Copyright New York Magazine
The 2025 off-year elections were by any measure a top-to-bottom win for Democrats and a setback for Republicans and more particularly for Donald Trump. This last point is important to stress, since the president is trying to distance himself from the bad results on grounds that (a) he wasn’t on the ballot anywhere and (b) the GOP suffered from a government shutdown he had nothing to do with producing. On the first point, well, of course, Trump will never appear on a ballot again, barring some sort of coup, and on the second point, Trump’s personal domination of political discourse since he returned to the White House means every election reflects on his personality and job performance. The 2025 results reflect his job approval and disapproval numbers pretty faithfully. So he should own the L, not that it’s psychologically possible for him. The breadth of the Democratic gains in 2025, however, should cast doubt on the idea that it represented a triumph for any wing of the Democratic Party or any one formula for success. Spinners are gonna spin, and there will be those who argue that Zohran Mamdani and his loud-and-proud progressivism or Abigail Spanberger and her cautious centrism hold the keys to the kingdom for Democrats going forward. But the reality is more nuanced. Here’s what Tuesday’s elections mean for the 2026 midterms. . The Trump realignment myth should be buried After the 2024 election many excited Republicans and despondent Democrats came to believe that Donald Trump had created a fundamental realignment in American politics, breaking the rough parity the two major parties had experienced for most of the 21st century. His gains among young, Black, Asian-American, and especially Latino voters were indeed striking. But they show few if any signs of persisting beyond 2024. Arguably the promises Trump made about bringing down living costs and restoring the pre-pandemic economy have now led to buyer’s remorse across these demographic groups, with the breadth and cruelty of his mass deportation program adding to his losses among Latinos. The GOP coalition appears to be shrinking back towards its MAGA core of middle-aged culturally conservative non-college educated white voters (especially men), which is enough to win some elections in some places some of the time, but not any sort of enduring majority. Perhaps Trump is right that his name on the ballot has unique value for his party. But if so, that’s bad news for Republican performance in 2026 and in 2028. . Trump 2.0 is not playing well The 2025 results show that Trump’s audacious second-term agenda with its aggressive power grabs and a presidential cult of personality is not generally playing well. As his steadily declining job approval numbers show (he’s currently at a second-term low according to all the averages), nearly everything he is doing is relatively unpopular, and that’s particularly true of the economic policy indices that most visibly drive voting decisions. If he is right in claiming that the ongoing government shutdown is responsible for the 2025 results, he needs to recognize that Americans disproportionately hold him and his party responsible for the logjam and the resulting damage. His partisan overreach is a problem for Republicans as well. The overwhelming success of California’s Prop 50 authorizing a Democratic retaliation for Trump’s mid-decade gerrymandering campaign is eye-opening. And it’s also significant that Democratic legislators in Virginia announced their own surprise congressional redistricting initiative on the very eve of elections that boosted their majority in the state House by a startling degree. . The 2025 Democratic wave was national Democrats won the marquee 2025 races handily. In New York City Zohran Mamdani overcame a massive red scare emanating from the White House and financial circles to handily defeat Andrew Cuomo, a once-formidable Democrat operating as essentially a Trump surrogate. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill won a gubernatorial race thought to be very close by 13 points. In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger also over-performed polls and expectations, and the entire Democratic ticket (including embattled attorney general nominee Jay Jones) swept to victory along with the aforementioned legislative gains. And yes, the percentage of California voters backing Prop 50 exceeded Democratic performance in 2016, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2024. House Speaker Mike Johnson dismissed the results as “blue states and blue cities [voting] blue.” But the Democratic wave was evident all over the country, wherever voters voted, with the Democratic Party making state legislative gains in Mississippi; winning two statewide races in Georgia; defending three Supreme Court justices from a purge effort in Pennsylvania; and prevailing on key ballot initiatives in Maine. Local elections in various states trended blue as well. . It’s beginning to look a lot like the first Trump midterms Similar gains in 2017 preceded a successful 2018 midterm election in which Democrats flipped 41 U.S. House seats, seven governorships, and six state legislative chambers (they also lost two net U.S. Senate seats thanks to a particularly difficult landscape). The parallels are occurring to a lot of people, as Politico reports: “The mood music is the same soundtrack,” Ian Russell, a Democratic strategist who focuses on House races, said of the comparison to 2018. “A deeply unpopular president, the same one, and a lot of Americans are very concerned about key issues like health care costs spiking.” What’s arguably different is a pervasively sour mood in the electorate that has depressed the popularity of both major parties. But the party that currently controls the White House and both congressional chambers is more likely to bear the brunt of this era of bad feelings. . Democrats need two wings to fly There really is very little evidence that the ideological character of 2025 candidates made a lot of difference in Democratic performance. Comparing Mamdani and Sherrill, for example, the former posted astonishing percentages among young voters while the latter did better among Black, Latino, and Asian-American voters. Mamdani, of course, faced a renegade Democrat as his principal opponent while Sherrill opposed a MAGA conservative. Both focused on an “affordability” message, but varied significantly in the details. Everything that happened around the country indicated that Democrats succeeded by tailoring their messages to the circumstances of their own communities, within the broader context of resistance to Trump and his allies. There’s no 2026 “blueprint” beyond taking advantage of a referendum on an unpopular president who has failed to keep his promises. . Republicans will sink or swim with Trump The strategic dilemma facing Republicans in the wake of the 2025 elections is simple: they have completely ceded all authority to a president who seems incapable of changing his course or his conduct. It’s typical that his first reaction to last night’s setbacks was to demand that Senate Republicans kill the filibuster in order to end the government shutdown by crushing Democrats instead of negotiating with them. Perhaps his pollsters and his congressional allies can convince him that metal-to-the-pedal partisanship and policies that are especially unpopular among key constituencies won’t save the GOP trifecta in 2026, or that Republicans cannot gerrymander themselves to a House majority. But they have forfeited any opportunity to declare independence from their three-time nominee and full-time leader, and will likely spend more time and energy planning their post-Trump future than in influencing what he does in the last three years of his presidency.
