16 takeaways from Democrats' big night

When nobody votes, Democrats win.

Supporters celebrate during the election night watch party for Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger. She is projected to win the race against Republican Lieutenant Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by a significant margin. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

1. Wow, Republicans are really unpopular with high-propensity voters. In our surveys at The Argument, Democrats have consistently held an enthusiasm advantage among voters who say they’re likely to vote, so the Virginia and New Jersey results weren’t as surprising to us as they may have otherwise been. But these types of results are indicative of two things: first, that Republicans were doing poorly on persuasion, and second, they’re getting clobbered when it comes to turnout. For example, the rural southwest of Virginia, which is reliably Republican, is seeing turnout rates close to 10 percentage points lower than in urban areas like Fairfax, relative to 2024. -Lakshya
   

2. New York City’s big fail: I’m really mad at myself for not paying attention to what was happening with question six in New York City, because it’s the only ballot measure that looks like it’s going to lose (53-47). Question six asked voters whether local elections, which are currently held off-cycle in NYC, should be held in the same years as presidential elections are held.
   
   Incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani voted “no,” citing a New York Groove column (I think this one?) for his vote. Largely, I think people who say they want to prevent the nationalizing local elections by keeping elections off-cycle should ask themselves whether this off-cycle election really managed to remain local …
   
   But more importantly, this failure is just another in a long line of election timing manipulation efforts to ensure officials can choose the electorate they want. As many people have noticed, off-cycle voters look very different than on-cycle voters. In effect, Mamdani and those who pushed to keep elections off-cycle were choosing to have lower turnout. As I wrote for The Atlantic in 2023, this is nothing new: In the late 1850s, after New York’s Know-Nothing Party moved local elections off-cycle, turnout fell below turnout levels in gubernatorial and presidential elections.
   
   “By 1868, more than 155,000 votes were cast for governor in the November statewide election; a month later, just 96,000 people turned out for the mayoral contest. When the city went back on-cycle in the 1870s, voter turnout for the mayor’s and governor’s races reached near parity.” -Jerusalem

3. Trans-baiting looks like a flop: Winsome Earle-Sears has poured money into ads attacking her opponent for being too friendly to trans rights, going so far as to borrow directly from Donald Trump’s most famous spot in 2024, accusing Spanberger of being for “they/them not us.” The effort appears to have flopped; only 4% of voters named trans issues in education as their top issue in The Washington Post’s September poll (the top concern was, unsurprisingly, the economy).
   
   It’s a sign of changing times: In 2021, Glenn Youngkin rode into the governor’s mansion on a platform promising to restore “parents’ rights” over how schools teach on issues like race and gender, seizing on the anti-woke backlash that had prompted school-board protests in places like the affluent Loudoun County. That playbook appears to be played out in the second Trump era. -Jordan
   

4. Democrats won the most expensive judicial races in Pennsylvania history. These races mostly drew attention because of their implications for 2028 and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. As Semafor’s Dave Weigel mentioned on The Argument‘s election night live show, this was a real test of the presidential hopeful’s electioneering. The $14 million campaign to unseat the Democratic state supreme court judges failed despite desperate efforts by the Republicans, as described by Bolts:
   
   “Republicans instead tried a kitchen-sink approach, including blaming the justices for gerrymandering the state in deceptive mailers depicting an unbalanced map that, in fact, had been drawn by the GOP. Republican groups also tried to paint the justices as a threat to ‘women and children’ because the court overturned Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction. (The Cosby ruling was based on the justices’ finding of prosecutorial misconduct in his case.)
   
   At times, retention opponents even co-opted slogans that liberal protesters have used this year to oppose the second Trump administration: one batch of Republican campaign signs read ‘No Kings, No Retention.’” -Jerusalem
   

5. I wish Jay Jones had lost. Sorry, I do. I think a Democratic attorney general in Virginia is likely to make more calls I agree with and, in particular, less likely to entertain Trumpy abuses of federal power. But his comments about his opponents were genuinely horrendous, and I think they did a lot of damage to Americans’ ability to trust that almost no one literally wants to kill each other over our political differences — a shared value on which a functional democracy must rest. That cause is a lot more important to me than the Virginia AG. Plus, he came across as vindictive and kind of vicious, both bad traits in a prosecutor. He did trail Spanberger by a lot, so many voters felt the same as me — but he won anyway, because Democrats won by so much statewide -Kelsey

6. Anti-Trumpism is a really, really powerful force in American politics. especially in non-presidential elections. In Virginia and New Jersey, the Republican nominees were tied to a very, very unpopular president — and sometimes by choice. Yes, 2026 is going to have higher turnout than 2025 did, but it won’t be on the level of 2024, and from the evidence we have, the drop-off is likely to be disproportionately Republican. That’s not good news for the party, and it makes you wonder if more swing-seat lawmakers will announce retirements or if some state Republican parties will think twice about some of their more aggressive gerrymander plans, as Kyle Kondik of the Crystal Ball pointed out. -Lakshya
   

