Election Night 2025 was a good one for Democrats. On Tuesday, the Party recaptured the governorship in Virginia, with the victory of the former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger over the Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, and held the governorship in New Jersey, with the congresswoman mikie Sherrill’s defeat of Jack Ciattarelli. Both victories had been expected, as was Zohran Mamdanni’s Defeat of Andrew Cuomo in the New York mayoral election. (Spanberger and Sherrill won by approximately fifteen and thirteen percentage points, respectively; Mamdani appears on track for a high single-digit win.) Democrats also did well lower down the ballot in a number of Virginia races, in state races in Pennsylvania and Georgia, and, notably, in California, where the redistricting referendum led by Gavin Newsom-a response to Texas’s Republican-led effort to create five new G.O.P. House seats-passed overwhelmingly.
To talk about the election results, and what thay portend for next year’s House and Senate races, I spoke by phone with Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics and a visiting scholar at the american Enterprise Institute. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Democrats managed to outperform expectations, the trouble Republicans face without Donald Trump on the ballot, and what the results mean for 2026 and 2028.
What’s your biggest takeaway from Tuesday’s results?
It’s a bad night to be a Republican. It’s hard to see what the silver lining is when you have losses all over the place.
In the past nine months or so, a lot of people have been saying that the Democratic Party’s brand is in the toilet. Democrats are not popular. They seem disliked by much of the country, including a big chunk of their own voters. This is not a good place to be if you’re a Democrat. How much does this really matter if you are the opposition party? How did you see that question before tonight,and do you see it any differently now?
I have a long-standing belief that elections are referenda on the party in power. My first reaction when I started hearing the argument that Democrats were in trouble was that I had heard the exact same argument in 2010. You may recall that Obama had an entire post-financial-crisis spiel about how the Republicans had driven the car into the ditch and now the Democrats were trying to help it out.It went on for quite some time, but voters didn’t care. They didn’t like Republicans, but they didn’t like what Democrats were doing, either.[[Republicans had huge success in the 2010 midterms.]And I think it’s the same story today, with the parties flipped. People’s dislike of some things that Democrats believe and do might be a problem for governing when Democrats win, but I don’t think it’s a problem for elections.
Trump is not that popular, but he does bring certain benefits to Republicans when he is on the ballot, especially in terms of turnout. in most elections during the Trump era when he has not been on the ballot, Democrats have done well. Broadly speaking, Republicans seem to do