The desert crossing is over. Having swept all the major electoral events on Tuesday, from one end of the country to the other and by wide margins, the Democratic Party has ended its long mourning after the defeat in the presidential elections and is recovering voters among the communities that had turned their backs on it a year ago. Now he is starting to prepare for the next polls, the mid-term elections that will decide control of Congress, with a feeling absent since November 2024: enthusiasm.
“The Democratic Party is back!” boasted the party’s leader in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jefferies, as reports made clear the size of the victory. “We have sent a message to America and the world. We choose pragmatism over partisan divisions,” Virginia gubernatorial winner Abigail Spanberger boasted in her victory speech.
The recognition is unappealable: the electoral victories did not only occur in states already under Democratic control or in which former vice president Kamala Harris won last year. The same pattern also repeated itself in swing states that rejected the party in 2024. The same Latino or Asian-American communities that stayed home or voted Republican a year ago went to the polls voting Democratic.
Trump himself, unusually contrite, acknowledged as much on Wednesday: the results “were not good. They were not good for Republicans and I think not for anyone. It was an interesting evening and we learned a lot… we’re going to have to ask ourselves what exactly they represent and what we should do about it,” he said from the White House, during a breakfast with Republican senators.
Spanberger won his election by 15 percentage points, more than double the 6 by which Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris had won that state twelve months earlier. In New Jersey, the other state where the governor’s office was at stake, her former roommate, Mikie Sherrill, won by 13 percentage points, seven more than the former vice president achieved in 2024.
Furthermore, in California voters supported with a clear majority the so-called Proposition 50, which allows for the redistribution of electoral districts in order to guarantee at least five more seats for the party in the House of Representatives in Washington, which counteracts a similar measure already approved in Texas and opens up new opportunities for Democrats to gain control of at least that chamber of Congress in next year’s elections.
In Georgia, one of the key states that decided last year’s election, voters for the first time in years opted for Democratic blue on their ballots for two seats on a state commission dominated by Republicans since time immemorial. In Pennsylvania, the pendulum state par excellence, three judges were re-elected who kept the territory’s Supreme Court in party hands.
Each race was very different, with candidates ranging from the progressivism of Zohran Mamdani in New York to the moderation of Spanberger and Sherrill. But they all had something in common: “the unpopularity of the president and many of his policies, as well as a general dissatisfaction with the direction the country is taking”, underline analysts from the prestigious political consultancy firm Cook Report.
Exit polls indicate that 60% of voters in Virginia and New Jersey said they were dissatisfied, or angry, “with the way things are going in the United States.” Democratic candidates won more than 75% of the vote among dissatisfied voters.
In the Latino community, which had swung toward Republicans last year, the pendulum appears to have swung again. Drastically. In some of the counties in the two states with the highest concentrations of this population segment, Spanberger and Sherrill have achieved some of their most resounding victories. The Manassas Park district, the one with the largest Hispanic population in Virginia, shifted 22% of the vote in favor of the Democrats compared to a year ago. In Hudson County, New Jersey, Sherrill won with 22% more votes than Kamala Harris won in November 2024.
“The results of Tuesday night’s elections, combined with the good results that Democrats have achieved in special elections held during this year, in which they won on average by fifteen points, indicate a serious danger for the Republican Party facing the 2026 elections,” Cook Report analysts write. “A democratic wave is building; the only question now is whether they can sustain it for another twelve months.”
Even Republican strategists admit it. Tuesday’s setback “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 a lot of time between now and next November. And it remains to be seen what effect Republicans’ efforts to skew electoral colleges in states they control in their favor might have, among other things, giving them an added edge in maintaining — or expanding — their current dominance in Congress.
The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, was defiant in a press conference after the recounts ended. “What happened on Tuesday is that Democratic cities and states voted Democratic. We already knew what was going to happen. Off-cycle elections are not an indication of what will happen next.”