7. Tit-for-tat mid-decade redistricting is on hold in Kansas. Last night — perhaps in reaction to the blue wave — Kansas Republicans “dropped efforts to force a redraw of U.S. House districts.” Kelsey and I have been talking about our mutual concern for a race to the bottom on gerrymandering, even as we accept the reality that unilateral disarmament isn’t in the interests of democracy either. That Kansas is balking right now seems more a reflection of how bad the national environment is for Republicans than an attempt to lower the temperature, however. -Jerusalem

8. Georgia? No, seriously. Georgia? Two little-known statewide candidates just crushed two Republican incumbents on the Public Service Commission in Georgia. The commission decides the rates that utilities can charge consumers, and while I personally don’t think that these positions should be elected, these absolutely massive margins are a sign of the ongoing realignment of high-propensity voters toward the Democratic Party. -Jerusalem

9. Look down ballot: The real test of Democrats’ performance wasn’t Spanberger’s margin. It was the fact that in the attorney general’s race, Democratic nominee Jay Jones pulled out a win, despite a scandal over leaked text messages in which he vividly imagined shooting the former Republican speaker of the House of Delegates and his kids.
   
   The texts became a national controversy in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s shooting, with Republicans claiming they exemplified a supposed culture of violence on the left. Jones’s victory is mostly a sign of just how damaged the Republican brand currently is in the state. -Jordan
   

10. Newsom Blues: California’s Prop 50 looks likely to win by a huge margin, allowing Gov. Gavin Newsom’s gerrymandering efforts to move forward. Newsom is one of my least-favorite guys in politics, so it’s very grumpily that I acknowledge that he was highly effective here. He drew what Lakshya tells me is a beautiful map directly symmetric with the Texas one, and he ran an effective campaign to persuade the California electorate to back it.
    
    But as Newsom plots his run for president, he should keep in mind that winning over Californians, who were mostly very happy about the chance to cast an anti-Trump protest vote, is very different than winning over voters elsewhere — for whom the California affiliation is still poisonous. -Kelsey
    

11. Redistricting on the line: Because Virginia Democrats held the House of Delegates, they will be able to push ahead with their plans for a mid-decade redistricting to counter Republican gerrymandering elsewhere in the country. The effort requires a constitutional amendment; to make it happen, lawmakers will need to approve the plan for a second time when the next session begins in January. If it passes, it will then go to the voters in the form of a referendum. -Jordan
    

12. The No Kings Commonwealth? One big-picture thought: With Democrats sweeping their races last night, I think we’re seeing the emergence of Virginia as the home for a very specific kind of Democratic politics that’s moderate on policy but very open to bare-knuckle partisan tactics like redistricting. In 2017, you might have called them the resist libs. Now, it’s a spirit captured by the No Kings movement. -Jordan
    
    

    A left-wing Trump isn't the answer. This is.

13. Winning is fun. I had almost forgotten the “good election night” feeling. It feels good! However, I’m worried about the Democratic Party getting complacent. In lower-turnout off-year elections, Democrats win! Great! That won’t retake the Senate and it won’t put the party on a footing to contest every state, as it desperately needs to.
    
    Do you like the feeling of winning? Time to buckle down and figure out how to have policy offerings that win in Republican states and higher-turnout elections too. -Kelsey
    

14. Blue wave incoming? Ignore Kelsey. After tonight, you should be even more confident that Democrats are favored to flip the House, with or without redistricting going their way. They are netting four seats in California and could net up to three more in Virginia, given that they have the go-ahead to place a mid-decade redistricting amendment before the voters in an off-cycle election (which Democrats have been doing increasingly well in!).
    
    The environment might even look a lot like 2018’s — and though the party’s polling is notably worse now than it was at this point in 2017, Democrats are also outperforming their polls in these off-cycle elections by much more than in 2017. In other words, it’s possible polls aren’t fully capturing the Democratic enthusiasm advantage just yet. -Lakshya
    

15. Good news for YIMBYs: The housing ballot measures all passed! As I wrote yesterday morning, these aren’t a panacea — they are a necessary but insufficient condition for resolving the housing crisis. Mamdani’s last-minute endorsement of the housing ballot measures was better than nothing, but for folks wondering if the new mayor will really go full YIMBY … keep wondering! -Jerusalem
    

16. Virginia is unusual: The Virginia governor’s race is often treated as a bellwether for just how ticked off voters are at whoever happens to be occupying the White House. But this year, a few unusual factors gave Democrats their edge, making the state an awkward test case for the national environment. First, Northern Virginia is still furious about DOGE, which left its labor market in ashes. Thanks to the mass federal layoffs and cuts to contractors, the Dem-voting upper-middle class professionals who call Fairfax, Arlington, and Alexandria home were almost certainly eager for revenge against Elon and Russ Vought. (The military-heavy Hampton Roads area is in a similar slump.) Second, Republican gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears ran an especially bumbling campaign. With her socially conservative views, she was always an awkward fit for the state, but she didn’t help her case by siding with Trump on federal workforce cuts — or blurting out in her one debate that firing people for being gay “isn’t discrimination.” -Jordan