The pendulum of American politics has swung again.
Just one year after President Donald Trump and Republicans’ victories nationwide, the Democratic backlash has arrived in Tuesday’s elections.
Democrats won both governor’s races on the ballot, in Virginia and New Jersey — that was expected. But they won by a lot. Though votes are still being counted, at the time of this writing, Mikie Sherrill was winning New Jersey by 13 percentage points and Abigail Spanberger was winning Virginia by 14.
Such a result would mean a significant partisan swing — in both states — from last year, when Kamala Harris won them both by about 6 percentage points. It would also mean the political winds have shifted very dramatically from 2021, when Republican Glenn Youngkin won Virginia’s governorship by 2 percentage points and Democrat Phil Murphy won reelection in New Jersey by just 3.
In Virginia, Democrats also won down-ballot, expanding their House of Delegates majority from 51 seats to at least 60. This will likely allow them to gerrymander the state’s congressional map, which proponents say is necessary to counteract Republican gerrymandering in other states this year.
Even the Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general, Jay Jones — plagued by scandal due to the leak of texts in which he fantasized about the deaths of a political rival’s children — won, though by quite a bit less than Spanberger’s margin.
The good news for Democrats continued in lower-profile elections elsewhere. In Pennsylvania, three Democratic supreme court justices won their “retention elections” easily, letting them stay on the court 10 more years. In Georgia, two Democrats won statewide special elections for the Public Service Commission — contests which, Georgia Republicans had warned, could be a bellwether for the 2026 midterms.
So what does this Democratic romp mean for the midterms?
Typically, it’s best to be cautious about what these off-year elections can tell us about how next year’s midterms will go. There is, after all, a whole year between now and then in which things can change. And the states with high-profile elections today are not representative of the country as a whole.
But there was a striking consistency to Tuesday’s results across states that really fits just one possible explanation: people are mad at Trump and voting for the opposition party.
One part of the story is that the Democratic base turned out. But another part is that swing voters, well, swung.
For example: in 2021, upscale Loudoun County, Virginia, went for the Democratic gubernatorial nominee by just 11 points. In 2025, Spanberger won it by about 29 points.
In targeting swing voters, Sherrill and Spanberger, like the victorious New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, have sounded a consistent theme: they will govern with a laser focus on affordability.
Some Republicans, like New Jersey governor nominee Jack Ciattarelli, tried to turn affordability to their advantage, as he blamed the incumbent Democratic governor for high prices.
But that didn’t work — high prices and a high cost of living, it seems, continue to be political poison for the president’s party. As I wrote last week, Trump seems to have forgotten why he won in 2024: he ran against President Joe Biden’s high inflation, but then has basically done nothing to address the problem while in office, instead pursuing his pet tariff agenda, which has actually driven some prices higher.
A year is a long time, and perhaps Republicans will prove more effective at motivating their base to turn out in the nationwide midterm elections than they were in this odd-numbered off-year. (In recent years, Democrats have regularly done better in lower-turnout, oddly-timed elections. They seem to have more voters who will show up no matter what, while MAGA GOP turnout is more fickle.)
For now, though, Democrats have quite a lot to be happy about — and Republicans have a great deal to be very nervous about heading into next year.
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