All right, I'm a day late (yesterday got away from me so we're doing a Thursday evening article about Tuesday's election) and we have a lot of races to cover, so let's get started on what (and I don't say this lightly) might have been the most one-sided election night in America I've ever seen: the blue wave was a tsunami Tuesday evening.
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| Gov-Elect Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) |
The biggest victories last night for the Democrats, at least in terms of partisan hierarchy, were twin gubernatorial victories in Virginia & New Jersey. The two sometimes felt like twin victories given that both winners were Democratic women who flipped House seats in the 2018 midterms and came to Congress after careers in traditionally male-dominated government jobs (Mikie Sherrill was in the Navy, Abigail Spanberger in the CIA). And both of the wins, despite a lot of hemming-and-hawing over polls (there were people who thought Sherrill, in particular was going to be in a tied-race due to late polling that ended up being cataclysmically wrong), were double-digit, comfortable mandates that came on the heels of Kamala Harris scoring lukewarm victories in these states last year.
Spanberger's win is the flip, and has garnered the most headlines, particularly accompanied with flips downballot for Lieutenant Governor & Attorney General, the latter with the Democratic nominee mired in scandal (as well as Spanberger being the commonwealth's first female governor). Her victory also came with a double-digit seat gain for the Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly, and is the next step in an increasingly likely plan to do another mid-decade gerrymander, this time for the Democrats, that should result in the left getting a 4-seat gain in the Old Dominion. Sherrill's victory, though, is also impressive-it comes on the heels of the two-term governorship of Phil Murphy, meaning this is the first time since the 1960's that the Democrats have won the New Jersey governor's mansion in three successive elections. This puts the number of Democratic governors at 24, which means that they just need a net gain of two seats next year to gain a majority of the governorships for the first time since 2009 (i.e. something they could not pull off in Trump's first term).
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| Commissioner-Elect Alicia Johnson (D-GA) |
Perhaps more important if you're watching for some electoral college hope, Democrats also scored big victories in Georgia & Pennsylvania last night. In Georgia, Democrats Peter Hubbard & Alicia Johnson both won landslide victories for seats on the Georgia Public Safety Commission, ousting two statewide Republicans. This isn't as glossy of a victory as Spanberger or Sherrill's, but it may be more impressive-no Democrat has won a statewide, non-federal race in Georgia since 2006. Given that Republicans are trying to hold the governorship after a 24-year-run next year, and not to mention they're trying to flip Sen. Jon Ossoff's seat, this is a really ominous sign for the GOP's chances, and indicates that Georgia, despite a fall-off last year for Kamala Harris, seems ripe for Democrats to start swinging to the left.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats also held onto three seats in the State Supreme Court, which means that the state (another of the Big 7 swing states) will be guaranteed to have a Democratic majority in 2028 during the next presidential election. This is also coming off of a really bad night in 2024 (more than any of the Big 7, Pennsylvania in 2024 was a disappointment for Democrats given how poorly they did down-ballot, in particular losing Bob Casey's US Senate seat), so the Democrats needed a win.
It wasn't just the swing states, though, that went blue. Even deep red states like Mississippi had great news-the Democrats were able to win two seats in the Mississippi State Senate, therefore breaking a supermajority in the upper chamber for the first time in years.
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| Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani (D-NY) |
Spanberger & Sherrill were the headlines Wednesday morning given their offices (governors become presidents, and both are names you'll likely start hearing for such positions in the future), but it's New York City's mayoral election that was front page news for most of the country. In an upset that seemed impossible to imagine at the beginning of the year, New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, the telegenic 34-year-old Democratic Socialist who ran on an exclusively progressive agenda, defeated former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to lead the most important city in America.
Mamdani's victory is a huge one for the Democratic Left, and you saw figures ranging from elected officials like Bernie Sanders & Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to online influencers like Hasan Piker celebrating this win. Mamdani's victory gives the left a rare opportunity to show what a self-described socialist approach might look like in America on a large scale, as Mamdani would be to the left of pretty much every governor in America (if he does well, it could open doors for the left to run on his legacy in other places...if he doesn't, it could hurt their cause given he'll be pointed to as an example of someone who got a chance & didn't work). Mamdani's victory ensured that Andrew Cuomo, who had to resign in 2021 in disgrace, will end his career the same way his father did-losing a general election that he led in in early polls to a man who started the contest as a nobody.
