Copyright huffingtonpost
President Donald Trump tried to stay out of the 2025 elections, the first major test of public opinion since he took office for a second time. He did not hold any of his famous rallies in any of the contested states. He did not even endorse the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia. He directly intervened in the New York City mayor’s race, but only the night before election day. Still, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that Trump is one of the major losers of Tuesday night’s contests. His preferred candidates in big races uniformly lost. The young and Latino voters he added to the Republican coalition in 2024 were either voting for Democrats or staying home. And all signs point toward Democrats having an incredibly strong chance to win a House majority in 2026, a result the president is already working desperately to stop. Trump himself is obviously not accepting such a conclusion: “‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters,” he wrote on his Truth Social page shortly after 10 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. Which pollsters? Unclear. “Donald Trump is a historic president,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom, the primary force behind a redistricting measure his state overwhelmingly approved and which dealt a direct blow to Republican chances of holding the House. “He is the most historically unpopular president in modern history.” It remains to be seen whether Tuesday night’s shellacking will do much to alter the Republican strategy for the midterms, which centres around tightly hugging Trump. Two of the party’s operatives, requesting anonymity to speak frankly, admitted they were concerned about swing-district members considering retirement following the party’s poor performance. The night also provided a vivid display of Trump’s unpopularity, which could help encourage both Republicans and other societal leaders in business, law and academia to break more frequently with the president and his authoritarian impulses. “Lame duck status is going to come even faster now,” Erick Erickson, the popular conservative blogger and radio host, wrote on social media. “Trump cannot turn out the vote unless he is on the ballot, and that is never happening again.” The night’s big winners were direct about how they differ from the unpopular president. “Here in New Jersey, we know that this nation has not ever been, nor will it ever be ruled by kings,” Representative Mikie Sherrill, the winner of the New Jersey governor’s race, said in her victory speech. “We take oaths to a constitution, not a king.” “We can respond to oligarchy and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves,” state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani said after his victory in New York City’s mayoral race. “After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him.” “In 2025, Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship. You all chose leadership that will focus relentlessly on what matters most,” Abigail Spanberger said after winning the election to become the state’s first female governor. “Leadership that will focus on problem-solving, not stoking division.” The backlash was universal. In Virginia, 59% of the electorate said cuts to the federal government had affected their finances, and two-thirds of those voters backed Spanberger, who is on pace to win by 14 percentage points, the largest victory for a Democrat in a Virginia governor’s race in decades. A full 37% of the electorate said they cast a ballot to oppose Trump, with 99% of them voting for Spanberger. Trump’s statement blamed these results on the ongoing government shutdown, which he has done little to end and much to exacerbate. But it’s difficult to untangle anger over the shutdown with anger over DOGE, when Trump fully empowered billionaire mega-donor and tech magnate Elon Musk to gut huge portions of the government and lay off workers en masse. Republican gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears never earned Trump’s endorsement, but also could never bring herself to break with Trump over the havoc he was causing for her state’s many, many federal employees. Spanberger’s victory was large enough to carry Jay Jones, the party’s scandal-plagued candidate for attorney general, over the finish line. Exit polls showed 43% of voters thought Jones’ text messages in which he joked about political violence were “disqualifying,” while another 26% said they were “concerning.” Jones still managed to win 9% of voters in the first camp and 85% of voters in the second, likely because they couldn’t stomach voting for a MAGA loyalist like Miyares. Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of the progressive canvassing group Swing Left, said her group saw no choice but to stand by Jones. He can help Democrats with a redistricting effort that would add more Democratic seats to the statehouse and contribute to the ranks of attorneys general suing the Trump administration on a regular basis. “The stakes of this moment require us to be ruthlessly pragmatic about doing whatever it takes to secure Democratic wins in the tipping point races that will materially impact people’s lives,” Radjy said. But the most worrying results for Trump in Virginia were further down the ballot: The party seems likely to secure a majority of 62 seats or more in the state’s House of Delegates, including claiming seats Trump had won by five percentage points or more in 2024. Party operatives had kept expectations low, saying they hoped to win just 55 seats. These races on Trump-won territory more closely mirror the races Democrats, despite their battered brand, will have to triumph in to win back control of the House than the higher-profile contests in Virginia, New Jersey or New York. “Trump made life harder and more expensive so we know voters want to fire Republicans,” said Jesse Ferguson, a veteran Democratic strategist. “These elections prove voters will actually hire Democrats when we genuinely make it about their lives. This is the way.” The Trump White House has made retaining the House its top priority for 2026, going so far as to launch a still-ongoing redistricting war by pushing red states to redraw their congressional lines and knock out Democratic members of the House. But that plan received several blows on Tuesday night — Kansas Republicans dropped their effort to draw out Rep. Sharice Davids, California voters approved Proposition 50 and Virginia voters cleared the way for a referendum on new maps in the Old Dominion, which could eliminate two or three GOP-held seats. In both Virginia and New Jersey, exit polls and municipal-level results indicated that Trump’s 2024 coalition was fraying. Trump made major gains last year in places like Manassas Park, a Northern Virginia city that is 46% Latino. Kamala Harris won it by just 20 points then, while Spanberger won it by 42 points. New Jersey has a similar story: Hudson County, just outside of New York City, is 40% Latino. Trump made significant gains, and Harris won it by 28 percentage points. Sherill is winning by 49 percentage points, with more votes yet to be counted. Exit polls show the pattern repeating with young voters. Both Sherill and Spanberger won men aged 18-29 after a year’s worth of Democratic fretting over their standing with the group, while Zohran Mamdani won young men by a 68% to 26% margin over Andrew Cuomo, the Trump-endorsed former governor of New York. John Della Volpe, a pollster at the Harvard Institute of Politics who studies youth voters, said Tuesday’s results did not show a permanent snap back to Democrats for young men, though. “Gen Z remains the most progressive generation in America ― but young men are the most politically fluid,” he wrote on social media. “Young women are driving the Dem advantage, but young men are deciding whether that advantage lasts.” Lower-profile races also saw victories. Democrats took two seats on Georgia’s Public Service Commission by massive 24-point margins; easily held three seats on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court and were also making significant gains in downballot races there; and defended the party’s state Senate majority in Minnesota while breaking a GOP supermajority in Mississippi. Democrats’ sweep also meant, at least for one night, the party’s factional debates were largely buried as three leading candidates with similar messaging mixing an emphasis on lowering the cost of living with opposition to Trump all triumphed easily. “At the end of the day, I don’t think that our party needs to have one face. Our country does not have one face,” Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told MSNOW as the results rolled in. “It’s about all of us as a team together, and we all understand the assignment. Our assignment everywhere is to send the strongest fighters for the working class wherever possible. In some places, like Virginia, for the gubernatorial seat, that’s going to look like Abigail Spanberger. In New York City, unequivocally, it is Zohran Mamdani.”
