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America gave Donald Trump a bloody nose.
On the first big election night since Trump swept back into power, the results were better than Democrats could have dared hope.
Zohran Mamdani stormed to a convincing victory over the Trump-endorsed Andrew Cuomo in the race for mayor of New York, America’s biggest city.
Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger won the governors’ races in New Jersey and Virginia by double digit percentages, far outpacing Kamala Harris’s performance against Trump a year ago this week. It marks the first time that Democrats have won three consecutive gubernatorial elections in New Jersey since 1961.
The blue wave kept coming. California voters approved new congressional district boundaries as Democrats seek to fight back against Republican redistricting efforts ahead of next year’s battle for the House of Representatives.
Democrats retained three crucial seats on the Pennsylvania supreme court. In the Virginia state legislature, House Democrats flipped 13 seats for their biggest majority in nearly 40 years. “Tonight was an earthquake election in Virginia,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
The results were in part a referendum on Trump, whose approval rating has never been lower. His authoritarian grandstanding is a show of weakness rather than strength. From ICE raids and tariffs to his $300m White House ballroom, his presidency is deeply unpopular. Are you better off than you were a year ago? Voters said no.
Tuesday’s elections also demonstrated that when Trump is not on the ballot – but his record is – voters do not turn out for him. Republicans such as Winsome Earle-Sears of Virginia, who tried to copy Trump’s anti-trans attacks on her opponent, found to her cost that the president is inimitable.
Democrats will savour it as the night they got back in business. It has been a thoroughly miserable year for a leaderless party struggling to outmanoeuvre a man who constantly throws the chessboard in the air. Morale has been at rock bottom. The party has been missing in action.
But while losing elections is bad, misreading the results can be worse. When Democrats narrowly lost the House of Representatives in 2022 but outperformed expectations, they took it as a sign that all was well with the status quo. Instead of challenging Joe Biden, they let him run for a second presidential term and paid the price.
Democrats would do well not to over-interpret Tuesday’s blowout. The party locked out of power always tends to be energised. Trump lost New Jersey and Virginia three times. In New York, Mamdani could not have chosen a more beatable opponent than the scandal-plagued Cuomo. In Virginia, Earle-Sears was no Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who skilfully kept Trump at arm’s length without alienating him four years ago.
And although Democrats have done well in special elections all year, the party’s brand is still under water. In July its approval rating hit a 30-year-low. Last week a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos opinion poll found that 68% of Americans think Democrats are out of touch – more than the 63% who see Trump in the same way.
These are mixed signals to the party as it seeks a path out of the wilderness. Was 2024 a cataclysmic shift that requires a total overhaul of the party, or a coin-toss defeat for a flawed candidate who had only 107 days to campaign? Do Democrats have to reinvent the wheel or merely pump fresh air into the tyre?
Tuesday alone was never going to solve the riddle. In New York the charismatic Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, electrified young progressives to become the city’s first Muslim mayor and give the left one of its biggest victories in years. But in New Jersey and Virginia it was Sherrill and Spanberger, two don’t-frighten-the-horses centrists with national security credentials, who prevailed.
Progressives and moderates were both given fodder to make a case that they have the antidote to Trumpism. The reality, of course, in a wildly diverse country of 50 states and 340 million people, is not one or the other, but all of the above. The maxim that all politics is local has taken a beating in recent years, but is not entirely dead.
The Democratic party is a glorious melee of different constituencies and viewpoints in contrast to the brittle monoculture of the Trump cult. What unites it ahead of next year’s midterms is a desire for fighters rather than folders and for a relentless focus on the affordability crisis even as the president flaunts power and wealth.
Asked whether Mamdani or Spanberger is the future of the party, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told the MSNBC network: “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. 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.”
And for the White House in 2028? That’s another story.
