After losing big last November, Democrats had a triumphant day at the polls Tuesday during the first major Election Day since President Donald Trump started his second term. What does that mean for the party going forward?
“I think it’s a great opportunity for our party to show that we can govern, to show, that we could bring people into the table, to show progress,” Corey O’Connor, a Democrat who beat Republican Tony Moreno in a landslide Pittsburgh mayoral race, told KDKA Radio Wednesday. “And we’re seeing it as the waves went all across the country last night. It’s a Democratic wave right now, but now it’s up to us to take the vision of growth, opportunity, jobs, housing, and what the Democratic party stands for.”
In Virginia, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin won the seat for the GOP in 2021, there was a reversal with the win of Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.). Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) won the New Jersey gubernatorial election, beating Trump-backed Jack Ciattarelli.
Another Trump-backed candidate – former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat – lost the New York City mayoral race to Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist. While Spanberger and Sherrill’s wins are a win for more moderate factions of the Democratic party, per the Associated Press, Mamdani’s win is a big score for the more progressive wing of the party, including Sen Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
“Voters don’t want nostalgia – they want new. Yesterday’s election made one thing clear: the Democratic Party wins when we stop recycling the same playbook and start elevating fresh leaders rooted in their communities,” said Caroline Welles, executive director of The First Ask nonprofit focused on supporting Democratic female candidates, in a statement provided to Audacy. “This cycle wasn’t just a political victory – it was a rejection of the idea that leadership only comes from insiders. First-time candidates, women, and working-class leaders carried the message voters responded to. That’s the energy and direction the party needs to keep winning.”
James Christopher of James Christopher Communications noted that while Democratic Socialists might not be winning elections in conservative parts of the country any time soon, he thinks some of Mamdani’s strategies might pop up more in the wake of his win.
The AP said some Republicans in Washington “may be more excited than Democrats that a self-described democratic socialist will become New York City's next mayor,” due to confusion about the party’s name. Trump even erroneously described Mamdani as a “communist.”
Still, these wins – some of them surprises – are just some of the Democratic successes this week.
“Democrats also won two statewide races in Georgia for public service commissioner and won the county executive races in Pennsylvania’s two bellwether counties, Erie and Northampton,” wrote Henry Olsen in an op-ed for The Washington Post. “California voters [overwhelmingly] paved the way for the state to draw a new congressional map intended to create more safe Democratic seats ahead in the midterms.”
Democrats also outperformed their margins from four years ago “in fast-growing suburbs, rural areas and even places with high concentrations of military voters,” early voting showed, according to the AP.
“Well, I would say almost unequivocally, it was a very heavily democratic night, almost at the scale of 2018 or 2008 based on the detailed data I saw in multiple states,” said John Couvillon, political analyst, pollster and founder of JMC Analytics and Polling during an interview Wednesday with Newell Normand of Audacy’s WWL Radio. Those were two recent landslide years for Democrats.
Couvillon noted that the party of an incumbent president tends to do poorly in elections soon after they take office. However, the 2022 midterms following former President Joe Biden’s win were a slight exception, with many voters motivated to vote Democrat after the conservative-leaning Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Trump was even declared the “biggest loser” of those elections.
“Anytime you have a party in power, particularly if they are very aggressive with pursuing their agenda, the out party of course is going to be more motivated to vote because they’re shut out of power,” said Couvillon. “Which is the case for the Democrats right now. They do not control the house nor do they control the Senate or the presidency.”
This year, that’s not all that’s going on. We’re also in the midst of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. Certain services have stalled and certain government employees have stopped getting paychecks.
“Now, you’re starting to have people getting furloughed and or their paychecks are not coming and they're starting to wonder, you know, how they could feed their families, make their mortgage payments and so forth,” Couvillon said. “And they take that anger out on the party in power in a state like Virginia, which has an over-large dependence on the government that hit very hard against the Republicans, where not only did Democrats go three for three in the statewide races, they picked up 13 seats in the state house in marginal districts.”
While the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers have vociferously laid the blame for the ongoing shutdown at Democrats’ feet, Couvillon noted that voters tend to blame whoever is in power for current ails. For example, lingering inflation. Voters were hard on Biden over this issue, and it is also impacting Republicans and Trump.
“It would also help if Trump paid more conspicuous attention to the cost of living and other domestic economic matters,” said Olsen in his op-ed. Polls from the AP further stress voters’ concerns about the economy, jobs and the cost of living as the Trump administration seems to focus on immigration and other issues.
So, should the GOP be worried? Couvillon thinks so.
“I think that Republicans do need to be concerned going into the midterms based on the sheer immensity of the Democratic victories last night from coast to coast,” he explained.
Couvillon also said he believes a core issue in this election and the upcoming midterms is inflation.
“When it comes to the economy, as John Cougar Mellencamp once said; ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’” he told Normand. “In other words, you as an incumbent party, you get punished for having a bad economy, but you don’t get a requisite amount of credit if things are going well. So, it’s kind of a case of you kind of playing, I guess, a little bit of defense here where you just want to make sure that you can get interest rates and or inflation down in time for the midterms.”