Democrats woke up this Wednesday after a long 12-month nightmare feeling that their inability to connect with their voters and win elections – like the one they lost just a year ago to US President Donald Trump – was nothing more than a bad dream.
Confidence in the chances of victory has returned to the party with victories without but both in the mayor of New York – where the candidate of the socialist wing Zohran Mamdani won the most anticipated race of the evening – and in the nominations to elect governor in Virginia (a state that Abigail Sparberger once again dyed blue, the color of the Democrats) and New Jersey (for which Mikie Sherrill signed). In both places, centrist candidates overwhelmed their Republican opponents. The party, moreover, won almost everything wherever it stood: from the mayor of Detroit to the vote in Somerville (Massachusetts) to stop investing in Israel.
The portion of good news – and the injection of adrenaline after a year of autopsies on the corpse of the November 2024 defeat – was completed by Yes of Californians to Proposition 50, which put Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s efforts in California’s electoral district to a referendum. He managed to make his compatriots understand that only with tricks of this kind is it possible to counter Trump, who is pushing to change the electoral maps throughout the country and thus favor his own in the 2026 legislative elections.
The effect of this vote goes beyond the borders of the most populous territory in the country, because it ensures that the Democrats have five seats up for grabs for next year’s midterm elections, in which the Republicans risk losing control of one or both chambers of the Capitol.
Turn left?
The Californian result arrived, due to the time change, around midnight. At that point it was clear what, even if there could be no consensus on how. The party, which celebrated its victories as a plebiscite on the second Trump administration – which advances unstoppably along its authoritarian path 10 months after taking office – remains divided in the debate over how best to continue winning. Are Mamdani’s progressivism and left turn the key? Or should we rather assume that the New Yorker’s phenomenal campaign, with its record-breaking seduction of the electorate and especially young people, could never have ended well in the states where Republicans and Democrats are closest?
These questions meant that every faction of the party – from the most moderate to the most progressive – had something to celebrate this Wednesday and that the victory did not serve to illuminate a single path to the 2028 presidential election.
“The important thing,” New York Democratic MP Nydia Velázquez explains to EL PAÍS, is that “we have sent a signal to the Republicans: there is an erosion of public support for the president, whose approval is at a minimum.” “These elections have made it clear what battles we have to fight and what positions we have to adopt to win. It’s not about moderates or progressives, but about listening to the voters and fighting for the working class again,” adds Velázquez, who is on the left of the coalition.
Both Spanberger and Sherrill ran as moderate candidates and both received more than 56 percent of the vote. His life adventures also confirmed that focused image. The new governor of Virginia was a CIA agent. The one from New Jersey, a Navy helicopter pilot. The two also have in common the fact that they entered politics in opposition to the figure of Trump and were able to sell themselves as an alternative to the policies of the occupant of the White House.
Mamdani has tried, for his part, to focus attention on municipal issues such as rent freezing or free buses for New Yorkers, even if with Trump in power everything is contaminated by the national circus of which he is the sole master of ceremonies.
The proud young socialist’s commitment to affordability in a money-ravaged city where his neighbors have serious problems making ends meet has proven to be a successful strategy capable of being replicated elsewhere. It’s also a telling contrast to the campaign that saw Kamala Harris lose in every crucial state last year to Trump, whose candidacy succeeded in convincing voters that only Republicans care about the cost of living and rampant inflation.
This Tuesday, when the debacle was already clear, the president of the United States rushed to distance himself from the losers of his match with a message in capital letters that once again showed him as someone who only plays as a team when he wins. He wrote: “The fact that Trump wasn’t on the ballot and the government (budget) shutdown (which broke its historic record this Tuesday with no signs of resolution) are the two reasons Republicans lost tonight, according to pollsters.” He addressed a group of conservative senators at a White House breakfast on Wednesday to ask them to examine their consciences as if it were none of his business.
Despite the blatant denial, Trump is right about one thing: The results in Virginia, which until Tuesday had a Republican governor and is home to about 150,000 federal workers, indicate that voters blame the president’s party for turning off the spigot of public money. Even the Democrats’ risky decision not to vote with their rivals to reopen the government until they guarantee there will be no cuts to health benefits is proving to be a winning move in the field of public opinion. And this despite the damage that officials who have stopped receiving paychecks are suffering along the way. Many of them have been driven to food banks to fill the pantry.
Sherrill’s victory in New Jersey hides, for her part, encouraging data for her party, which has seen the return to the fold of some voters from the Hispanic and African-American minorities who fled in the 2024 presidential elections.
However, the respite that this Tuesday’s elections granted to the Democrats did not resolve the great pending question: who will be the leader who will bring the party back to the White House? Mamdani cannot run for president because he was born in Uganda, and the law prohibits him from doing so. Kamala Harris, who just released a memoir in which she blames everyone but herself for her defeat, doesn’t rule out the idea. And among the names consolidated for months in the pools, from the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, no one clearly stands out.
Governor Newsom, coming out of California’s Proposition 50 referendum strengthened as someone who isn’t afraid to cut corners to get results, is one of them. He pledged Tuesday to turn his post-victory appearance into what history may remember as the first speech of his presidential campaign.
“What an evening for the Democratic Party!” he said. “We are now a party on the rise, a party that is alert, that is no longer on the defensive. Although it is not a victory just for us. It is a victory for the United States, for the people, and for the principles by which our founding fathers lived and died.”
Now it remains to be seen how far this drive will take his people, and how they intend to regain their agility after a year in a coma. In a country perpetually on the electoral campaign, the 2026 mid-term elections, in which the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate will be renewed, are officially inaugurated one year after their celebration.
