After a Drubbing, Does the GOP Have a Plan?

Donald Trump “has reordered America’s political divide both geographically and demographically,” the New York Times conceded this past May. The map accompanying the paper’s exploration of the new political landscape showed the United States with a surfeit of crimson arrows all pointing right. The scale and durability of the electorate’s red shift were still in doubt. America’s political realignment was not.

In a similar initiative for The Atlantic, the pollster Patrick Ruffini identified the series of political conversions that Trump had engineered during his decade in politics in their various stages. First, the “midwestern white working class” sorted themselves into the president’s camp. Then came the “nonwhite voters once at the center of Barack Obama’s coalition, especially working-class Hispanics.” And because these shifts are predicated as much on cultural identity as ideology, they may be permanent. “Absent a big change in how these voters perceive the Democratic Party,” Ruffini wrote, “they aren’t going back.”

At the presidential level, Ruffini might be right. But to survey the results of 2025’s off-year elections is to fail to see any trace of the epochal political reordering that is so evident when Trump is on the ballot. This year, the voters in the demographics that once again handed Trump the keys to the White House stayed home. And the voters that did turn out gave Republicans a drubbing.

Virginia’s voters dealt out the hardest of the blows the GOP absorbed on Election Night. The Democratic Party expanded its control of the state’s House of Delegates, ejecting at least 15 Republican incumbents, and increasing its majority from 51 to 64 seats. Democrats defeated conservative radio host John Reid, the first openly gay major-party nominee on a statewide ticket in Virginia, in the race for lieutenant governor. They pushed their scandal-plagued nominee for attorney general, Jay Jones, over the finish line despite his record of fantasizing about the deaths of his opponent and his opponent’s children. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger handily defeated Republican nominee Winsome Earle-Sears, outperforming her RealClearPolitics polling average by more than four points.

In postmortem analyses of the GOP’s failures, some blamed Earle-Sears’s inability to settle on a “motivational message that excited voters to get off the couch,” as a onetime Virginia GOP candidate told Politico. “The economy was the No. 1 issue,” another onetime Republican state-level lawmaker said. Earle-Sears had a different theory of the case. She leaned hard into cultural issues -- specifically, those that relate to transgenderism -- reprising themes struck so successfully by the Trump campaign in 2024. But it’s not 2024 anymore.

Trump’s victory not only resulted in a slate of executive actions targeting that cultural hot button; it also gave tacit permission to private industries and enterprises to turn away from their past support for transgender ideology. Trump’s victory denuded trans-related controversies of much of their sting, if only because he succeeded in making them less present in Americans’ lives. In a sense, Earle-Sears was a victim of Trump’s success.

It would be folly to draw too many sweeping conclusions from the Earle-Sears campaign’s implosion, though, because the dynamic that defined the governor’s race in Virginia was reversed in New Jersey. In the Garden State, the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee, Jack Ciattarelli, was relentlessly on-message -- energetic, personable, ubiquitous, and hyper-focused on state-level bread-and-butter issues to the exclusion of almost all else. But he lost, too -- by a lot.

In his face-off against incumbent New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy four years ago, Ciattarelli wildly outperformed expectations (and the polls) to come within striking distance of the governor’s mansion. Heading into Election Day this year, the RealClearPolitics average showed the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Mikie Sherrill, ahead by just over three points -- well south of Murphy’s polling margins in 2021, which Ciattarelli beat by a full five points. But on November 4, there was another polling miss -- this time, a rare underestimation of Democratic enthusiasm. In the end, Sherrill sailed to victory with a 13-point margin, beating her polling average by a staggering ten points.

Sherrill ran an uninspired campaign, most of which she spent evading the campaign themes Ciattarelli stressed: the unaffordability of life for New Jersey residents, spiking power costs, and onerous local tax burdens. Her lopsided victory nevertheless helped Democrats unseat five Republican lawmakers in the New Jersey General Assembly, narrowing the GOP minority to just 23 seats.

The Sherrill campaign bet that the state’s voters would put aside their qualms about handing Democrats a third straight term of gubernatorial control for the first time since 1961 if she could tether Ciattarelli to Trump. Democrats blanketed the airwaves with attacks on Ciattarelli’s “100 percent MAGA” bona fides, insisting he was both a tax hiker and a miserly figure happy to see initiatives like a new Hudson River rail tunnel grind to a halt for the sake of blocking Obamacare subsidies. This convoluted messaging strategy worked. Democratic voters turned out in droves, and not just in Virginia and New Jersey.

In Pennsylvania, voters overwhelmingly chose to retain three Democratic state supreme court justices. Erie County voters backed the Democratic candidate for county executive over the Republican incumbent by 24 points. In Bucks County, a pivotal Philadelphia collar county that Trump flipped to the GOP in 2024 for the first time since 1988, voters gave their incumbent Republican sheriff the boot.

