed off at the Trump administration,” Christina Freundlich, a Democratic strategist who worked on the Virginia lieutenant governor’s race. “Democrats came out in record numbers, and this is a foreshadow of what we’re going to see next year.”
Democrats rode the traditional, party-out-of-power tailwinds, reenergizing its own base by pushing back on Trump’s second-term policies that have alarmed liberals. Spanberger’s and Sherrill’s messaging on the stagnant economy and affordability crisis helped their party bounce back in its first political test of the second Trump era — and by margins that even surprised some Democrats.
Axios (“A big blue wave for Democrats, and two paths forward“):
Democrats delivered a resounding rebuke to President Trump in all five of the most-watched races in Tuesday’s elections, as voters responded to candidates’ promises to address frustrations with high prices and Trump.
It wasn’t just that Democrats, as predicted, won key races in Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California and New York City. In race after race, the margins of victory — including double-digit wins in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races — were what resonated. County after county moved blue.
“The Democratic Party is back,” declared House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist elected New York City’s mayor, told supporters his victory represented “a mandate for a new kind of politics, a mandate for a city we can afford.”Even as Democrats celebrated late Tuesday, it was clear the results didn’t settle the Democratic Party’s civil war over the best way to move forward after its crushing losses in 2024. Progressive and moderate Democrats both emerged with genuine measures of victory Tuesday — and they’re already wielding it as evidence that it’s their side that should lead the party out of the wilderness in 2026 and 2028. Progressives in New York City and California fired up their base to elect Mamdani, and to redraw California’s congressional map to help Democrats’ push to flip five U.S. House seats next year.
[…]
For the Democratic Party, the dueling narratives will continue into 2026 and 2028. Left-wing elected officials and strategists argue that the party has become so unpopular that it needs young outsiders like Mamdani running on an unapologetic progressive vision — a mirror image of what Trump and his allies did in the Republican Party over the past decade. Moderate and establishment Democrats argue that it was progressives who made Democrats unpopular in the first place, thanks to their embrace of slogans such as “defund the police.” They say the party needs more center-left, practical candidates with appealing biographies.
Clearly, there is substantial dissatisfaction with President Trump and some of his policies. We’ve seen that in poll after poll. I fully expect that, to the degree our elections reflect the will of the voters, Democrats will retake the House after the 2026 midterms.
But I thought that Monday morning. And six months ago. I take very little from yesterday’s results.
Midterms have different electorates than presidential cycles. And off-off-year cycles have different electorates still.
In Virginia, with 97% of the votes in, Spanberger got 1,961,990 votes. Her Republican opponent got 1,442,817. That’s 3,404,807. Bump it 3% to account for uncounted votes, and you get 3,506,951. Last November, by contrast, Kamala Harris got 2,335,395 votes to Donald Trump’s 2,075,085. That’s 4,410,480. That’s more 1,005,673 votes.
That people are typically more motivated to vote in presidential elections than in gubernatorial elections is not shocking. That’s doubly true when the presidential election is expected to be close* and the gubernatorial election isn’t. Still, the 3.4 million who showed up for both elections are not a normally distributed sample of the 4.4 million who showed up for the presidential election. They’re likely older, wealthier, and more educated. Not so long ago, that favored Republicans. Now, it favors Democrats.
*Virginia isn’t considered a swing state anymore, and the Democrat carrying it in presidential elections is no longer surprising. But people vote on the national vibe, not the Electoral College reality.
