As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump is a phenomenally effective vote-winner, capable of turning out millions of otherwise infrequent voters to deliver the White House and Congress to the Republican Party. But as president, Trump has been an albatross around the neck of his party.
Consider his record as party leader. In the 2017 elections, Republicans suffered sharp defeats in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, with Virginia Democrats sweeping all three statewide offices and winning a majority in the state General Assembly. The following year, in the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats won a landslide victory in the House of Representatives, their largest since 2006. Trump came close to victory in the 2020 presidential but may have contributed to the Republican Party’s defeat in the Georgia Senate runoff election, handing the Democratic Party full control of Washington for the first time since 2011.
Even 2022, a midterm under President Joe Biden, was less successful than it could have been for the Republican Party because of Trump’s influence in the battle for the Senate, where voters rejected MAGA-aligned candidates in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania. With the 2024 presidential election came another strong Trump performance as he brought out the voters who support him and him alone.
Tuesday was the first major election since Trump entered the White House for a second term. And although voters across Virginia, New Jersey and New York City were most concerned with the particulars of their respective states and localities, there was no question that this was also a chance to register their discontent in a way that might send a message to Washington and the rest of America.
In each place, Democrats delivered crushing defeats to their Republican opponents. In the Virginia race for governor, Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic nominee for governor, cruised to victory along with Ghazala Hashmi, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, and Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee for attorney general, who struggled with scandal in the final weeks of the race. In the New Jersey election for governor, Mikie Sherrill delivered an unambiguous defeat to the Republican Jack Ciattarelli, and in New York City’s three-way mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani prevailed over both a former governor, Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent, and the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa.
Supporters of the president might pooh-pooh these results as unrepresentative. This isn’t a presidential electorate, they might say; there are different circumstances. But New Jersey and New York City both had high turnout for off-year elections (Virginia had a slight increase). In other words, it really is the case that Trump specifically, in his capacity as president, inspires ferocious energy and opposition against him among a large part of the voting public.
The results, then, are a marked contrast to the accommodation, capitulation and outright surrender of prominent individuals and institutions in the face of Trump’s demands. They also serve to remind us of what ought to be a fundamental maxim of democracy: that there is no singular “people” and there are no permanent majorities.
As I have stressed again and again, it is a profound mistake to treat the 2024 presidential election as a referendum on the ideological direction of the United States or as evidence of a realignment or whatever else you happen to have as your hobbyhorse. (Here, I’ll observe that it is unclear if “realignments” actually exist. Even coalitions as seemingly durable as the one that made Franklin Roosevelt president four times showed signs of strain and fracture within a decade of their arrival.)
For some observers, the 2024 election seemed to show a shift of young people and Latinos to the Republican Party. This was said to herald a “vibe shift” in American politics and perhaps a durable turn to the political right. But the truth of the matter is that voters, and especially those who are new and infrequent participants in the political process, are as driven by events and circumstances as anything else. And the key factor last year was voters’ reaction to the inflation that plagued Biden’s term in office.
Americans voted in Trump to lower the cost of living and return the United States to the political and economic status quo as it was before the pandemic. But rather than meet the public where it was, Trump and his cadre of ideologues in the White House took their victory to mean that they could pursue their most radical dreams and try to make good on their extreme preoccupations.
In 2024, the Americans who decided the election voted for lower prices and a lower cost of living. What they got instead were soldiers on the streets, masked agents leading violent immigration raids, arbitrary tariffs, new conflicts abroad, dictatorial aspirations, endless chaos and a president more interested in taking a wrecking ball to the White House to build his garish ballroom than delivering anything of value to the public. At this moment, in fact, the government has been shut down for more than a month, the House of Representatives has not been in session since the middle of September, and Trump is still talking about defying multiple court orders to restore food assistance to hungry families, even though his own administration announced that it would partially comply.
Both Trump and his administration are less interested in helping ordinary Americans than they are in fulfilling their idiosyncratic program of austerity, pain and deprivation. They are all stick, no carrot.
It’s against this backdrop that voters just went to the polls and cast millions of votes against the president by way of Democratic candidates, moderate and progressive, who stood for both affordability and the nation’s most cherished values, who pledged to use their time in office to protect their new constituents from the provocations and assaults coming from the government in Washington.
If these elections had gone the other way — if the Democratic Party had underperformed or even lost one of these contests — then every commentator under the sun would say, rightfully, that Democrats were in disarray; that even the president’s deep unpopularity couldn’t keep them afloat with voters.
But Tuesday was a Democratic victory. And the party didn’t just win — it won by commanding majorities on virtually every field of play. In polls, in focus groups and now at the ballot box, the public is telling us something very clearly: Trump is simply too much. If this is an opportunity for Democrats to win back lost ground — and it is — then it is also a warning to a Republican Party that has tied its entire identity to the man from Mar-a-Lago.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.
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