Why Democrats won the 2025 elections

Democrats romped in both high-profile and low-profile elections Tuesday, in what clearly seemed like a national trend.

Just one year after President Donald Trump and Republicans’ victories nationwide, the Democratic backlash has arrived in Tuesday’s elections.

Democrats won both governor’s races on the ballot, in Virginia and New Jersey — that was expected. But they won by a lot. Though votes are still being counted, at the time of this writing, Mikie Sherrill was winning New Jersey by 13 percentage points and Abigail Spanberger was winning Virginia by 14.

Such a result would mean a significant partisan swing — in both states — from last year, when Kamala Harris won them both by about 6 percentage points. It would also mean the political winds have shifted very dramatically from 2021, when Republican Glenn Youngkin won Virginia’s governorship by 2 percentage points and Democrat Phil Murphy won reelection in New Jersey by just 3.

In Virginia, Democrats also won down-ballot, expanding their House of Delegates majority from 51 seats to at least 60. This will likely allow them to gerrymander the state’s congressional map, which proponents say is necessary to counteract Republican gerrymandering in other states this year.

Even the Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general, Jay Jones — plagued by scandal due to the leak of texts in which he fantasized about the deaths of a political rival’s children — won, though by quite a bit less than Spanberger’s margin.

The good news for Democrats continued in lower-profile elections elsewhere. In Pennsylvania, three Democratic supreme court justices won their “retention elections” easily, letting them stay on the court 10 more years. In Georgia, two Democrats won statewide special elections for the Public Service Commission — contests which, Georgia Republicans had warned, could be a bellwether for the 2026 midterms.

Typically, it’s best to be cautious about what these off-year elections can tell us about how next year’s midterms will go. There is, after all, a whole year between now and then in which things can change. And the states with high-profile elections today are not representative of the country as a whole.

But there was a striking consistency to Tuesday’s results across states that really fits just one possible explanation: people are mad at Trump and voting for the opposition party.

One part of the story is that the Democratic base turned out. But another part is that swing voters, well, swung.