Election night 2025 turned out to be a good one for Democrats. The party reclaimed the governor's seat in Virginia on Tuesday thanks to the former congresswoman's victory. Abigail Spanberger over Republican Lieutenant Governor Wince Earl-Sears and won the governorship in New Jersey after Congresswoman Mika Sherrill defeated Jack Ciattarelli. Both victories were expected, as were Zoran Mamdanni's victory over Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayoral election. (Spanberger and Sherrill won by about fifteen and thirteen percentage points, respectively; Mamdani appears to be on track for a high single-digit victory.) Democrats have also successfully reduced the vote in a number of elections in Virginia, state elections in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and particularly in California, where a redistricting referendum led by Gavin Newsom is a response to Republican-led Texas attempt to create five new GOP 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 Trend, a senior election 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 were able to beat expectations, what challenges Republicans face without Donald Trump on the ballot, and what the results mean for 2026 and 2028.
What is your biggest takeaway from Tuesday's results?
It's a bad night for a Republican. It's hard to see what the bright side is when you have losses everywhere.
Over the past nine months or so, many people have said that the Democratic Party brand is in the toilet. Democrats are unpopular. They seem to be disliked by much of the country, including a significant portion of their own voters. This is not a good place if you are a Democrat. How much does it really matter if you are an opposition party? How did you perceive this issue before tonight, and do you see it differently now?
I have a long-standing belief that elections are referendums on the party in power. My first reaction when I started hearing the argument that Democrats were in trouble was that I heard the exact same argument in 2010. You may remember that Obama, after the financial crisis, had a whole story about how the Republicans drove the car into a ditch, and now the Democrats are trying to help it. This went on for quite a long time, but voters did not care. They didn't like the Republicans, but they didn't like what the Democrats were doing either. [Republicans had huge success in the 2010 midterms.] And I think that today it’s the same story, only the parties have changed places. People's dislike of some of the things that Democrats believe and do may be a problem for governing when the Democrats win, but I don't think it's a problem for elections.
Trump isn't as popular, but he brings some benefits to Republicans when he's on the ballot, especially in terms of turnout. In most elections during the Trump era when he was not on the ballot, Democrats did well. Generally speaking, Republicans seem to feel pretty bad when he's not on the ballot.
Yes, we saw something similar with Obama. He was a political force and could attract diverse voters in the presidential election, but Democrats would be defeated in off-year elections. And I think Trump has a similar effect. There are many true Trump voters who simply aren't going to show up to vote in off-year elections. Meanwhile, the Republicans seemed to sell off their big advantage, which was upper-class suburban voters voting during off-years. Now these people are mostly Democrats.
When I was growing up and following politics, people often talked about voters' desire to control the party in power. So, if Republicans were in power, you would want to vote Democratic, and the President's party would often lose midterm elections. This still seems to be true, but it now appears to be a case of different electorates in off-year elections. Has there been any change?
I think that as we have become more polarized and there are fewer undecided voters, there has become more of a focus on who is voting. This is not so much a game of persuasion as a simple game of appearance. This is the beginning and the end of everything. We're in a highly polarized environment where there aren't as many marginal voters, and you don't see the swings that you might have seen from, say, 1964 to 1980. It's just getting harder and harder to convince people. It's about getting voters to the polls, which is a bad deal for Republicans right now.
The theory of politics that you just described, that it is more about motivating people than persuasion, is generally viewed more favorably by more ideological party members and less by centrists. Democrats are engaged in a debate over whether they need to galvanize their own constituents or appeal to voters at the center. As someone who follows your work closely, I wouldn't think of you as someone who believes that parties simply need to ignite their voters. Have you changed your mind?
Generally speaking, Americans still don't like radical change. They don't like it when tariffs are imposed on them willy-nilly. They don't like some of the things the Democrats in power are doing. So I think moderation can help when you're really in control. This difference is something we talked about a little bit at the beginning, which is that it doesn't matter if you're unpopular when you're out of power, but when it comes to governing and we start talking about the seven or eight percent that can be persuaded, that can become a problem.
On Tuesday, two gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey, seen as more moderate, performed well and topped polls. They did better in Virginia than Democrats did in 2017, during Trump's first term. And New Jersey may be doing a little worse, but at the same time, New Jersey has gotten a lot closer to being a purple state over the last decade, or at least it was in the last election. So, do people who argue that moderation is critical to a Democratic victory have an argument about these two races?
Yes, and I think you summed up the argument there. If you're looking to counter that, it's the Virginia Attorney General race, right? I think this is where you have a pretty radical sounding Democratic candidate. Perhaps people rationalized it, but in the end he was only four points behind Spanberger. And overall he will win by about six points, and Spanberger will win by about fifteen. So I think that actually gives you a pretty good idea of what the persuasive voter universe was like. Twenty years ago in Virginia, a guy who got caught texting about what the future attorney general was doing would have done a lot worse. [Jay Jones, the Democrat, fantasized in text messages about shooting a Republican colleague.] That's polarization and the limit to how much radicalism can hurt you in a general election is right there.
