The News
Democrats routed the Republican Party from high-profile governors’ races to obscure local contests Tuesday, sweeping statewide races in Virginia and New Jersey while electing New York City’s first Muslim mayor.
The blue tide washed further than most pollsters had predicted. In Virginia, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger defeated Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by more than 10 points, the biggest Democratic margin in 40 years. In New Jersey, Rep. Mikie Sherrill blew past Jack Ciattarelli, a three-time GOP candidate whose energetic campaign made some Democrats nervous.
Both candidates had coattails, pulling along fellow Democrats as Republican turnout sagged. In Virginia, GOP Attorney Gen. Jason Miyares lost to Jay Jones, a former state legislator whose campaign was rocked when National Review obtained violent text messages he’d once sent to a Republican colleague. The Republican state delegate who shared the messages, Carrie Coyner, was on track to lose her Richmond-area seat.
Democrats entered the night with 51 seats in the 100-member House of Delegates. They were on track for a much larger majority, giving Spanberger more space to govern and making it easier for the party to attempt to draw new congressional maps next year. In New Jersey, Democrats kept their lopsided margin in Trenton — a particular disappointment for Ciattarelli, whose strong 2021 campaign swept many powerful Democrats out of their seats.
On Tuesday, Democrats gained back ground in majority-minority parts of north Jersey where President Donald Trump had won. (Passaic County, where Latinos are a plurality, flipped to Trump last year and was going for Sherrill by double digits.)
In Pennsylvania, Democrats convinced voters to retain three state Supreme Court justices for 10-year terms. Republicans had hoped to win at least one of those races, running a “No in November” campaign that linked the incumbents to the “lawfare” against Trump. Democratic strategists, who poured resources into the races and deployed Gov. Josh Shapiro to campaign for the justices, had expected a late GOP push and a possible move from Trump.
In the end, the president kept his involvement in the state to a Truth Social post, urging voters to reject the “woke” justices. The president did little for Republican nominees in New Jersey and Virginia, too, and virtually nothing on a California ballot measure that could eliminate five Republican House seats. The California redistricting measure is expected to pass, after Democrats built a massive mail vote lead.
Trump was more active in New York, where his plea for Republican voters to abandon GOP nominee Curtis Sliwa and support ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo appeared to move last-minute votes. Support for Sliwa collapsed, and in defeat, Cuomo was on track to win more votes than any mayoral candidate in the last 32 years. But Mamdani won more than 1 million votes — the first candidate for mayor to do that since the 1960s — as turnout surged.
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David’s view
Mamdani’s win, obviously, isn’t a victory for every Democrat. Cuomo’s desperate campaign — almost certainly his last — tried to knit together a coalition of Republicans, independents, and Democrats worried that a socialist mayor would wreck their city and their party.
You can expect more centrist Democrats (who are most of them) to point at the margins in Virginia and New Jersey and say that the candidates who won big in swing states truly show what they stand for.
But every Democrat got something out of Tuesday night. They’ve had a year of special election overperformances, followed by hand-wringing about how unpopular and leaderless their party is.
Exit polls suggest that it’s still unpopular: In Virginia, half of voters said that they viewed the Democratic Party unfavorably. That distaste didn’t hurt Spanberger and her ticket, because 18% of those unhappy voters backed her anyway. Fifty-one percent of voters said that “support for trans rights” had gone too far, after Earle-Sears and other Republicans in Virginia pounded Democrats on the issue. The Trump administration threatened to cut funding for suburban school boards that retain inclusive gender policies. But 22% of voters who agreed with Earle-Sears on the issue voted for Spanberger anyway.
“Less than one year into the Trump-Vance Administration, they chose pro-equality candidates and rejected hollow campaigns of fear mongering,” said Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson. “Voters weren’t fooled by millions of dollars in cruel, transphobic ads.”
The president’s unpopularity was part of the mix. His disapproval rating in both New Jersey and Virginia exit polls was higher than the vote for Kamala Harris last year. Trump’s strength last year convinced Ciattarelli, and to a lesser extent Earle-Sears, to keep close to him this year, defending policies that were clearly hated locally — DOGE layoffs of federal workers outside DC, threats to cancel the Gateway tunnel improvements between New York City and north Jersey.
What did they get in the trade? Nothing, really. Trump never campaigned in either state, didn’t even use Earle-Sears’ name in a Monday “tele-rally,” and released just $2 million from his war chest for last-minute GOP campaign work in both states. Pennsylvania Democrats told me that they’d prepared for the president to do more for the “No in November” campaign, and were surprised when the GOP’s most powerful surrogate put out one piddling Truth about the race.
We won’t have the full turnout picture for a few days, but it’s clear that the Trump-era Democratic coalition simply stays more engaged in electoral politics than the GOP. Spanberger and Sherrill won more votes than any previous Democratic nominee for governor of their states.
The left, in New York, has also found that it can change the electorate. Mamdani’s campaign registered tens of thousands of new Democrats to support him in the primary and stop the Cuomo campaign.
Room for Disagreement
Republicans want the night, and the next year, to be about Mamdani. “Under Kathy Hochul’s weak catastrophic leadership, New York City has now fallen to a pro-Hamas, Defund the Police, Tax Hiking, Antisemite Jihadist Communist,” said Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., in what might be one of her last statements before launching a challenge to Hochul.
Every victorious Democrat ran on “affordability,” betting correctly that voters who trusted Trump to bring down prices this year would be angry that he hadn’t. But Stefanik blamed Hochul for the “historic affordability crisis,” and Republicans are ready to highlight any problems Mamdani has in lowering rents or raising taxes next year.