David’s view
When now-New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill’s strategists tested her campaign messaging, they saw a major opportunity with a valuable bloc of swing voters: backers of outgoing Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy in 2021 who had moved to Donald Trump’s camp in 2024.
Republicans saw potential there for Jack Ciattarelli, their gubernatorial nominee in 2021 and 2025, who embraced the president and dreamed of bringing DOGE to New Jersey. But Democrats’ research showed that none of that was clicking.
“There was already this sense that Trump wasn’t doing what he said he was going to do,” said Angela Kuefler, a campaign pollster who has worked with both Sherrill and Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger since they entered politics.
Swing voters were telling Democrats that “their costs were still really high,” she added. “This isn’t why they voted for him. They were saying: ‘We took a chance on Trump, and it didn’t work.’”
The messy end of the government shutdown has darkened Democrats’ moods, just days after their wins in the off-year elections. But those victories have pointed them to a big lesson, one that may work no matter who they nominate.
The lesson is this: Not only is it effective to run against the Trump administration in 2025 (and, likely, 2026), but Republicans often make that easier by refusing to put any daylight between their candidates and the president. In both New Jersey and Virginia, Democrats were ready to adjust if GOP nominees criticized Trump’s threats to infrastructure funding or federal worker layoffs. Instead, those Republicans stuck with the White House.
Democrats are already applying that lesson in New York, where Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik launched her gubernatorial bid last week. Her campaign video made no mention of Trump, whom she has supported vocally since his first impeachment in 2019.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s campaign, which has hired veterans of the Sherrill race, quickly cut together clips of Stefanik praising Trump, warning that she’d focus on supporting him instead of cutting costs.
“Voters don’t think back to what Republicans were before Trump,” said Kuefler. “They now see all Republicans as MAGA Republicans. Jack [Ciattarelli] did a lot of damage to himself. But he was also a victim of where his party had shifted.”
Republicans have downplayed Tuesday’s losses as Democratic home games in blue states that had never supported Trump anyway. But Tuesday was the first time that Trump’s party has had to face voters nervous about the economy without him on the ballot. (Even in 2020, voters were more optimistic about Trump leading a pandemic-era comeback than Democrats wanted to believe.)
From 2017 through 2019, voters in competitive races largely trusted Trump’s handling of the economy. If they rejected his party, they did so for other reasons — like threats to their health care plans and queasiness about deportations. The economy was his strongest suit.
That has changed, even as Republicans insist that it hasn’t. Democrats are getting bolder about the implications of both the reality and the spin.
In this article:
Know More
A test case for that boldness is taking shape in Omaha, Nebraska, where the Democratic Party has never managed to convince voters that retiring GOP Rep. Don Bacon was a reliable MAGA vote. Bacon is still one of the few Republican lawmakers willing to openly criticize the president.
So Democrats are bullish on taking back Bacon’s city-based 2nd Congressional District next year — and not just because it backed Kamala Harris by five points last year. They’re betting that the MAGA voters who made Bacon fight for his nomination will pick a more pro-Trump successor.
State Sen. John Cavanaugh, a Democrat running for the open seat, told Semafor in an interview at his campaign office that “people are very hungry for a Congress that is asserting itself and engaging in oversight and stopping the conduct of Trump — and also, hungry for a Congress that is focused on lowering their costs.”
Statewide, Cavanaugh’s party is likely to support independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn next year against incumbent Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts. Osborn outperformed most Democratic challengers in 2024, running 7.5 points ahead of Harris and more strongly with independents.
“I don’t know that Ricketts can even think for himself. He just basically reposts the same things that Trump does,” Osborn said.
Republicans plan to run the same play against Osborn that they would against any Democrat. Osborn skipped the Nebraska state party’s fundraising dinner on Friday, and the GOP sent a billboard truck anyway — displaying Osborn, Maine Democrat Graham Platner, and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani as “the future of the Democratic Party.”
It was a reminder that every out-of-power party has its problems. But this time, there’s virtually no Republican brand — and no Republican agenda — that isn’t based on Trump.
The media can’t change that brand or agenda, as Fox News has found in the days since the off-year election. When it became clear that the Democrats’ “affordability” focus worked for them, the network’s personalities tried to explain how Trump could take the issue back.
In an interview with Laura Ingraham, the president argued he didn’t need to.
“I think polls are fake,” Trump said, when asked about cost-of-living concerns. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”
The comment was tailor-made for an ad. In fact, the GOP’s most effective ad of 2024 warned that Harris was focused on helping transgender prisoners instead of average voters. Democrats still bristle at the tagline: “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
You can already hear Democrats’ comeback against Republicans who can’t distance themselves from Trump without antagonizing the president. “They’re for him; we are for you.”
Room for Disagreement
Despite Osborn’s readiness to tie Ricketts to Trump, Osborn didn’t exactly sound like he’d run the same message as Cavanaugh, or as the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial candidates.
“I’m not running against Trump. I’m running against a Ricketts rubber stamp, catering to the billionaire class,” he told Semafor.
Notable
- In ProPublica, Rob Davis looks at one information problem for Trump: He is getting repetitive news that doesn’t cover any of his current political risks.
- In The Wall Street Journal, Rahm Emanuel suggests that Democrats can run their 2006 playbook again by combining populism with anti-corruption campaigns.
- In Politico, Alec Hernandez and Adam Wren go through a memo from Sherrill’s team with advice on how Democrats can copy her.
- In her memoir, Harris lamented that she did not come up with an effective reply to the “she’s for they/them” slogan quickly enough. “The pronoun that matters is ‘we.’ We the people. And that’s who I am for.”