The Tuesday Reckoning: A Snapshot of the 2025 Off-Year Election Results
Democratic Candidates Made Strides to Rebuild its Coalition Amidst Trump’s Unpopularity But Will That Be Enough?
The 2025 elections produced substantial Democratic gains, on par or exceeding the 2017 off-year elections. In almost every county holding elections, Democratic candidates performed better than Former Vice President Harris did in 2024. Democratic and progressive candidates far exceeded their polling averages, increased their state legislative majorities, and even toppled political dynasties. They did so by both reuniting the traditional Democratic coalition of liberals, young voters, people of color; and by expanding their appeal into traditionally Republican districts. Though Democratic candidates deserve a great deal of credit for running effective campaigns, the election outcomes were driven above all by one source: President Trump’s profound unpopularity. We have provided the snapshot you need: examined the pre-election political terrain, analyzed the defining races that shaped this cycle, and mapped out what it all means for the Democratic Party’s prospects in 2026.
A Broken Coalition. The 2024 Fractures of the Democratic Base.
Last year’s 2024 presidential election vexed Democratic strategists for many reasons, some more obvious than others. The most surprising reason was President Trump winning by expanding his coalition into communities of color across key swing states, especially among men of color. As Catalist reported in their What Happened report — in collaboration with HIT Strategies — Trump expanded his support among Latino men by 12-points, among Black men by 8-points, and among young men by up to 29-points. Given the already fractured Democratic coalition under Biden, these were losses the party couldn’t afford. Pundits’ post-election analysis tended to blame these losses on Harris’ supposed out-of-touch liberalism, particularly on policing, immigration, and trans rights. Oddly enough, the fact that Biden’s approval rating sat at negative 21-points on Election Day played little of a role in popular analyses of Trump’s victory. Presidential popularity, specifically presidential unpopularity, is a major factor for a party’s success up and down the ballot, and Trump’s evaporating approval rating will haunt Republican candidates in 2026.
Setting the Stage of Trump’s Unpopularity. How we Got Here.
President Trump entered office for the second time with approval from a solid majority of the American public, and a governing coalition in the House and Senate. However, this would only last for two months before falling to majority disapproval with a downward trend over the following months. Trump’s disapproval ratings fell specifically because voters deeply disapprove of his handling of the economy particularly around inflation and cost of living, which is the very issue that actually won Trump the election in 2024. As Elliott Morris, at Strength in Numbers, has thoroughly demonstrated, voters are holding Trump responsible for the high prices and low economic mobility that severely undermined Democratic chances in 2024. In short, the material realities that led infrequent voters to break for Trump in 2024 persist, and have deepened, under new political leadership.
These material realities now position Democrats to reap political advantage, specifically by mobilizing voters outside of their loyal Democratic Party base and the very voters they lost to Trump last year. The Democratic base is already highly energized and engaged as we saw in this year’s special elections, which tends to be low-turnout. Mix together an unpopular incumbent President with an unpopular government shutdown that voters blame on the President; add in a bunch of highly motivated Democratic partisans; and engage competent (even dominant) Democratic challengers and you got a recipe for a blue wave — exactly like what we saw in this year’s three key races.
New York City: The Birth of a New Politics.
Perhaps no election in 2025 produced such remarkable results as the New York City Mayoral election. Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year old assemblyman defeated former Governor Andrew Cuomo twice in the same election year. New York City-based political analysts have already written beautifully about this election, but we would simply note the following standout statistics:
Mamdani won more than a million votes and clinched a majority of an extraordinarily high New York City election turnout, becoming the first to do so since 1969.
Mamdani accomplished this by young and first-time voters showing up to the polls. Exit polls indicate that up to 1-in-5 voters never casted a mayoral ballot before and voters under 45 made up nearly 41% of the electorate – up from 30% in 2021.
Mamdani, who campaigned as a Democratic Socialist and has explicitly embraced strong trans rights previously, won men aged 18-29 by an astonishing 38-points, running directly counter to the post-2024 election narratives.
