View / Why Democrats won so big, and how they might shake the ‘disarray’ label

After ending his mayoral campaign with a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, Zohran Mamdani got a question that no candidate can prepare for.

“Any response to President Trump saying he’s better-looking than you?” independent journalist Timmy Facciola asked on Monday.

Mamdani laughed and kept smiling. “My focus is on the cost-of-living crisis, bro,” he said.

Thirty-six hours later, Mamdani became mayor-elect with more than 1 million votes — the first time that has happened since before the Beatles broke up.

Democrats remain nervous about the implications of a Mamdani win for their lousy brand, and we still don’t know how Park Slope home-owner Chuck Schumer voted. But before Tuesday night, and a set of elections that went even better than Democrats had expected, Schumer’s party found a breezy answer for whether Mamdani helped or hurt them: He was focused on affordability, just like Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey.

They’ve quoted Eugene Debs less than Mamdani has, and they don’t want to slap handcuffs on Israel’s prime minister, but the trio have shared a focus on pocketbook issues.

Last week, when I asked about Republican plans to tie every candidate to Mamdani (something the Senate GOP campaign apparatus tried to do before dawn on Wednesday), DNC chair Ken Martin told me: “If that’s where they want to focus their energy, we’re going to be focusing our energy on the fact that the Republicans and Donald Trump haven’t done anything to improve people’s lives.”

In fact, as electric as Mamdani can be on the stump, he responded to a juicy question about confronting the president with a stock answer that supports this new Democratic depiction of his economic message: They could talk if Trump would “actually deliver on the campaign he ran to deliver cheaper groceries and a lower cost of living.”

Sherrill and Spanberger were seen until 8 pm last night as cautious, sometimes dull campaigners who refused to follow the news cycle, but they did hammer a similar point. And they won by landslides.

The scale of the GOP defeat — though it only shifts power in a couple of states — is already changing how both parties view the electorate. Here are three big conclusions:

Republicans had weaker turnout.

In every election this year, Democrats had a simpler time finding and mobilizing their voters than Republicans. The pattern isn’t new: Their coalition is more highly-educated and higher-earning than it used to be, and thus is easier to activate.

Even last year, at his apex, Trump got tens of thousands of swing-state votes from people who ignored the rest of their ballots. A lot of those voters just won’t show up for non-Trump candidates.

New Jersey’s Jack Ciattarelli told me in June that Trump had gotten hundreds of thousands more votes than Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy ever did. If he turned most of them out, his thinking was, he’d win.

And Ciattarelli did turn out most of them, while he lost. Ciattarelli got 70% of the 2024 Trump vote and more raw votes than any Republican nominee for the job since the 1960s. But Sherrill got 81% of the 2024 vote for Kamala Harris, and more votes overall than any previous candidate for governor.

In Virginia, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears got the same share of the Trump vote: 70%. But Spanberger ran even stronger than Sherrill, hitting 84% of Harris’ vote total.

Some of that was persuasion. According to exit polls, both Sherrill and Spanberger won 7% of voters who recalled supporting Trump last year. But after nearly a decade of trying, Republicans haven’t figured out a way to convert new MAGA voters into people who turn out reliably.

In Pennsylvania, where Republicans didn’t come close to unseating three liberal state Supreme Court justices, their “no” campaign ran 2 million votes behind Trump.

Trump’s 2024 coalition has scattered.

The most recent MAGA converts were least likely to vote Republican this year. That was clearest in New Jersey, where Ciattarelli campaigned hard for Latino and Asian voters who swung right last year in Passaic and Hudson counties.

His campaign bus was even wrapped with a photo from a rally in North Bergen, where nearly three-quarters of voters are Hispanic.

But Sherrill reversed Trump’s gains. She swept both of those counties and, per the exit poll, won 77% of nonwhite voters. Spanberger did even better, with 82% of the nonwhite vote, including 92% of Black voters. Earle-Sears, the first Black female nominee of either party, had less appeal with those voters than Trump did.

Both Republicans also failed to build on Trump’s numbers with rural white voters. Southwest Virginia stayed deep red, but Spanberger made a point of campaigning in areas Democrats never won anymore, and she cut the margins almost everywhere.

This all matters for redistricting and House races next year; Republicans are targeting Passaic County Rep. Nellie Pou next year, after Trump eked out a win in her district, but Sherrill won it by a landslide.

GOP issues didn’t work.

The first sign that Republicans were cratering last night was Jay Jones’ resilience in the race for attorney general of Virginia.

Jones spent the final month battered by a text message scandal that incumbent Republican Jason Miyares made the focus of his campaign. (One of the oddest jobs any Republican had this year: posting a screenshot of Jones’ murder-curious texts as the first reply to any Jones post.)

Crucially, no Democrat un-endorsed Jones over the violent texts. But Republicans hoped enough Democrats would be repelled by it for Miyares to overcome Earle-Sears’ weakness.

There was a drop-off. More than 36,000 voters skipped the race, and more than 13,000 wrote someone’s name in rather than choose Jones or Miyares. But Jones ran stronger statewide than Harris did last year. Republican hopes of branding Democrats as unhinged and violent didn’t pan out; voters prioritized the party over anything one candidate had done.

Other Republicans, who hammered Democrats over their support for inclusive transgender policies in schools, found that the issue didn’t work like it had against Harris. A more potent topic: data center construction. In a DC suburban state legislative district, Democrat John McAuliff’s campaign ads promising to fight more data centers pushed him to a narrow upset of a GOP delegate.

Where did Republicans win? They held their major offices in Nassau County, where Long Island voters heard every day about what Mamdani might do to New York. The mayor of Manchester, New Hampshire, got reelected; so did the mayor of Columbia, South Carolina.

Incumbents with their own brands and records held on; weaker Republicans who needed MAGA voters to win were turfed out.