Democrats came out of the 2025 election cycle emboldened and strengthened, after two bigger-than-expected victories in Virginia and New Jersey where polls significantly overestimated the support for Republican candidates.
Other than making clear how the American people is souring on the GOP and the Trump administration at a moment when the President’s approval ratings have hit a second-term low as he struggles to limit the effects of inflation and many voters feel unsatisfied with the state of the economy, the 2025 off-year election cycle can provide interesting insights into the dynamics of important socio-demographic groups, how electoral coalitions will be shaped in the coming future and, crucially, what we can expect from, and what to look for ahead of, next year’s midterms.
The GOP Got Shellacked in Two Blue-leaning States
Yes, Kamala Harris carried both Virginia and New Jersey back in 2024, which may let you believe it was expected for Republicans to lose the governorships in two states that went Democratic last year, even considering the blowback the incumbent President’s party usually get in these kind of contest. Indeed, there is nothing to write home about the fact that Democrats won the two races – it was a widely foreseen outcome, with the election prediction market attributing Republicans less than a 1-in-10 chance of retaining the governorship in Virginia while predicting Democratic candidate Mikie Sherrill would win the Garden State’s higher office more than 80% of the times.
The surprise of the night came from the scope of Democrats’ victory: both Spanberger and Sherrill defeated their Republican opponent by a resounding 15-point margin after their President Trump lost their respective states by just around 6 points only 12 moths ago, marking a remarkable 9-point leftward which, if applied uniformly to last year’s election results, would give Democrats a landslide victory in the Electoral College, winning all seven swing states and coming close to flip states like Ohio or Iowa.
Republican Gains Were Reversed
But what’s even more troubling for Republicans, and for Democrats, is that reversed Trump’s 2024 gains into key constituencies that the GOP hoped to solidify and make permanent but proved, at least for now, to be a candle in the wind.
The main category the President made inroads into last year are Hispanic voters: a group that historically voted Democratic over the party’s message on immigration that swung hard to the right in 2024 due to Democrat’s inability to address concerns over the economy. The shift was momentous: Trump gained so much ground with Latino voters in the NYC and Philadelphia Metro Area – from Newark, NJ, all the way through Trenton – that New Jersey swung 10 points to the right compared to 2020, when Joe Biden carried it by 16 points.
But the President was able to gain ground with Asian voters too, something visible looking at its performance in the Virginia DC Metro Area: a high-population density region with high shares of Asian and Hispanic voters which, despite registering a high Median Household Income and ranking as one of the most college-educated areas in the country, shifted significantly in favor of Trump in 2024, contributing to the Old Dominion State’s 5-point rightward swing from 2020 despite Harris’ strong showing among well-off, college-educated voters in Whiter suburbs throughout Virginia.
Trends Favoring Democrats Kept Up
In fact, what’s even more troubling for the GOP is that recent trends favoring Democrats were amplified in last week’s elections. Since the begging of the Trump’s era, Democrats’ easiest target group has been White, upper-middle class and college-educated who reside in the nation’s suburbs. This group, the backbone of the traditional conservativism in Reagan’s and Bush’s Republican Party, has consistently become more Democratic in recent years, offsetting the GOP’s gains in rural areas and among blue collar voters and opening up opportunities for Democrats in erstwhile conservative suburban stronghold in states like Georgia or Texas.
A Dive Into New Jersey
While, even though to a different extent, Democrats maintained their newfound strengths in the suburbs, Republican were not capable of holding to their inroads into minorities or even improve their margins with a friendlier rural voters.
In Inner-NYC, a urban, diverse region in New Jersey that borders New York City characterized by somewhat low level of MHI and educational attainment, and which swung hard in Trump’s favor last year, Sherrill run ahead not only of Harris, but even of Biden’s 2020 16-points victory. Maybe even more importantly, evidence suggests that the region’s significant leftward shift in 2025 had more to do with voters’ persuasion than turnout fluctuations. Indeed, despite turnout being naturally lower in an off-year contest compared to a presidential elections, Sherrill’s margin was so big that she ended up netting more raw votes out of the region than Kamala Harris, an extraordinary testament to the persuasion effort put in place by the Sherrill campaign and the enthusiasm it generated.
The same dynamics are visible in the demographically similar Trenton-Camden Area, while Sherrill’s gains were more limited in the richer and more college-educated Outer NYC Area. This more suburban region, which is still home to a significant amount of minority population, did shift to the left from 2024 to 2025, but Sherrill fell short of 2020 Biden’s numbers: still, also considering the turnout drop compared to last year, Sherrill managed to net around 70K ballots out of the area with respect to 2020.
The turnout problem hit Republicans in conservative-friendly turfs like Jersey Shore, where despite a minor percentage shift Ciattarelli’s margin of victory was reduced by 40K votes compared to Trump’s, or South Jersey, where a combination of turnout decrease and Sherrill’s good showing with Black voters reduced her margin of loss by 25K.
