Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey stood in front of a train station in a downpour last week, lamenting the demise of a Hudson River rail tunnel after President Trump said he “terminated” federal funding for it.
Four hours south, in a suburban Mexican restaurant, former Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia delivered a stump speech entirely devoted to her plans to fight the Trump administration.
Neither woman is technically running against the president in their races for governor. But they might as well be.
“There’s only one thing he seems to care about, and that is making sure he never gets crosswise with Donald Trump,” Ms. Sherrill told the small crowd of supporters and commuters about her opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, a Republican whom she has labeled the “Trump of Trenton.”
“That’s not who I am going to serve as your governor,” she added.
In 2018, Ms. Spanberger and Ms. Sherrill rode a wave of anti-Trump energy to win Republican districts and political stardom. Both campaigned then as moderate moms with national security backgrounds.
That center-left strategy — and the educated, suburban political coalition it activated — became a model for Democrats in the elections that followed in 2020 and 2022.
Now, with Mr. Trump back in the White House, the two women are positioning themselves as the second coming of Democratic opposition, hoping to once again ride a crest of liberal anger toward the president to power.
Less than a year after a presidential election that sent Democrats into the political wilderness, Ms. Spanberger and Ms. Sherrill are testing whether that old strategy still works for a party scarred by its 2024 defeat.
Amid months of tortured political soul searching, other Democrats have tried to address their party’s failings with new strategies.
In New York City, Zohran Mamdani, the front-runner for mayor, powered a come-from-behind campaign with bold progressive promises, social media prowess and a fiercely liberal message that promises to upend the party establishment. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has abandoned the party’s longstanding preference for abiding by political norms to champion an extraordinary effort to approve a new congressional map, pushing back on similar Republican moves and trying to maximize Democratic power.
But in New Jersey and Virginia, Ms. Spanberger and Ms Sherrill have decided to stick with reruns rather than pilot new programming.
“Amid all of the chaos coming out of Washington and all of this unsteadiness that is hurting so many of our communities, we are going to elect a governor who will stand up for Virginia,” Ms. Spanberger told the crowd packed into the Mexican restaurant on an affluent stretch of suburban Alexandria’s Del Ray neighborhood.
Longtime roommates in Washington and close friends, Ms. Spanberger and Ms. Sherrill have taken similar approaches in their campaigns for governor.
As in 2018, both have structured their races as referendums on Washington, casting their opponents as lackeys to a powerful president and promising to fight Mr. Trump’s agenda on issues from tariffs to abortion rights. National Democrats have positioned the races as the first opportunity for their powerless party to mount a comeback.
“You’ve got the DOGE cuts, federal contractors getting fired and layoffs and the government shutdown, plus all the other insanity of the Trump administration,” said former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia. “This is as good as it gets to be on the ballot as a Democrat.”
Ms. Sherrill sees similarities between her race for governor and her initial run for Congress. Many of the issues that are a focus of her effort — taxes, health care and the commuter rail tunnel — are the same (though there also new topics, like rising costs from tariffs and high electricity prices.)
But Mr. Trump’s total control over the Republican Party pushed Mr. Ciattarelli, who was endorsed by the president, to embrace elements of the president’s agenda and shifted the tone of Ms. Sherrill’s campaign away from talk of bipartisanship.
During her first campaign, Ms. Sherrill said in an interview, “there were still credible people in the Republican Party, and you were able to really make your argument and then bring a bipartisan coalition of people together around issues.”
This time, she said: “It’s been more hard hitting.”
Views of her own party have changed, too. Just 30 percent voters said they had a favorable view of Democrats in a Quinnipiac University survey this fall, compared to nearly half who said the same in a poll conducted by CNN in October 2018.
“That experience in 2018 of flipping districts, like we all did, was really the formative experience,” said Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat who also won his seat in 2018 and remains close with both Ms. Spanberger and Ms. Sherrill. Now, he says, “There is discontent with the Democratic Party and there’s discontent with some of the political leadership and people are wanting and demanding more.”
While both Ms. Spanberger and Ms. Sherrill have a record of bucking their own party leadership at times, neither woman is leading the conversation over the future of the Democratic Party.
That’s a discussion better left to the many Democrats already eyeing what’s widely expected to be a crowded presidential primary field in 2028, said Dan Sena, a Democratic strategist who oversaw the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s strategy to win the House in 2018.
“For a governor, I’m not sure you want a firebrand in this day and age — you want a steady hand to guide the values that matter most to your state,” said Mr. Sena, who is working for a super PAC supporting Ms. Sherrill. “There is still great power in candidates who have records of service and are independent minded.”
But, some Democrats warn, the party’s seven-year-old strategy of focusing on rejecting the president may eventually run its course.
“2028 could be a totally different animal,” Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona said after speaking at Ms. Spanberger’s Virginia stop Thursday afternoon.
New Jersey and Virginia are the only states that elect governors in the year after a presidential race, a position that frequently transforms their contests into a quadrennial check on an administration’s first year in office and has sometimes catapulted the victors into national figures.
Mr. Trump, who still motivates the Democratic base like no other political figure, is an irresistible target for Democrats. Polling shows that 56 percent of likely voters in New Jersey and 57 percent in Virginia disapprove of the way he is handling his job as president.
“The boogeyman is Trump,” said Mo Butler, a Democratic political consultant and a former chief of staff to Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. “It’s very difficult for a Democratic candidate — especially statewide in this environment when Trump is president — it’s very difficult for them not to run that sort of campaign.”
Ms. Spanberger’s stump speech in the closing days of her campaign touched on the main points of Trump grievance for Democrats: the sprawling cuts to the federal work force — an issue particularly acute in Virginia — the president’s erratic tariff and trade policy, cuts to health care spending and aggressive immigration enforcement and deportations.
Those campaigning for her were more direct.
“What is happening is not OK,” Alfonso Lopez, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, told the crowd in Alexandria.
It is helpful for Ms. Spanberger to have drawn one of the weakest Republican opponents in recent memory. Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears has raised about half as much money as Ms. Spanberger and won only a tepid endorsement from Mr. Trump, late in the campaign.
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Ms. Sherrill has faced a tougher opponent in Mr. Ciattarelli, who has tried to combine some of the president’s signature issues, like cracking down on immigration and transgender rights, with his focus on lowering taxes, public safety and improving schools.
She is attempting to replace Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democratic who is finishing his second term. Democrats have not won three consecutive governor’s elections in the state since 1961.
With 860,000 more registered Democrats in the state than Republicans, the question for Ms. Sherrill is whether her anti-Trump message will be enough to mobilize Democrats, particularly Black and Latino voters who shifted right during the 2024 election.
As she crisscrossed the state on Thursday, Ms. Sherrill assailed both her opponent and Mr. Trump, linking the agendas of the two men over and over again.
Allies made the stakes even more explicit to the crowd.
“You get to send a message right here in New Jersey that a free people bows to no king,” Pete Buttigieg, the former secretary of transportation, told a cheering crowd at a campaign rally on Thursday. “Not three years from now, but this coming Tuesday.”
Representative Frank Pallone, Democrat of New Jersey, made the stakes even more explicit to the crowd: “Don’t bring MAGA into New Jersey,” he pleaded.
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
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