The New Yorker:

The senior elections analyst at RealClearPolitics on what the Party might’ve learned, and how the electorate is changing.

By Isaac Chotiner

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 Spanbergerover 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 Mamdani’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 they 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.

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