I will also note, because it's become something of a debate on social media in the past 24 hours, that Mamdani's win is not, historically, all that impressive. If you compare him to most Democratic nominees for NYC Mayor, he underwhelmed (those comparing him to the Obama 2008 campaign need to check themselves-Obama's race was far more of an achievement). Of course, winning a landslide wasn't really his goal, and wasn't really possible. He was running against a well-funded, well-known former governor, and because of his viewpoints, was unpalatable to large chunks of an electorate that normally favors a Democrat. I honestly don't think it matters-winning margins when you're groundbreaking (and Mamdani's politics and youth do make him groundbreaking) matter less than just getting a win, but it has to be said that if the Democratic establishment had gone all-in on a more conventional Democrat without Cuomo's baggage (like, say, NYC City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams), it's possible Mamdani's campaign would've mirrored that of Omar Fateh's in Minneapolis: bigger-than-usual, but not a victory proper.
Mamdani's victory also is a bad look for Chuck Schumer, who (along with fellow Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand) refused to endorse the Democratic nominee in the race (and unlike Gillibrand, Schumer is a NYC resident, so he definitely voted on Tuesday). Schumer has faced criticism for poor strategic approaches in recent months (particularly his tacit endorsements of candidates like Haley Stevens for Senate), but this is a bad look because it will come back to haunt him. Not only has a man he refused to endorse just become mayor of the biggest city in his state, but he did so with the endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seen as Schumer's likely primary opponent. Schumer could've taken a play from Kathy Hochul (who gave Mamdani a reserved, but very real endorsement, and will probably escape a particularly robust primary challenge as a result), but didn't, and I suspect he may pay a bigger price for it than his inaction indicated.
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| Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) |
Let's turn our attention to the 2026 midterms, but we don't have to crane our necks too far as the state of California is giving us a grand look. Proposition 50 passed overwhelmingly last night in the Golden State, meaning that the gerrymandered maps that Gavin Newsom pushed to counter the gerrymandered maps in Texas will officially become the law, and part of 2026's math. In California, it is likely that the Democrats will net another 4-5 additional seats. Three of them seam near-certain after last night, with Ken Calvert, Kevin Kiley, & Doug LaMalfa all three now in districts that went for Kamala Harris by double digits (the kinds of seats it's basically impossible to win in a blue midterm), and Darrell Issa is now in a seat that Trump lost, albeit by 3-points. The problem for Issa is that he's way too conservative to get crossover support, something that's not the case for David Valadao (in a Biden/Trump seat now, though one Biden won by much more than Trump), though Valadao also has to be nervous.
Calvert won't even run in the 41st district-much of his old district is in the 40th seat currently held by Rep. Young Kim (which was made much redder to shore up the other districts), setting up what will be the cycle's first member vs. member. It won't be the last, though-in Texas, a special election to fill the seat of the late Rep. Sylvester Turner went to a run-off between County Attorney Christian Menefee and attorney Amanda Edwards. Whomever wins this seat (the race will conclude in January) will surely run for reelection in a race against Rep. Al Green. Member vs. Member races oftentimes get ugly (and are extremely rare outside of a year ending in "2"), so both are worth keeping an eye upon, particularly the one in Texas which will echo the ongoing narrative about age (Green is 78-years-old, both Menefee and Edwards are under 45).
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| Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) |
Former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) last night proclaimed the Senate in play, and if this is the electorate (a huge if), she'd absolutely be right. It's worth noting that most of the Virginia Assembly seats that flipped, to be fair, were in seats that either Harris won or Trump won by less than 5-points in 2024-the electorate was in some ways just giving Democrats the victories they needed down-ballot. But the recalibration of, say, Hispanic voters back to Biden-era voting in New Jersey is a question mark for states like Texas, Nevada, & Florida next year which have Gubernatorial and/or Senate races up for reelection.
The single person that felt like she should be the most nervous last night, though, was Susan Collins. If it's a case where hard-red areas aren't going blue (just getting a bit pink), but the blue/purple districts are abandoning Republicans en masse in the Trump 2.0 era, there is no candidate that feels more vulnerable under that scenario than Collins. Collins has built most of her brand off of Democrats willing to split their ticket with her, and she can't win without that phenomena continuing in 2026. One has to wonder if she's doing internal polling right now to make sure Graham Platner stays in the lead, given he is a uniquely toxic candidate she could exploit in a way that she won't be able to go against Janet Mills.
But it's also still anyone's game, as is evidenced down-ballot in the Pine Nut State, where Rep. Jared Golden's decision to retire yesterday made it all-but-certain that a different former governor, Paul LePage (i.e. the guy Mills beat in 2022) will flip the seat. Democrats on the left have long-hated Golden, to the point they drove Matt Dunlap to challenge him from his left (possibly a contributing factor to his retirement), but now they'll get a red seat as a result. If we're witnessing the rise of a Democratic Tea Party, they seem to be making some of the key mistakes that the Republicans made in 2010 & 2012.
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