The elections on Tuesday hardly seem to be top of mind for President Trump.
He has spent the last week crisscrossing Asia, talking trade, nuclear weapons and rare earths, and is headed to Florida this weekend. He has not appeared in person in any of the major states hosting elections, like New Jersey or California, to pump up his party’s candidate or cause. In Virginia, where a weak Republican candidate for governor is lagging behind an impervious-looking Democrat, he’s offered only a tepid endorsement late in the campaign.
(This has not, of course, stopped Democrats from talking about him, either in California, where they are fighting to pass a ballot measure that could give them five more safe House seats, or anywhere else.)
None of this is unusual for a president in an off-year. But the contests — particularly the governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia — are essentially the opening salvos of the midterm elections. And even if Trump has relatively little to say about them, the results will offer signals about his political strength and his party’s strength more broadly, as it considers ways to keep his supporters in the fold when he is barred from once again topping the ticket.
“Will those Trump voters become Republican voters?” asked Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who worked on Chris Christie’s successful off-year campaigns for New Jersey governor in 2009 and 2013. “Do they think any other race, other than presidential, is important enough to come out for?”
Here are three story lines that show how even elections that aren’t directly about Trump can’t help but be a little Trumpy.
Can a candidate win a blue state by sounding like Trump?
When Jack Ciattarelli, a former state lawmaker and a Republican, first ran for governor of New Jersey in 2017, he cut a wonky profile and occasionally criticized Trump, who he knew repulsed swing voters.
Fast forward eight years — and a second unsuccessful run for governor in 2021 — and you have a candidate who has fundamentally shifted his approach, my colleague Nick Corasaniti wrote in a perceptive profile. Ciattarelli doesn’t talk so much about Trump. But he talks like him, decrying “open borders” and appearing with vaccine skeptics and far-right Trump-backers like Jack Posobiec. Nick wrote:
Such an approach amounts to a bet not yet tested in a competitive election since Mr. Trump’s return to power last year: that the margins in a close race can be made up by tacking closer to the Republican base in a general election, and that Trump supporters will turn out even without Mr. Trump atop the ticket.
It’s a departure from the timeworn tactic of playing to the middle, and if it works in a blue state, it will say a lot about the staying power of Trump’s political style.
Will Trump’s 2024 coalition stick around?
Ciattarelli’s decision to tack so close to Trump reflects the president’s performance there in 2024, when he lost to former Vice President Kamala Harris by less than six percentage points, but showed remarkable strength in the state’s most diverse areas. Every single majority-Hispanic township in the state swung Trump’s way between 2020 and 2024, by 25 percentage points on average.
That, Shane Goldmacher and Christine Zhang wrote, makes Tuesday’s results in New Jersey an early test of whether that movement was “evidence of a durable political and racial realignment or a passing phenomenon specific to Mr. Trump.”
“New Jersey ends up being the first meaningful temperature check since the last election,” said Carlos Odio, a Democratic pollster who specializes in studying Latino voting patterns and lives in New Jersey.
Ciattarelli appears to understand precisely what’s at stake, campaigning frequently in Black and Latino areas that were once considered safe Democratic turf.
What about the one race Trump can’t quite quit?
There is no chance that a Republican is going to win New York City’s mayor’s race. But that hasn’t kept Trump entirely away from the contest to govern his hometown.
He mulled getting involved to stop Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, from winning. He spoke directly with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the Democrat and former Trump foil now running as an independent, about the race. His advisers discussed giving Mayor Eric Adams, the embattled Democratic incumbent, an administration job in exchange for dropping out (Adams eventually did drop out, sans job offer).
None of that has stopped the rise of Mamdani, a democratic socialist, but Trump has tried one more tactic: threatening the city with major cuts to federal funding if Mamdani is elected.
Trump seems unlikely to change the outcome of the race. But the question for New York is how, if Mamdani is elected, the president might flex his power to shape the city itself.
POSTCARD FROM SACRAMENTO
… and what Tuesday means for Gavin Newsom
Polls suggest that California voters are likely to pass Gov. Gavin Newsom’s redistricting measure on Tuesday, a win that could help Democrats flip five House seats next year — and that could pay political dividends for Newsom, too. My colleague Laurel Rosenhall, who covers California government, explains.
The ballot measure was framed as a way to fight President Trump’s mid-decade redistricting push with fire. But it could also serve as a foundation for a 2028 presidential campaign for Newsom himself.
Over the course of the campaign, Newsom expanded a national list of supporters that helped him raise an astonishing $114 million in less than three months. The haul from small donations is especially notable, with $38 million from people across the country who responded to email and text message appeals.
Their contact information is on a list Newsom has been methodically building since his earliest days in politics. More than 25 years ago, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Newsom began collecting emails for a bond measure to fund San Francisco parks. Since then, he told me he’s been disciplined about expanding and maintaining the list that he calls “the most valuable asset” of his political career.
Newsom leveraged that asset to turn a state level redistricting measure into an attention-grabbing national campaign. And that’s a platform he can draw on again in 2028, if he wants to.
More on redistricting
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Proponents for California’s new redistricting measure say voters are motivated by stopping Trump.
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The Virginia legislature took the first step to redrawing Congressional maps to benefit Democrats in 2026.
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Ohio is now the latest Republican-led state to redraw its congressional map to benefit the G.O.P.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Leader Thune’s position on the importance of the legislative filibuster is unchanged.”
That’s what a spokesman for John Thune, the Senate majority leader, told my colleague Carl Hulse on Friday, shutting down a demand from President Trump to dispose of the filibuster in order to end the government shut down.
On Thursday, Trump took to Truth Social to call for Senate Republicans to “go for what is called the Nuclear Option.”
“Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” he wrote.
Thune has weakened the filibuster, but he and other Senior Republicans fear that getting rid of it entirely would spectacularly backfire if Democrats regained control of the Senate.
More on Senate Republicans:
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Senators opposed the president’s plan to import Argentine beef and voted three times this week to end his power to enforce sweeping tariffs, indicating growing Republican angst over Trump’s trade agenda.
The Moment
Ready for a surprise
It was the end of President Trump’s five-day visit to three countries in Asia — a tour packed with extravagant welcome dinners, an aircraft rally and the gift of a replica gold crown — and The New York Times’s photographer Haiyun Jiang thought she was done for the day.
She had already photographed Trump and Xi Jinping of China shaking hands, and watched them recede into the bilateral meeting the whole trip had built up to. She and the other photographers had been told they wouldn’t see the two men together again.
But, about 90 minutes into Trump and Xi’s meeting, the media was told that the plan had changed, and the two men were coming out once more — together. That’s when Haiyun took this photo showing Trump whispering some final words to a smiling Xi, as the men in his delegation solemnly looked on.
Haiyun keeps cameras on her all the time in the event of surprises like this. That happened earlier on the trip, too, when Air Force One flew from Tokyo to Busan, and the captain told the passengers that they would soon be able to see a spectacular view of Mt. Fuji.
Haiyun, of course, had two cameras at hand, slung over the seat in front of her, poised to capture the unexpected.
Laurel Rosenhall, Taylor Robinson and Ama Sarpomaa contributed reporting.
Jess Bidgood is a managing correspondent for The Times and writes the On Politics newsletter, a guide to how President Trump is changing Washington, the country and its politics.
The post What Tuesday’s Elections Might Tell Us About Trump appeared first on New York Times.
