What to make of the Democrats' big election victories this week? Historic Republican losses in down-ballot contests overshadowed the expected Democratic wins in New York City, as well as the New Jersey and Virginia governors' races.
"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," reports Politico.
In Georgia, two Democrats won non-federal statewide offices on the state's five-person public utility regulator. They are the first Democrats to win any statewide office in Georgia since 2006.
In Mississippi, Democrats broke a GOP supermajority in the state Senate after flipping two seats, plus they got another pickup in the state House. (Mississippi?!)
In addition to gaining the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, the Democrats walloped the Republicans in capturing 12 additional House of Delegates seats in Virginia, increasing their majority from 51 to 64, and in New Jersey's General Assembly, the Democrats gained a supermajority.
If Republicans are going to continue to tell themselves that the election wasn't all about Trump, that everything is fine, and they have nothing to worry about, they will get slaughtered in 2026.
Those gains by Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia were made at the expense of Republicans in Republican-majority districts. It was actually worse in other down-ballot races.
In many local races across the country, Democrats touted victories that will reshape their communities, like the flipping of all three city council seats in Georgetown, S.C., the unseating of the last remaining Republican city council member in Orlando, Fla., and winning back mayoral races in Connecticut.
For the first time in a half-century, Democrats control the Onondaga County legislature that includes Syracuse, N.Y. Democrats saw a city council seat in Charlotte, N.C., switch parties for the first time since 1999.
Democrats across the ideological spectrum won, too. Beyond Mamdani's victory in New York City, the Democratic Socialists of America touted municipal wins for members in Detroit, Atlanta and Cambridge, Mass., among others.
As bad as it was for Republicans this week, we can count on Democrats to blow it and come back to Earth by the 2026 midterm elections. The systemic and structural problems bedeviling the Democrats, which led to their 2024 debacle, have not gone away and, in some ways, have gotten worse.
First of all, as Roy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute points out in a very good analysis in The Free Press, "The historical record does not suggest these off-year elections are much of a guide to anything." A drowning man will grasp at anything to save himself, so the Democrats' becoming giddy with excitement over the election results is part of the mirage about the true nature of their party's troubles.
They are still historically unpopular. Polls show the Democrats' favorability hovering in the 33% range, with a RealClearPolitics polling spread of 24 points between favorable and unfavorable. (Republicans are at 40% favorable with a spread of about 11%.)
The election didn't change that. As Teixeira notes, the biggest danger the Democrats face is in reading far too much into these results and doubling down on their radical agenda.
The Free Press:
After this week, the risk is that the party uses a few good results in a few states as permission to memory-hole last year’s disastrous performance—and skirt the awkward conversation about why they lost so badly. Democrats cannot let themselves off the hook for the many ways over many years they have alienated working-class voters; Tuesday’s results are, at best, no more than a down payment on fixing that problem.
But these elections do demonstrate once again that the Democrats’ coalition, tilted as it is toward educated, engaged voters, is likely to over-perform in non-presidential elections where its coalition’s turnout advantage is at its largest. The scale of Abigail Spanberger’s and Mikie Sherrill’s victories in Virginia and New Jersey respectively show that their coalition’s advantage in lower-turnout elections is alive and well, but does not eliminate their disadvantage in higher-turnout elections. As the subhead of an article on the results in liberal Substack The Argument candidly puts it: “When nobody votes, Democrats win.” (author emphasis)
The New York Times’ Nate Cohn noted: “Tuesday’s [elections] were decided by the kind of highly engaged, lower-turnout electorates that have repeatedly backed Democrats in recent years,” and “The relatively disengaged and disaffected voters who propelled Mr. Trump’s victory probably sat this one out.”
Yes, the GOP got clobbered. However, the turnout in many states and localities was between 20% and 25% (New York City was the exception with the highest turnout for a mayoral election since 1968); these off-year elections have, in most instances, belonged to Democrats.
Related: Mamdani's Election Is Not As Significant As We Think
Another indicator of unsolved problems for the Democrats in Tuesday’s results is the persistent class gap in support. Democrats now do far better among college-educated voters than among working-class (noncollege) voters, and this election was no exception. Indeed, comparing the 2024 and 2025 elections in Virginia and New Jersey using preliminary results indicates what drove Democrats’ over-performance in 2025 relative to 2024 (both Spanberger and Sherrill ran ahead of Harris): a larger class gap in both states (especially New Jersey) driven by stronger performance among college-educated voters relative to Harris in 2024; and a larger share of college voters in both states (especially Virginia) relative to 2024.
The GOP's problems are not going to fix themselves. Republicans in Congress have to maximize their majorities and pass significant reform measures while trying to get the budget under some semblance of control.
Trump has to do a better job explaining his economic policies and lean on Congress to pass them. Was the GOP too complacent in the lead-up to Nov. 4? If they were, the results should have shocked them back to reality.
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