The Democratic Party has plenty of challenges, but they were easy to forget Tuesday night.
Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill won governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey by double-digit margins. Zohran Mamdani will be New York’s mayor. Democrats posted strong showings in Pennsylvania, Georgia and elsewhere.
In many ways, the outcome of off-year general elections like these are deeply imperfect measures of the national political environment or the state of the parties. They’re not federal elections. They’re shaped by local issues and idiosyncratic candidates. And Tuesday’s were decided by the kind of highly engaged, lower-turnout electorates that have repeatedly backed Democrats in recent years.
Democrats also had an excellent showing in November 2023, one year before the last presidential election. They held the Kentucky governor’s mansion, won key races in Virginia, won a Supreme Court election in Pennsylvania, and were surprisingly competitive in the Mississippi governor’s race, while in Ohio ballot measures on abortion rights and marijuana legalization prevailed. Democrats thought it meant they had the political winds at their backs heading into the 2024 election; they were wrong.
But next year is a midterm election, not a presidential one. And it wasn’t just one or two down-ballot races where Democrats benefited from strong candidates, but dozens of races across the country. Even Jay Jones, the embattled Democratic attorney general candidate in Virginia, managed to win comfortably.
While these results — like those in 2023 — may not say much about the Democratic Party’s broader woes, they probably do say something about what might be coming in next year’s midterms.
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