Democratic successes in local U.S. elections won’t soothe party’s anxieties about its future

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The Democrats scored a rare political hat trick in important off-year elections Tuesday, but their shutout against Donald Trump’s Republicans doesn’t begin to address the party’s divisions, its aimlessness, and its powerlessness as it girds for next year’s vital midterm congressional elections.

Yes, the triumph of two moderate female gubernatorial candidates in large Eastern states does suggest a way forward for a wayward party –but they came in Democratic strongholds that Mr. Trump in three tries has never conquered.

Even so, by emphasizing economic issues at a time when affordability of vital consumer goods is the pre-eminent issue in the United States, former representative Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Representative Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey underlined the vulnerability of Mr. Trump’s Republicans at a time of profound Democratic unease, even deep disagreement, about the party’s future.

The Democrats now face the decision about whether to regard the two campaigns as startups, and for party leaders to become, as tech entrepreneurs would put it, hyper-scalers of those tactics.

Meanwhile, the surge of participation, led by younger voters, that propelled a once-obscure democratic socialist to victory in the New York City mayoral race suggests that the Democrats may have the potential of creating an anti-elitist, anti-political-establishment vanguard to match that of a far different sort that the Republicans have created under Mr. Trump and his MAGA movement.

An important byproduct: Zohran Mamdani provided a broad avenue to bring Latino and Black voters back to the party’s fold at a time when Mr. Trump was making inroads in those groups, once solidly Democratic. And while he registered huge majorities in voters under 45, voters 65 and older – the stable rock of contemporary Democratic coalitions – fled him in massive numbers.

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But at the same time, the generational and ideological rebellion that fuelled the Mamdani campaign and movement – and the tatters in which it left the city’s political and economic power structures – may be making Democrats even more vulnerable to charges that the party, like its GOP counterpart, is careering toward extremism.

It raises questions over whether, despite its gubernatorial triumphs, the party could be approaching a forbidding and heretofore forbidden American political ledge that, besides scattered prominent exceptions in places like Idaho and North Dakota and a House member from New York, Vito Marcantonio (in Congress, 1939-1951), few major figures or movements have survived.

Thus, in the first major contests since the beginning of the second Trump era: a nettlesome Democratic dilemma festers despite the California ballot-initiative victory that could deliver as many as five new House of Representatives seats for the party.

One vital question: How much to run against Mr. Trump even if he is not on the ballot?

“Voters were sending a very strong message that they are looking for change from the current political environment,” said John McGlennon, a political scientist at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

“There may be some talk that Donald Trump was not emphasized, but here in Virginia the numbers, the social media and the television commercials say otherwise. Trump was mentioned constantly, but not by the Republicans.”

Two dollops of caution for those who might think the victory of Democratic women in both Virginia and New Jersey – the only states with the unusual tradition of conducting gubernatorial elections out of sequence with the rest of the country in the year after a presidential election – means that the Republicans are doomed in next year’s midterm congressional elections:

First: Mr. Trump’s poll ratings in both states are under water in territory not necessarily fundamentally hostile to Republicans, at least in off-year elections. Both New Jersey and Virginia have had prominent Republican governors since the Ronald Reagan years.

And second: The two states have remarkably similar, and astonishingly consistent, histories of rejecting gubernatorial candidates of the same party as the president in the White House.

So, while the January gubernatorial inaugurations of Ms. Spanberger in Richmond and Ms. Sherrill in Trenton is an encouraging sign for the Democrats, and indeed a vital development for a party thirsty for any relief from its drought of success since Mr. Trump was inaugurated, these figures should put a sobering tint on the midweek celebrations: Virginia now has elected a governor of the party outside the White House in 12 of the 13 elections since 1977, when Jimmy Carter was president. New Jersey now has done so in nine of the past 10 since 1989, when George H. W. Bush was president.

In short, voters in both states behaved predictably, in a manner best described in an 80-year-old American musical, Annie Get Your Gun. They were doin’ what comes naturally.

And in doing so, they very likely won’t salve the anxieties Democrats have about themselves and their future: a dangerous uneasiness reflected in a Pew Research Center survey released last week that found two out of three Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say the party makes them feel frustrated – a huge increase from the roughly half who expressed that sentiment in 2019 and 2021.

To be sure, that frustration catapulted Mr. Mamdani to Gracie Mansion, the elegant East River residence of the mayor of New York. And because it also swept in affluent voters in enclaves like Brooklyn, it instantly made the 2026 Senate candidacies of unconventional progressives in Maine and Michigan more plausible even as it provided fodder for Mr. Trump and his MAGA allies.

The President began his guns-ablaze criticism of Mr. Mamdani before he was declared the victor, calling him a “Communist with no experience and a Record of COMPLETE AND TOTAL FAILURE.”

This attack foreshadowed what clearly will be a Republican theme and meme in coming days: an effort to demonize Mr. Mamdani, who rattled the business elite and still handily defeated Andrew Cuomo despite the President’s late, grudging endorsement of the former governor.

They are set to portray him not as a talisman of idealistic rebellion to match their MAGA multitudes but instead as a toxic symbol of fringe progressivism gone wild, or worse – as an unrepentant Stalinist with a streak of class hatred and a strain of antisemitism.

Months earlier, amid Independence Day commemorations, the Vice-President pilloried Mr. Mamdani’s comments that said, “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country, even as we constantly strive to make it better.”

Mr. Vance ripped into him, portrayed him as lacking gratitude for the United States, and said, “Who the hell does he think that he is?”

As of Tuesday night, a backbench state assemblyman is two months from being the leader both of a rebellious movement and, as a consequence, of the biggest city in the United States.