Virginia and New Jersey, the two states that voted for governor in 2025, both voted for then-Vice President Kamala Harris over then-candidate Donald Trump by 52%-46% margins in 2024. Democrats ran significantly better in both states on Tuesday. One reason is that Trump Republicans, as an increasingly downscale party, see their turnout sag in off years than when the presidency is up. But that wasn't their only problem this time.
In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer and congresswoman, won 58%-42%, well ahead of her standing in most polls. Republicans who dismiss this result as reflecting the weakness of nominee Winsome Earle-Sears should note that Democrat Jay Jones beat incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares 53%-47%, despite the Oct. 3 revelation of Jones' text messages that he'd like to murder a colleague and see his children die in their mother's arms.
Some 46% of Virginia voters said this was disqualifying, but even some of them voted for Jones. It's evidence that hatred of Trump's party runs deep among many Democrats.
The most significant swing from 2024 was in northern Virginia, part of metropolitan Washington, which cast 33 percent of the state's votes. That's a highly educated, upscale community with a high percentage of federal and government contractor employees, but Republicans would be unwise to dismiss the Democratic gains as just a response to the government shutdown. It could be a forecast of what's in store for them in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania; Oakland County, Michigan; and Waukesha County, Wisconsin.
In New Jersey, Rep. Mikie Sherrill. D-N.J., a Navy veteran, beat Republican Jack Ciatarelli 56%-43%, a big improvement on incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy's, D-N.J., 51%-48% squeaker against Ciatarelli four years ago. Sherrill's majority looked much like the 57%-41% Democratic advantage in the 2012, 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, which caused it to seem a solid blue state.
The big difference is that Ciatarelli was unable to duplicate the big gains that Trump made among Hispanic voters. Trump carried heavily Hispanic Passaic County with 50% -- it voted only 42% Republican this year. Similarly, in Virginia, even Miyares, despite his Hispanic ancestry, won only 37% in heavily Hispanic Prince William County.
New Jersey and Virginia also have large Asian populations. But Ciatarelli won only 37% in heavily South Asian Middlesex County, behind Trump's 44%, and in heavily Asian Loudoun County, Virginia, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears's 35% was below Trump's 40%.
Has the Trump administration's rough-and-ready immigration enforcement hurt his fellow Republicans? Or are we just seeing sags in turnout from low-propensity voters in low-propensity constituencies, as we have in previous contests a year after their side wins, as Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini suggests?
A possible crosscurrent: The Republican percentages held up pretty closely to Trump's 2024 percentage in Monmouth and Ocean counties on the Jersey Shore, whose demographics are similar to much of Florida's, and in rural Southside and southwest Virginia.
Then there is New York City, similarly sized (8 million-plus) to New Jersey and Virginia, whose record (since 1969) turnout of 2 million-plus was nonetheless lower than each of those states' 3 million-plus.
Since he won the June primary, the young socialist Zohran Mamdani -- he turned 34 last month -- has held wide leads in polls. His cheerful demeanor and clever ads, plus his emphasis on cost-of-living issues (free buses, city-owned grocery stores), have naturally produced sympathetic coverage from most media.
These media outlets have been happy to gloss over his positive attitudes toward terrorist-sponsoring Hamas and his immediate reaction to its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. They weren't bothered by his protracted stubbornness in renouncing the "globalize the intifada" slogan, which means kill Jews everywhere, he once embraced. For months, he had wide leads in the polls thanks to split opposition from widely disliked former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.
But the results, with 93% of the votes in, have been somewhat different. In a city that voted 68%-30% for Harris over Trump, Mamdani is leading Cuomo by a decisive but far from overwhelming 50%-42%, with just 7% for Sliwa.
While Democrats improved on Harris' performance in Virginia and New Jersey, Mamdani far underperformed Harris in New York City. One-quarter of New York's Harris voters supported the Republican or the candidate endorsed by Trump. Mamdani's core constituency is highly educated, lower-income singles who congregate in central cities and university towns -- what I've called the barista proletariat -- a large bloc in New York City and decisive in the 2023 mayoral race in Chicago, but a small segment of the electorate in most of America.
As the Democratic nominee, Mamdani ran better among Black people in central Brooklyn and southeast Queens than he had in the primary, and ran well below but still carried Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhoods in the Bronx and northern Manhattan and, narrowly, heavily Mexican Corona. And he lost heavily Asian parts of Queens, though not quite as lopsidedly as Italian neighborhoods in Staten Island and Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn.
Mamdani's weakness among some Democratic constituencies does not represent a danger for the party across the country generally. But it does suggest that the socialist wing of the party, and those Democrats whose antipathy to Israel can verge on antisemitism, are far from a majority force nationally. It underlines the importance, in my view, for conservatives to follow the example of Ronald Reagan and William Buckley in denouncing those such as Tucker Carlson who have provided a friendly forum for the Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes.
In the meantime, Trump faces a tough constituency today: the Supreme Court. Will the justices, including those he appointed, accept his claim that the gauzy language of a 1977 law gives him the power to raise and lower his beloved tariffs singlehandedly? There's a serious chance the majority-Republican-appointed court may reject that claim, as a totally Democratic-appointed court in 1952 rejected Harry Truman's claim that he could seize the steel mills in wartime.
A Supreme Court rebuff to Trump could turn out to be a political gift to the Trump Republican Party. Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs in April thrust his job approval downward, and 3% inflation, which, though low, can be plausibly linked to continuing tariffs, provides a basis, as Mamdani has shown, for Democratic campaigns. Also, should Trump acquiesce to an adverse Supreme Court decision, as Truman did 73 years ago, voters' fears of an authoritarian presidency will be mitigated.
Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available. COPYRIGHT 2025 CREATORS.COM