Democrats Sweep 2025 Elections, 2024 Narratives Crumble

In state and local elections, American voters repudiated Donald Trump's presidency, and disproved claims of a lasting right-wing cultural shift

The 2025 elections went very well for Democrats, and pro-democracy Americans more broadly. Each state and local race had its own dynamics, but the overall picture is a repudiation of Donald Trump’s presidency. The popular energy displayed in large No Kings protests last month translated into votes.

In just about every possible way, the election undermined media narratives that treat Trump and the Republicans’ narrow 2024 win as a sweeping referendum on U.S. culture. In that narrative, the American people, boosted by a deeply conservative generation of young men, rose up to reject diversity, immigration, and racial and gender equality.

It was always absurdly overdetermined, acting like Trump’s 2024 popular vote plurality of 49.8% was a large majority, and underrating the fluky factors of inflation and a global anti-incumbency wave in the aftermath of COVID. But endless repetition got various people—especially some influential elites in business, media, law, and academia—to believe the narrative and act as if it’s true, thereby making it closer to real. 2025 election results show it isn’t.

Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears was among the candidates who ran hard on anti-trans stances, taking out multiple hate-stoking ads. It flopped. Democratic candidate Abigail Spanberger won by nearly 15 points, and every county in Virginia shifted blue by at least four points, with some as high as 16.

And it wasn’t due to low turnout. In the comparable 2021 election, one year after Biden and the Democrats won nationally, Republican Glenn Youngkin won Virginia’s gubernatorial election by two points, with about 1.66 million votes. With some votes left to count, Spanberger’s total is already over 1.9 million.

Trump-endorsed New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo and his supporters ran hard on bigotry—saying Muslim Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani would cheer another 9/11, putting out AI-generated ads of Black and Latino criminals for Mamdani, etc.—as well as anti-communist fearmongering. It flopped. New York saw the highest turnout for a mayoral election since the 1960s, and Mamdani got more than 50% in a three-candidate race. He won over a million votes, more than the entire population of South Dakota or Delaware.

New Jersey governor was a closely watched contest, since Kamala Harris beat Trump there last year by less than 6 points, and Democrats were trying to hold the governorship for a third term in a row. It was a blowout, with Democrat Mikie Sherrill winning by about 13 points.

Swing state Georgia, which went for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, elected Democrats to statewide office for the first time since 2011. Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard defeated Republican incumbents to win seats on the state’s Public Services Commission by running on the high cost of energy.

In light of 2025 results, votes in the previous election look more like 2024-specific choices than signs of a lasting cultural change. While pundits rushed to proclaim a “vibe shift”—in particular asserting that young men and Latinos moving towards Trump was due to a lasting conservatism formulated in negative reaction to an excessively woke left—the results just one year later show the opposite.

Young men voted for Democratic candidates by large margins. Spanberger will be Virginia’s first woman governor, and according to exit polls, won 18-29 year old men, 57 to 42. Similarly, in New Jersey, Sherrill won them 56 to 44. Mamdani, the most left-wing high-profile Democrat, got 68% of young men.

And all three Democrats got over 80% of young women.

Counties in New Jersey and Virginia with high Latino populations swung hard towards Democrats, with many shifting more than 10 points compared to 2024. Spanberger and Sherrill both won over 65% of Latino voters, with huge margins among women and solid majorities among men. Mamdani won Latinos by seven points, interestingly doing better with men than women.

These results wreck the argument from some prominent centrist commentators, such as Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, that Democrats should react to 2024 by accepting that they lost the culture and need to compromise on core values to win again. Be more anti-immigrant, be more anti-trans, be more positive towards anti-democracy bigots like Charlie Kirk. Not as much as Republicans, but move in that direction, since that’s supposedly where the American people are.

Nope. It was always bad advice, not just immoral but bad strategy too. Few voters who prioritize bigotry want the diet version, and trying to appease them alienates parts of the Democratic coalition. Yesterday’s vote shows that the path to defeating Trumpism is not accommodating it, but opposing it with the values of freedom, equality, and affordability.

Institutional Power

America still has a corrupt, lawbreaking, rights-violating, Constitution-disdaining fascist in the White House, and his enablers still control Congress. So there’s a long way to go. But pro-democracy Americans strengthened their position by gaining or retaining institutional power.

Virginia had a Trump-sycophantic governor in Republican Glenn Youngkin. Now it has a national security-minded Democrat in former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger, plus a sizable majority in both houses of the state legislature. Anti-Trump leaders in a state that borders Washington DC and contains a lot of federal workers is an asset.

New York City had a corrupt mayor in Trump’s pocket, since current leader Eric Adams had been caught taking bribes from Turkey, and Trump had the Justice Department drop the charges in exchange for Adams backing the president’s anti-immigrant push. Now America’s biggest city will have an openly defiant mayor who celebrates pluralism, displayed talent at online and in-person communication, and clearly gets under Trump’s skin.

Voters in swing state Pennsylvania retained three rule-of-law supreme court judges, defeating a deep-pocketed Republican push opposed to voting rights and abortion. Pennsylvania has been a focus of Trumpist lies, conspiracy theories, and bad faith election lawsuits, and Republicans unsubtly aimed to install judges who’d go along with that in the next congressional and especially presidential election. Voters didn’t let them.

California passed Proposition 50, allowing the state to gerrymander as a counter to the aggressive Republican gerrymanders in Texas and other red states. And here’s where things get especially interesting.

In normal circumstances, gerrymandering is bad for democracy, letting politicians give disproportionate power to “their” voters while effectively disenfranchising others, often racial minorities. But in America’s current circumstances, letting Trump and the Republicans manipulate their way to consolidated authoritarianism would be much worse.

Enabled by a Supreme Court majority hostile to the Voting Rights Act and its goal of racial equality, and prompted by Trump’s demands, Republican-controlled states are moving to redraw Congressional districts to try to win themselves a disproportionate number of seats in 2026, thereby retaining the House of Representatives. With Prop 50, California voters gave the state permission to retaliate, likely balancing out Texas’ artificial Republican gains with artificial Democratic gains.

Except there’s a big wrinkle. Gerrymandering can gain seats by spreading your party’s vote across more districts, but that dilutes your vote in each one you win. Imagine your party wins one district by 11 points, and loses a neighboring district by 1, for a combined vote of +10. With the same turnout, gerrymandering can turn that into two districts you win by 5. But not if your overall vote share goes down.

Republicans are redistricting based on 2024 numbers, and the inaccurate belief that Trump’s win revealed a growing right-wing majority. If next year’s midterms see turnout similar to this year’s off-cycle elections—a reasonable expectation, since the economy and Trump’s authoritarian abuses will probably keep getting worse, and his cult of personality has never turned out voters when he’s not on the ballot—then Republican gerrymanders may end up creating more competitive House districts rather than more safely red ones.

Overall, things will get worse before they get better. Trump and the Republicans will likely dial harder into authoritarianism, media control, and attempted election manipulation, seeking ways to retain power in the face of a popular backlash. But as the 2025 elections showed, that backlash is large and formidable—a popular front that ranges from democratic socialists to neoconservatives, with a lot of energized liberals and others in between.

It’s enough people power to, in time, pull America back from the authoritarian brink.