Two Somewhat Different Coalitions
While Sherrill’s landslide victory was built on turning out low-income, urban minorities that helped propel Trump to the presidency for a second time and came back to the fold over concerns on the cost of living the administration has not been able to address, the biggest drive of Democratic gains in Virginia was represented by another key part of the party’s modern coalition: suburban voters.
A Dive Into Virginia
Yes, Spanberger ran extremely strong in the highly-diverse DC Metro Area, which swung back to 2020 numbers after shifting red last year, but the turnout drop in the region was significant (chart) and, unlike in the Inner NYC Area, where Sherrill was able to improve so much Democrats’ share of the votes that she netted raw votes despite fewer ballots being cast, that resulted in Spanberger’s margin of victory being reduced by almost 200K units compared to Harris’.
On the other hand, the Virginia Governor-Elect blew the door off the Old Dominion’s suburbs, from Northern Virginia to the Richmond and Hampton Roads metropolitan areas. Some of the regions that registered the smallest rightward shifts from 2020 to 2024, high-income, college-educated voters in Virginia suburbs gave Spanberger their blessing, as she ran well ahead of Biden’s 2020 numbers in these areas, when he carried the state by 6 points. Spanberger’s exceptional performance meant she could offset the effects of a lower turnout, gaining 100K votes combined from Richmond and Norfolk (Hampton Roads Metro) and reducing the GOP candidate’s margin of victory by 40K ballots in NoVA.
Notably, as Spanberger made the biggest inroads with well-off and college-educated voters, the correlation between MHI and educational-attainment and 2024->2025 leftward shift was roughly equal, unlike in 2024, when educational attainment was correlated more strongly to 2020->2025 swing. In other words, while Trump was able to gather some support from the very-rich in 2024, the same was not true for Earle-Sears: Spanberger’s inroads became even bigger as the MHI approaches sky-high levels.
Earle-Sears can take solace looking at her performance in the Black Belt, a rural area with a high share of Black voters, where she ran particularly close to Trump’s 2024 numbers, seeing her margin shrink by only a handful of ballots compared to last year.
On the other hand, the Republican candidate’s showing in Southwest Virginia, a White, rural, and MAGA-friendly area, was disastrous. Despite running as a staunch conservative often positioning herself to the right of incumbent Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, she was not able to generate sufficient enthusiasm with the party base causing turnout to significantly drop and having her margin of victory shrunk by around 100K ballots compared to Trump’s, despite running only slightly behind his numbers in terms of share of the vote.
Republican Turnout Woes
The dynamics registered in SWVA raise a particular red flag for Republicans looking ahead at next year’s midterms. While the GOP’s slippage with minority voters may as well be lethal for the party’s hopes of retain control of Congress after 2026, in particular in light of the negative judgement expressed by Hispanics on Trump’s handling of the economy, which he promised to make flourish during last year’s campaign, and immigration which could effectively erase GOP gains among them, Republicans may have to confront a more fundamental issue: turnout out their voters.
As the GOP has increasingly been relying on low-propensity voters – those who participate in elections infrequently rather than on a consistent base – their major concern may end up not being make sure that right-leaning voters don’t defect to Democrats, but that they don’t show up at all at the ballot box next year.
As Democrats need to flip only a handful in order to gain control of the House of Representative – the exact number will depend on how mid-decade redistricting across various state and a Supreme Court case dealing with the Voting Rights Act pan out, but a number between 5 and 10 seems most likely as of now – and effectively spell the end of the Trump’s administration legislative agenda, possibly initiating impeachment procedures and relegating the President to a lame duck status, even minor turnout fluctuations could be able to flip the scale in one direction and decide the outcome of the election.
Republicans’ main issue is that they struggle to turn out their voters in low-key off-year contests when Trump is not on top of the ticket, while the Democratic electorate is more prone to participate even in non-presidential races. This was clearly visible looking at the percentage decrease in votes cast in Virginia from 2024 to this year’s gubernatorial election. The correlation between turnout and educational attainment is striking: counties with the highest shares of population possessing a college degree also registered the smallest percentage decline in ballot cast, while areas with low educational attainment levels recorded the steepest drops.
The same conclusion is drawn considering the relationship between turnout drop and Kamala Harris’ 2024 share of the vote: the more Democratic a region is, the less turnout decline it registered this year, with the exception of the highly-diverse DC Area, which saw a participation decline despite being heavily liberal, considering that minority voters have traditionally been less consistent than their White counterparts.
While a single election held during a government shutdown should not make Democrats rest on their laurels, the 2025 cycle sent a number of worrying signals for the GOP that, taken together, suggest that Trump’s party may have a hard time at performing well in next year’s midterms.
Be it Republican’s slippages with minority amid a difficult-to-solve cost-of-living crisis or their persisting difficulties in affluent suburbs – which are covered throughout the US by a number of swing districts that may end up deciding who controls the House – these bruising election losses send a waking call to the GOP, which may need to rethink its working and communicating strategy in order to defeat political gravity and come out of next year’s midterm elections unscathed.
