In the Trump era, Democrats have seemed to excel among the highly engaged, highly educated voters who predominate in low-turnout, off-year elections, only to struggle when more irregular and less educated voters flock to the polls in presidential years.
But on Tuesday, when Democrats won the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races by wide margins, it wasn’t simply because more Democratic-leaning voters showed up to the polls while more Republican-leaning voters sat out. The Democratic candidates also succeeded at winning over a modest but meaningful sliver of President Trump’s supporters, based on exit polls and authoritative voter file records.
While it’s always challenging to nail down the details of an electoral shift, the available data generally suggests that Democratic gains were driven slightly more by flipping Mr. Trump’s supporters than by benefiting from a superior turnout, at least for Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey.
Together, the combination of a more Democratic electorate and success among those swing voters was enough to turn light blue Virginia and New Jersey into Democratic romps. It was also enough to allow Democrats to reverse last year’s losses among Hispanic voters, as many of Mr. Trump’s new Hispanic supporters from 2024 stayed home and many others returned to the Democrats.
Here are two ways we know this:
Exit polls
Exit polls aren’t perfect measures of the makeup of the electorate (they are estimates based on surveys of voters), but in this election they tell a clear story about turnout that’s consistent with other available data.
The most important exit poll question for evaluating the makeup of the electorate is how people say they voted in the last election. By this measure, the New Jersey and Virginia electorates this year were more Democratic-leaning than in 2024: Overall, exit poll respondents said they supported Kamala Harris last year by eight percentage points in New Jersey and by nine points in Virginia, compared with Ms. Harris’s actual six-point wins in the states.
Although this suggests an impressive Democratic turnout, it also implies that turnout alone didn’t explain the decisive victory — because Ms. Sherrill and Ms. Spanberger won by 13 and 15 points.
Instead, the two Democrats won so decisively because they also flipped a crucial sliver of voters who said they supported Mr. Trump in 2024. Ms. Sherrill and Ms. Spanberger both won 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters, according to the exit polls.
It may not seem like much to flip 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s backers, but consider: When a voter flips, it adds one voter to one party and also deducts one from the other, making it twice as significant as turning out a new voter.
Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican candidate for governor in New Jersey, countered by flipping 3 percent of Ms. Harris’s supporters. And Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, won 1 percent of Ms. Harris’s vote. But the overall effect of the flips was enough to turn electorates that favored Ms. Harris by single digits into Sherrill +13 and Spanberger +15 victories.
The same story holds among Hispanic voters, who snapped back toward Democrats in both states. The exit polls in New Jersey found that Ms. Sherrill won a whopping 18 percent of Mr. Trump’s Hispanic support in the state (no figures were reported for Virginia, where the Hispanic vote is smaller).
Ms. Sherrill also seemed to benefit from a much stronger turnout among Democratic-leaning Hispanic voters. In the New Jersey exit poll, Hispanic voters who cast ballots in 2025 reported backing Ms. Harris by 25 points; in the actual 2024 election, Ms. Harris won Hispanic voters by just nine points, according to New York Times estimates.
Together, it was enough for Ms. Sherrill to win Hispanic voters by 37 points, according to the exit polls.
Voter records
The gold standard for analyzing the electorate is the individual-level records of who voted in an election (but not whom they voted for).
Usually, this data takes months to become available. But in New Jersey, nine counties containing nearly half of the state’s electorate have already provided this data for both early and Election Day voters, allowing an unusually early and authoritative look at who cast ballots in 2025 — and their party registrations.
In these counties, Democrats had a roughly 19-point turnout edge by party registration, up from around a 16-point edge among 2024 voters. That’s a net 2.5-point shift (the figures are rounded), and largely consistent with what the exit polls found.
Alone, the net 2.5-point shift in party registration would not explain a nearly nine-point shift toward Ms. Sherrill in these counties (when compared with the 2024 vote for Ms. Harris). More sophisticated modeling, using Times/Siena poll data, shows a similar if slightly more pronounced pattern, with Ms. Sherrill gaining a net 3.5 points because of turnout alone — still not enough to account for her much bigger gains overall.
In other words, the voter records suggest the same thing the exit polls do: Ms. Sherrill benefited from Democrats’ improved turnout, but she benefited even more from flipping some of Mr. Trump’s 2024 supporters to her side.
It’s worth contrasting this with a similar analysis of special and off-year elections from 2023 and 2024. Back then, it often felt as if I could pull off something of a parlor trick: If you told me who showed up to vote in a special election, I could tell you the result just based off our model of how those people voted in the 2020 election. That’s because voters were consistent in their party support, and Democratic strength in those races was being driven by turnout alone.
My old trick wouldn’t have worked in these New Jersey counties in this election. Too many Trump voters flipped to the Democrats.
Nate Cohn is The Times’s chief political analyst. He covers elections, public opinion, demographics and polling.
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