Mamdani brought New York’s sizeable Muslim and South Asian population into the political mainstream for the first time. Accounting for just 7% of the total 2021 turnout, both communities doubled their support and made up 15% of the 2025 turnout. They provided a major bulwark of new voters for the campaign.
Virginia. The Great Consolidation and MAGA’s Defeat in a Light Blue State.
Unlike New York City, Virginia’s elections faced relatively few surprises in terms of candidates. Former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger and Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears essentially had two years to campaign for Governor. Spanberger led in virtually every poll, and her victory in November was all but inevitable. However, very few analysts predicted that Spanberger would win by 15-points and improve on Harris’ margin in virtually every county. Fewer still predicted that Democratic Attorney General nominee Jay Jones would win by a larger margin than Harris in 2024, despite rarely leading in public polling following a serious scandal late in his campaign. Jones’ victory, unseating a capable Republican incumbent in spite of his own serious electoral issues, underscored the degree of Democratic strength in 2025, and points to potentially enduring viability in future elections.
Additionally, Virginian Democrats, taking advantage of a deeply unpopular government shutdown in a state home to hundreds of thousands of government employees, won a commanding majority in the House of Delegates, extirpating Republicans from Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads, and consolidating strength in the Virginia suburbs. These areas, constituting a significant share of the overall vote, were once the core Republican territories as Virginia moved out of its Solid South past. Spanberger’s 18-point win in Virginia’s suburbs, along with a strong showing in urban areas, leaves the Republican Party little room to organize counteroffensives in the 2026 midterms and could put even more Republican seats at risk.
New Jersey. A Snap Back to Reality.
If Virginia’s gubernatorial election barely stirred the political waters, New Jersey’s gubernatorial race promised a far livelier showdown. With an unpopular Democratic Governor in Trenton, the Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli attempted to court voters of color and embrace the mantle as a change candidate while also running to the hard right. Hit hard by the affordability crisis, New Jersey lurched to the right in 2024, with the largest shifts in minority-majority townships, particularly among the most heavily Latino regions of the state. Moreover, Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, won a contested primary with a little over a third of the vote and seemed to struggle with engaging voters of color on the campaign trail. Polling averages showed a slight Sherill lead but predicted a close election.
Instead, Sherrill crushed Ciattarelli by nearly 14-points, and won the Democratic Party’s largest vote share in more than 35 years. Sherrill’s victory was in large part due to the dramatic return of Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024, with the Republican gains among those voters proving very short-lived. For example, Sherrill won Union City, an 80%+ Latino city in North Jersey, by nearly 70-points, a landslide realignment from Harris’ comparatively paltry 17-point win just a year earlier. Sherill would also win Asian voters by 65-points and win Black voters by 89-points.1 Both her margins and key constituencies much more closely resembled Biden’s 2020 election results, further illustrating that Republican gains among Democratic constituencies may well be fleeting.
Conclusions: Voters Want to Punish Trump, But Democrats Must Work for It.
Americans have rarely been so pessimistic about the economy, and they have never disapproved of Trump as much as they do right now. A narrow plurality of 2024 voters voted for Trump to address specific material issues in their lives, especially the cost of living. The Trump administration not only failed to do anything about that issue, but has actively antagonized them; going so far to even deny that cost of living is a problem in the first place. Rather than representing a dynamic new political reality, Trump looks increasingly like another deeply unpopular Republican — George W. Bush’s second term.
As was the case with Bush, Democrats did not win decisive election campaigns by sitting idly and allowing Bush to destroy himself. Instead, the party’s most effective forces — specifically Obama’s 2008 campaign — deliberately distanced themselves from the unpopular aspects of the Democratic Party’s past, ran disciplined, focused campaigns on high salience issues, and embraced messages of change and hope that energized a new electorate and led the nominee to victory.
Democratic candidates across the ideological spectrum are already showing this same dynamism. The crucial strategy is to control the battlefield – fighting on their own terms, not on the terrain set by the Trump administration.
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