Election Night 2025 was a good one for Democrats. On Tuesday, the Party recaptured the governorship in Virginia, with the victory of the former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger over the Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, and held the governorship in New Jersey, with the congresswoman Mikie Sherrill’s defeat of Jack Ciattarelli. Both victories had been expected, as was Zohran Mamdani’s defeat of Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayoral election. (Spanberger and Sherrill won by approximately fifteen and thirteen percentage points, respectively; Mamdani appears on track for a high single-digit win.) Democrats also did well lower down the ballot in a number of Virginia races, in state races in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and, notably, in California, where the redistricting referendum led by Gavin Newsom—a response to Texas’s Republican-led effort to create five new G.O.P. House seats—passed overwhelmingly.
To talk about the election results, and what they portend for next year’s House and Senate races, I spoke by phone with Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Democrats managed to outperform expectations, the trouble Republicans face without Donald Trump on the ballot, and what the results mean for 2026 and 2028.
What’s your biggest takeaway from Tuesday’s results?
It’s a bad night to be a Republican. It’s hard to see what the silver lining is when you have losses all over the place.
In the past nine months or so, a lot of people have been saying that the Democratic Party’s brand is in the toilet. Democrats are not popular. They seem disliked by much of the country, including a big chunk of their own voters. This is not a good place to be if you’re a Democrat. How much does this really matter if you are the opposition party? How did you see that question before tonight, and do you see it any differently now?
I have a long-standing belief that elections are referenda on the party in power. My first reaction when I started hearing the argument that Democrats were in trouble was that I had heard the exact same argument in 2010. You may recall that Obama had an entire post-financial-crisis spiel about how the Republicans had driven the car into the ditch and now the Democrats were trying to help it out. It went on for quite some time, but voters didn’t care. They didn’t like Republicans, but they didn’t like what Democrats were doing, either. [Republicans had huge success in the 2010 midterms.] And I think it’s the same story today, with the parties flipped. People’s dislike of some things that Democrats believe and do might be a problem for governing when Democrats win, but I don’t think it’s a problem for elections.
Trump is not that popular, but he does bring certain benefits to Republicans when he is on the ballot, especially in terms of turnout. In most elections during the Trump era when he has not been on the ballot, Democrats have done well. Broadly speaking, Republicans seem to do quite poorly when he is not on the ballot.
Yeah, we saw a similar thing with Obama. He was a political force and could turn out all kinds of voters in Presidential elections, but the Democrats would get walloped in the off-year elections. And I think Trump has a similar effect. There are a lot of true Trump voters out there who just aren’t going to show up in the off-year elections. And, meanwhile, Republicans have kind of traded away their big advantage, which was upper-class suburbanites who vote during the off years. Now those people are mostly Democrats.
When I grew up and was following politics, people often talked about the desire of voters to keep a check on the party in power. So, if you had Republicans in power, you would want to vote for Democrats, and the President’s party would often lose midterm elections. That still seems true, but now the story seems to be about there being different electorates in off-year elections. Has there been a change of some sort?
I think that, as we’ve become more polarized and there are fewer swing voters, it’s become more about who is voting. It’s less of a persuasion game and more of just a simple turnout game. That’s the beginning and end of it. We are in a highly polarized environment where there just aren’t that many marginal voters, and you don’t really see the types of swings that you would have seen from, say, 1964 to 1980. It’s just harder and harder to persuade people. It’s about getting your voters to the polls, and that’s not a good bargain for Republicans right now.
The theory of politics you have just described—that it’s more about motivating people than persuasion—is normally viewed more sympathetically by more ideological party members, and less so by centrists. Democrats have been engaging in this debate about whether they need to fire up their own voters or reach out to voters in the center. As someone who’s followed your work closely, I would not think of you as someone who has the perspective that parties just need to fire up their own voters. Have you changed your opinion?
Generally speaking, Americans still don’t like radical change. They don’t like tariffs being sprung on them willy-nilly. They don’t like some of the things that Democrats in power do. So where moderation, I think, can help is when you’re actually governing. That distinction is what we were talking about a little bit at the beginning—about how it doesn’t matter that you’re unpopular when you’re out of power, but, when it comes to governing and we start talking about the, like, seven or eight per cent that’s persuadable, it could be a problem.
On Tuesday, two gubernatorial candidates, in Virginia and New Jersey, who are considered more moderate did quite well, and outperformed the polls. In Virginia, they did better than Democrats had done in 2017, during Trump’s first term. And in New Jersey they maybe did a little bit worse, but, at the same time, New Jersey has come much closer to being a purple state in the past decade, or at least it was in the last election. So, do people who are making the case that moderation is crucial for Democrats to win have an argument about these two races?
Yeah, and I think you summed up the argument there. If you’re looking for a counter on that, it would be the Virginia attorney general’s race, right? That’s where you had, I think, a pretty radical-sounding Democratic candidate. Maybe people rationalized it away, but he ended up running only four points behind Spanberger. And, over all, he will win by about six points, and Spanberger will have won by about fifteen. So I think that actually gives you a pretty good insight into what the universe of persuadable voters was. Twenty years ago in Virginia, a guy who got caught texting the things that the soon-to-be attorney general did would have run much worse. [Jay Jones, the Democrat, fantasized in text messages about shooting a Republican colleague.] So that’s the polarization and the limit on how much radicalism can hurt you in a general election right there.
