Tuesday was a rough night for Donald Trump.
Despite the “mandate” he claimed upon his own election a year ago, voters turned out in large numbers to reject his preferred candidates, delivering Democrats their first taste of hope since Trump steamrolled back into Washington. The message seemed clear: “Americans are appalled by what they are seeing coming out of this administration,” as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it on CNN Tuesday evening. Even Trump, typically allergic to acknowledgments of defeat, couldn’t ignore the results: “I don’t think it was good for Republicans,” he told GOP senators afterward. “But we had an interesting evening, and we learned a lot.”
What should Democrats learn from it all, as they seek a way out of the political wilderness? What are they to make of victories that spanned from Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who will succeed Eric Adams as New York City mayor, to Abigail Spanberger, the centrist who defeated Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia’s gubernatorial race? Does Mamdani’s unabashedly progressive vision represent the future of the party? Or should more candidates embrace the moderation that lifted Spanberger in a purple state that has been led for the past four years by a guy who was once memorably described as “Donald Trump in khakis?”
The biggest lesson, perhaps, is not about ideology, but basic politics. As Spanberger herself put it in 2018, when she first won the congressional seat she’d hold for six years: “Beating the drum about how terrible the president is [is] just beating the drum. It’s not actually doing something productive.”
Though she and Mamdani occupy different ends of the Democrats’ ideological spectrum, both ran campaigns focused on lowering costs and other kitchen table issues—not merely on countering Trump. “They were focused on affordability,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, told CNN Wednesday, describing cost-of-living issues as the “throughline” of Mamdani, Spanberger, and New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill’s campaigns.
It turned out to be a resonant message. “Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship,” Spanberger told supporters in a victory speech Tuesday. “You all chose leadership that will focus relentlessly on what matters most: lowering costs, keeping our communities safe, and strengthening the economy for every Virginian. Leadership that will focus on problem solving, not stoking division.”
It was a night of historic wins. Mamdani became the first Muslim to win election as mayor of New York City; Spanberger will be the first woman to serve as governor of Virginia, which will flip from red to blue and give Democrats another state bulwark against Trump’s authoritarian agenda. More immediately, the victories should reinforce the message of the mass demonstrations that have erupted across the country this year, and may give Democrats more leverage in their shutdown fight with the GOP majority on Capitol Hill. “The shutdown was a big factor” in the election results Tuesday, the president told Senate Republicans. “We must get the government back open soon.”
What all this means for next year’s midterms remains to be seen. When current Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin won in 2021, it seemed to foreshadow a 2022 red wave. But it didn’t materialize—at least not until 2024, when Trump himself was back on the ballot. Democrats, seeking to finally enact a check on Trump’s largely unbound power, hope their momentum will pay off sooner than that—that their off-year dominance could pave the way for the kind of success they had in 2018. “Over the next year, the ability to stop Trump in his tracks runs directly through the Democratic Party,” Martin, the DNC chair, said after Tuesday’s election. “We will earn every vote. We will win.”
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