Trump and GOP lose big in off-year election

There is no spin that can change the fact that Democrats had a huge victory in the off-year election,

One can fairly note that the major races were in blue states – and Democrats were expected to prevail.  Even the one state in which the governorship flipped – Virginia – has generally been listed among the bluer states.

What should keep President Trump and the GOP awake at night is the scope and depth of the victories.  The races in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City were expected to be close.  That is what the pundits were saying, and the polls were showing.  (Once again the pollsters missed.)

The races were blowouts – landslides by today’s standards.  In Virginia, Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger topped Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears 58 to 42 percent.  In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill defeated Jack Ciattarelli by 56 to 43 percent.  While Zorhan Mamdani was expected to prevail in the Big Apple, he was not on track to win a clear majority against former Governor Andrew Cuomo and perennial candidate Curtis Sliwa – but he did.

As expected, the voters of California approved Governor Newsom’s plan to redistrict the state to provide more Democrat congressional seats – up to five, by most estimates.  This was in response to the Texas plan to redistrict to gain five new Republican seats.

The Democrat victories ran deep – winning up and down the ballot in state and local offices.  It is almost impossible to find offices that flipped from Democrat to Republican.  Counties that Trump had won in 2024 flipped back to the Democrats by wide margins.

More bad news for Trump and the GOP was the Black and Latino vote.  Trump had done well with minority voters – even winning a majority of male Hispanics.  That trend hit a brick wall this year. 

Those are the facts.  The critical question for Trump and Republican strategists is “why?”  How can a party with a record low approval rate win so big?

The second question is easy to answer.  It is how elections have been decided in recent years.  There is universal disdain for the ruling class in both parties.  Voters are forced to choose which candidate or party they dislike the least.  It was Trump in 2016 and 2024, and Biden in 2020.  This year voters disliked the Democratic Party the least.

Republican pundits point to population shifts.  For example, approximately 800,000 people have left New Jersey since 2024.  They surmise that they were mostly more conservative folks – Republicans.  Even if true, that hardly explains the magnitude and depth of the Democrat sweep.

Another ominous sign for Republicans was the size of the voter turnout.  That is never considered to be good for the party in power.  Voters generally turn out in big numbers to turn out the party in power.  In this case voters viewed Trump and the Republicans as the party in power.  The vote was a pushback against Trump and Trump policies.  Democrats successfully made Trump the issue in this election – essentially nationalizing the election.  We know that because 70 percent of voters said their vote was anti-Trump.  He was THE issue in their minds as they cast their ballots.

I have routinely advised candidate clients that elections are won or lost on what the voters decided to decide upon.  We can see how that worked in New Jersey.   According to pre-election polls, the number one issue on voters’ minds was high taxes – New Jersey being one of the highest tax states in the country.  That should have been a problem for Democrats in the Garden State.  But the voters decided to decide their votes on Trump.

Just one year ago, Trump stunned the political intelligentsia by pulling off his greatest victory against the longest odds.  One year later he is – to some measure — politically toxic.  How did that happen?

First and foremost, there has been the continuing extreme criticism.  Trump has been repeatedly compared to the world’s worst despots – even Adolph Hitler.  The entire GOP has been demonized had Nazi cultists.   That is all a lie, but as Joseph Goebbels noted, big lies repeated over and over will gain credibility. That is what we have been seeing.

But much of the problem has been Trump, himself – and the policies and actions he has so aggressively pursued since reclaiming the presidency.  He started doing things that did not have popular appeal – and he should have known it.  Most Americans thought his blanket appeal for the January 6^th rioters was wrong.  That was true even of people who believed the rioters were overly prosecuted. Folks were not happy with the impact of tariffs on retail prices. Building a larger ballroom for the White House was much needed by most accounts, but the timing was bad optics.  And Trump and the GOP were getting the blame for the shutdown.

Trump’s biggest problem was presiding over an economy that was not getting better in most folks’ judgment — at least in the perception of the consumer public.  It has been true in virtually every election that the economy is a major factor in how the public votes.  As Democrat strategist put it, “It is the economy, stupid”.  It was true again this year.

The economy is doing okay and poised to do better in the future.  But it is today’s economy that voters were considering – especially against Trump’s promise to improve the economy  from day one. 

There is a lot of speculation as to the impact of the off-year election on the 2024 mid-term election.  I will wade into that turbulent water in a future commentary.  For now, I can only concede that the off-year election was not good for Trump or the GOP.

So, there ‘tis.