Laura Barrón-López & Jake Traylor, MSNBC - President Donald Trump’s name may not have been on the ballot Tuesday, but he suffered a resounding defeat anyway as voters rejected Republican candidates and registered their strong disapproval of the way the president is doing his job.
From gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, to the mayoral race in Trump’s hometown, to a redistricting measure in California, Americans opposed Trump’s endorsed candidates and expressed deep dissatisfaction with the direction of the country while signaling their dismay with the cost of living and their personal financial situations.
In that sense, Tuesday’s results — a Democratic rout — served as a warning sign for the president and Republicans headed into the 2026 midterms when the party out of power historically makes significant gains.
NBC News - Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill won the New Jersey governor’s race, NBC News projects, defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli after a hard-fought contest in which President Donald Trump loomed over voters’ choice. Sherrill worked to make the race a referendum on the president, casting Ciattarelli as a Trump acolyte who will not stand up to the president. “He’ll do whatever Trump tells him to do, and I will fight anybody to work for you,” Sherrill said in their first debate in October. NPR - Here are five takeaways from the 2025 off-year elections:
1️⃣ It’s still the cost of living, stupid. Prices, prices,
prices. Affordability was a through line in most of the races Tuesday.
President Trump’s lack of focus on it likely hurt his party, as voters
overwhelmingly sided with Democrats on the economy.
Roll Call - Democratic former Rep. Abigail Spanberger won Tuesday’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, ending four years of Republican control of the governor’s mansion. Spanberger was leading GOP Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears 55 percent to 45 percent, when The Associated Press called the race roughly an hour after polls closed. She will be Virginia’s first female governor. “Tonight we sent a message,” Spanberger said in her victory speech in Richmond, flanked by her husband and three daughters. “We chose our commonwealth over chaos. You all chose leadership that will focus relentlessly on what matters most: lowering costs, keeping our communities safe and strengthening our economy for every Virginian.” Spanberger will succeed term-limited Republican incumbent Glenn Youngkin, who in 2021 capitalized on parental frustrations over education policy to score an upset victory. Virginia governors are not eligible to run for a second consecutive term. Her victory comes on the same night that Democrats retained the governorship in New Jersey, with Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s victory. Democracy Docket - Maine voters rejected a Republican-backed ballot initiative Tuesday that would have imposed new photo ID rules and severely limited mail-in voting — a decisive win for voting rights advocates who said the measure threatened to upend the state’s long-standing tradition of accessible elections. The measure, appearing on the ballot as Question 1, would have created a new photo ID requirement for both in-person and mail-in voting and eliminated programs that expanded access to absentee ballots. It also would have ended Maine’s permanent absentee voter list — requiring voters to apply for a mail ballot each election — banned ballot requests on behalf of family members and limited every town to a single drop box. |
Why Mamdani won - “He brought the working, middle and upper-middle classes together in what I called back in July an ‘emergent coalition of the precariat’ — united in part by a growing affordability crisis and in part by simple rage about income inequality, corruption and the entitlement and impunity of the very rich.” — David Wallace-Wells, Opinion writer, NY Times
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NY Times - More than 2 million New Yorkers had voted even before the polls closed at 9 p.m., the first time that total had been surpassed since 1969, when John V. Lindsay won re-election.
Can Mamdani fulfill his promises?
Time - New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani built his platform around a simple premise: The city is far too expensive, and he’s going to make it more affordable.
From freezing rents and making buses free to boosting the minimum wage and increasing taxes for New York’s wealthiest residents, nearly all of the major actions Mamdani has pledged to take as mayor are aimed at lowering costs for New Yorkers and shrinking the wealth gap in the country’s biggest city.
“I think that the Democratic Party must always remember what made so many proud to be Democrats, which is a focus on the struggles of working-class Americans across this country,” he said in an interview on ABC.
Those ambitious, affordability-focused proposals have been key to Mamdani’s unlikely rise from a lesser-known Queens assemblymember who came into the crowded Democratic primary as a heavy underdog to New York City’s next mayor. Now, as he leaves the campaign trail and turns toward governing the city, the question looms large: Will he be able to make his plans work in practice? Dealing with the issues he boosted
NY Times - Mr. Mamdani’s political rise may be remembered for what came first: the buoyant, flamboyant, rule-breaking primary run that united a new coalition of Brooklyn gentrifiers and Queens cabbies around the city’s growing affordability crisis and the birth of a megawatt talent.
But his election on Tuesday as the 111th mayor of New York owes as much to the equally improbable backroom campaign that followed. In Midtown C-suites and intimate phone calls, a left-wing populist who had built his brand on taxing the rich wooed, charmed and delicately disarmed some of the most powerful people in America.
The arc of his success is nothing short of staggering. At the start of the year, Mr. Mamdani was polling at 1 percent, tied, as he likes to say, with the candidate known as “someone else.” Few New Yorkers recognized his name, and his own political team put the odds of winning as low as 3 percent.
Now, at age 34, he will be New York City’s youngest leader in more than a century, amid a pile of historic firsts: the first Muslim mayor, the first South Asian and arguably the most influential democratic socialist in the country.
California’s congressional maps will be redrawn to create more blue-leaning districts after voters approved a measure to amend the state’s constitution on Tuesday, delivering a victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in a contentious redistricting battle that has broken out around the country. will be redrawn to create more blue-leaning districts after voters approved a measure to amend the state’s constitution on Tuesday, delivering a victory for Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrats in a contentious redistricting battle that has broken out around the country.
Time - Democrats will hold onto the governorship of New Jersey as Rep. Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli in the most closely watched gubernatorial race of the year, offering her party a much-needed boost after months of political uncertainty under the Trump Administration. The Associated Press called the race for Sherrill shortly after the polls closed on Tuesday night.
Sherrill, 53, a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who was elected to Congress in the Democratic wave of 2018, emerged victorious after a bruising campaign that tested her reputation as a moderate in a state that has shifted towards Republicans in recent years. Her win extends Democratic control of the governor’s mansion to a third consecutive term and cements her status as one of the party’s rising national figures.
NBC - Texas voters approved two state constitutional amendments in statewide votes, NBC News projected. The ballot measures amend the state's constitution to clarify that only U.S. citizens can vote and to enshrine parental rights.
NBC - Virginia state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi became the first Muslim-American woman elected to statewide office in the U.S. with her victory in the state's lieutenant governor's race, NBC News projected.
NBC - Pennsylvania voters are projected to approve the retention of three state Supreme Court justices, preserving Democrats' 5-2 majority on the battleground state's high court.
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