Democrats woke up this Wednesday after a long 12-month nightmare with the feeling that their inability to connect with their voters and win elections like the one they lost exactly a year ago against US President Donald Trump was nothing but a bad dream.
Faith in the party's chances of victory returned with resounding wins in New York—where the socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral race in the most anticipated contest of the night—as well as in the gubernatorial elections in Virginia (which Abigail Sparberger turned blue, the Democratic color) and New Jersey (which Mikie Sherrill won). In both states, the centrist candidates swept their Republican opponents. The party, moreover, won almost everything where it ran: from the Detroit mayoral race to the vote to stop Somerville, Massachusetts, from investing in Israel.
The dose of good news—and the adrenaline rush after a year of post-mortem examinations of the November 2024 defeat—was completed by Californians' approval of Proposition 50, which put to a referendum the efforts of Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom to redraw voting districts in California. Newsom managed to convince his fellow citizens that only with tactics like this is it possible to defeat Trump, who is pushing to alter electoral maps across the country to favor his supporters in the 2026 midterm elections.
The effect of that vote goes beyond the confines of the most populous territory in the country, because it secures for the Democrats five seats up for grabs in next year's midterm elections, in which Republicans risk losing control of one or both Houses of Congress.
Left turn?
The California results arrived around midnight due to the time difference. By then, the outcome was clear, though there was no consensus on how to achieve it. The party, which celebrated its victories as a referendum on Trump's second administration—which is relentlessly advancing down its authoritarian path 10 months after he took office—remains divided on the best way to continue winning. Is progressivism and Mamdani's leftward shift the key? Or could his phenomenal campaign, from which there is much to learn about how to seduce the electorate in record time and mobilize young people, have never ended well in the purple states—the color resulting from mixing Democratic blue and Republican red?
These questions meant that each faction of the party had something to celebrate on Wednesday, and that the victory did not illuminate a single path toward the 2028 presidential elections. “The important thing,” explains Democratic Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez of New York to EL PAÍS, “is that we have sent a signal to the Republicans: there is an erosion of public support for the president, whose approval rating is at rock bottom.” “These elections have made it clear what battles we must fight and what positions we must adopt to win. It’s not about moderates or progressives, but about listening to the voters and fighting again for the working class,” adds Velázquez, who is on the left side of the coalition.
Both Spanberger and Sherrill presented themselves as moderate candidates, and both won by a landslide with over 56% of the vote. Their life stories further reinforced this moderate image. The new governor of Virginia was a CIA agent. The governor of New Jersey was a Navy helicopter pilot. They also shared the fact that they entered politics in opposition to Trump and successfully positioned themselves as an alternative to the policies of the White House occupant.
Mamdani, for his part, tried to focus on municipal issues such as rent freezes and free buses for New Yorkers, although with Trump in power, everything is inevitably overshadowed by the national circus, with him as its sole ringmaster. The young and proud socialist's emphasis on affordability in a city ravaged by money, where residents struggle to make ends meet, has proven to be a successful strategy that can be replicated elsewhere. It also stands in stark contrast to the campaign that led Kamala Harris to lose in every key state last year to Trump, whose candidacy successfully convinced voters that only Republicans cared about the cost of living and rampant inflation.
On Tuesday, when the debacle was already clear, the US president rushed to distance himself from the losers in his party with a message in all caps that once again revealed him as someone who only plays as a team player when the team wins. He wrote: “The fact that Trump wasn’t on the ballot and the government shutdown [which on Tuesday shattered its all-time record with no end in sight] are the two reasons why Republicans lost tonight, according to the pollsters.” On Wednesday, he addressed a group of conservative senators at a breakfast at the White House, asking them to examine their consciences, as if the matter had nothing to do with him.
Despite the blatant disclaimer of responsibility, Trump has a point: the results in Virginia, which until Tuesday had a Republican governor and is home to some 150,000 federal workers, indicate that voters blame the president's party for cutting off public funding. They also show that the Democrats' risky decision not to vote with their rivals to reopen the government until they receive guarantees that there will be no cuts to healthcare subsidies is proving to be a winning move in the arena of public opinion, despite the harm being done to federal employees who have stopped receiving their paychecks. Many have been forced to rely on food banks to fill their pantries.
Sherrill's victory in New Jersey, meanwhile, hides hopeful signs for his party, which has seen the return to the fold of some of the Hispanic and African American minority voters who fled in the 2024 presidential elections.
The respite that Tuesday's elections have given Democrats has not, however, resolved the major outstanding issue: who will be the leader to guide the party back to the White House? Mamdani cannot run for president because he was born in Uganda, and the law prohibits him from doing so. Harris, who has just published a memoir in which she blames everyone but herself for her defeat, has not ruled out the idea. And among the names that have been solidified in the predictions for months, from progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, none clearly stands out.
Newsom, who emerged strengthened from the Proposition 50 referendum as someone unafraid to take shortcuts to achieve results, is one of them. On Tuesday, he strove to make his victory appearance what history may ultimately remember as the first speech of his presidential campaign.
“What a night for the Democratic Party!” he said. “We are now a party on the rise, a party that is alert, no longer on the defensive. But this is not a victory just for us. It is a victory for America, for the people, and for the principles for which our Founding Fathers lived and died.”
Now it remains to be seen how far this momentum will take his party, and how they plan to regain their momentum after a year in limbo. In a country perpetually in campaign mode, the campaign for the 2026 midterm elections, in which the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate will be renewed, is officially underway a year before they take place.
