The Democrats’ time in the wilderness is over. After winning all major elections across the country on Tuesday by wide margins, the opposition has finally put behind it the long period of mourning following its defeat in the presidential election and is winning back voters in communities that turned their backs on it a year ago. Now preparations begin for the next battle, the midterm elections that will decide control of Congress, with a feeling that has been missing among Democrats since November 2024: enthusiasm.
“Enough with the premature obituaries. The Democratic Party is back,” wrote House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries as the vote count made clear the size of the victory. “Tonight we sent a message – we sent a message to every corner of the Commonwealth; a message to our neighbors and our fellow citizens across the country; we sent a message to the entire world – that in 2025, Virginia has chosen pragmatism over partisanship,” Abigail Spanberger, the winner of Virginia’s gubernatorial election, said in her victory speech.
The approval is undeniable: the electoral victories were not limited to states already under Democratic control or those won last year by former Vice President Kamala Harris. The same pattern repeated itself in swing states that rejected the party in 2024. The same Latino and Asian communities that stayed home or voted Republican a year ago voted Democrats.
Trump himself, unusually contrite, acknowledged as much on Wednesday. “I don’t think it was good for Republicans. I’m not sure it was good for anyone, but we had an interesting evening and we learned a lot, and we’ll talk about it,” he said from the White House, during a breakfast with Republican senators.
Spanberger won his election by a 15-point margin, more than double the six-point margin by which Harris had won the state 12 months earlier. In New Jersey, the other state where the governorship was at stake, her former roommate, Mikie Sherrill, won by 13 percentage points, seven more than the former vice president achieved in 2014.
Furthermore, in California voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 50, which allows the redrawing of electoral districts in order to guarantee at least five more seats for Democrats in the House of Representatives. That counters a similar measure already passed in Texas and opens up new opportunities for Democrats to gain control of at least the lower house of Congress in next year’s midterm elections.
In Georgia, one of the swing states that decided last year’s election, voters for the first time in years chose Democratic blue on their ballots for two seats on a state commission that has been dominated by Republicans since time immemorial. In swing state Pennsylvania, three justices were re-elected, keeping the state Supreme Court under Republican control.
Each election has been very different, with candidates ranging from progressive Zohran Mamdani of New York to moderates Spanberger and Sherrill. But they all had something in common: “The unpopularity of the president and many of his policies, as well as widespread dissatisfaction with the direction the country is taking,” note analysts from the prestigious political consultancy Cook Political Report.
Exit polls indicate that 60% of voters in Virginia and New Jersey expressed dissatisfaction or anger with the way things are going in America. Democratic candidates garnered more than 75% of the vote among these disaffected voters.
In the Latino community, which swung toward Republicans last year, the pendulum appears to have swung back again. Drastically. In some of the counties with the highest concentrations of this population segment in both states, Spanberger and Sherrill have won some of their most decisive victories. The Manassas Park district, with Virginia’s largest Hispanic population, swung 22 percentage points in favor of Democrats from a year ago. In Hudson County, New Jersey, Sherrill won by 22 percentage points over what Harris achieved in November 2024.
“The results of all of Tuesday night’s election races – combined with Democrats’ outperformance in special elections earlier this year by an average of 15 points – point to serious danger for the GOP ahead of the 2026 midterm elections,” Cook Report analysts wrote. “A blue wave is forming; the only question now is whether it can be sustained for another twelve months.”
Even Republican strategists recognize this. Tuesday’s drubbing “shows that there is discontent, certainly against the current administration, and it shows that candidates and campaigns matter too,” Mike DuHaine, former political director of the Republican National Committee, told NBC.
But there is still a lot of time between now and next November. And it remains to be seen what effect, among other things, Republicans’ efforts will have to swing voting districts in their favor in states they control, something that could give them an added advantage in maintaining — or expanding — their current dominance in Congress.
House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared defiant in a news conference after the final vote count. “What happened last night was that blue states and blue cities voted blue. We all saw it coming, and no one should read too much into last night’s election results. Off-year elections are not indicative of what’s to come. That’s what history teaches us.”
Sign up to our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