In Georgia, Democrat Peter Hubbard became the first state-level candidate to win a statewide race for his party in 20 years, but he didn’t hold that singular title for long. Shortly after Hubbard’s race was called, Democrat Alicia Johnson duplicated the feat, winning over 60 percent of the vote in her pursuit of a seat on the Public Service Commission. In nearby Mississippi, Democrats put an end to the GOP’s 13-year supermajority in the state Senate by flipping two seats.

In response to efforts by some Republican-led states to redraw congressional maps to boost Republicans’ chances of holding the House in next year’s midterm elections, California’s voters easily approved a measure committing the state to mid-decade redistricting. That initiative could net Democrats as many as five new House seats.

And, in major urban centers across the country where the contests came down to a choice between far-left Democrats and outright socialists, it was often the socialists who carried the day.

In Atlanta, Kelsea Bond became the city’s first-ever socialist city council member. Socialists elected onetime Rashida Tlaib communications director Denzel McCampbell to the Detroit City Council, increasing the presence of the Democratic Socialists of America in the nine-member chamber to two. Katie Wilson, the self-described socialist candidate for Seattle mayor, ousted incumbent Democrat Bruce Harrell. And in New York City, Zohran Mamdani won a majority of the vote in a three-way race. On Election Night, he promised New Yorkers a new day -- when there would be “no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.” With abounding evidence, the far-left magazine Jacobin called 2025 the year of “municipal socialism.”

It is always a risk to draw sweeping conclusions about the trajectory of American politics from a handful of contests in the year that follows a presidential election. But there’s the risk of folly, too, in declining to acknowledge evidence of what looks a lot like a blue wave in miniature.

Despite the discrepancies in candidate quality, the variety and salience of state-level issues, and the much-vaunted national political realignment, the 2025 electorate seemed motivated primarily by the opportunity to send a message to Washington. And that message was unmistakably one of contempt for Donald Trump.

Indeed, that Spanberger’s and Sherrill’s margins of victory closely track with the president’s disapproval rating in their respective states seems to tell that tale clearly enough. And if that electorate looks anything like the one that materializes in November 2026, Republicans should expect even deeper losses -- losses that will have much more dramatic implications for national politics.

Trump made historic inroads with Hispanic voters in 2024 -- a shift that helped him flip Latino-heavy (and commensurately dark-blue) counties such as Passaic, N.J. This year, Sherrill beat Ciattarelli in Passaic by 15 points while winning two-thirds of the state’s overall Hispanic vote. The story was the same in Hispanic-dominated locales in Virginia, such as Manassas Park. There, the electorate swung 22 points in the Democrats’ direction.

Likewise, the elections showed once again that the president’s appeal among a small but significant minority of black voters is not transferable to GOP candidates down the ballot. While Trump won 15 percent of black voters in 2024, according to the Pew Research Center’s validated voter survey, preliminary Virginia exit polls showed Earle-Sears winning just 7 percent of black voters (and a meager 3 percent of black women). In New Jersey, Ciattarelli won only 5 percent of black voters, who made up 10 percent of the electorate.

Voters with four-year college and advanced degrees backed Democratic candidates at rates similar to their 2024 margin for Kamala Harris. In contrast with last year, though, voters without a college degree made up a notably smaller percentage of the electorate. Only about one in five voters in New Jersey and Virginia did not attend college or earn a four-year degree. Voters without a college education remain a pivotal part of Donald Trump’s electoral coalition, but they are unreliable voters. Indeed, when the president’s name doesn’t grace the top of a national ticket, they often end up staying home.

It was women who were perhaps most responsible for the Democratic Party’s victories this year. Spanberger beat her Republican opponent by 30 points among women, who account for 52 percent of Virginia’s electorate. In New Jersey, Sherrill carried women, who also made up the majority of voters, by 25 points. While there were no exit polls of either Virginia or New Jersey in 2024, in nearby Pennsylvania, Trump defied the gender dynamic that propelled Democrats to victory this year. Last November, Trump beat Harris among men in the Keystone State by 17 points while managing to lose women by only ten points.

When Trump is on the ballot, Republicans have ample evidence to conclude that his presence reorders the electorate in tectonic ways. But they have as much or more evidence to indicate that the electorate reverts to a more familiar shape when he’s not. That is quite the conundrum for a party that has remade itself into a vehicle for Trump’s highly personal brand of politics. Indeed, the fact that the president’s name will never again be at the top of a national ticket should keep Republican strategists up at night.

Ultimately, Election Day 2025 was a conventional affair in which the party that just lost the previous general election mounted a comeback on the strength of its voters’ opposition to the sitting president. If 2026 follows a typical trajectory, the lame-duck president’s second midterm election is on track to mirror the 2018 midterms, when a 41-seat Democratic gain dismantled the Republican majority in the House.

If Republicans are going to stave off that outcome, they’ll have to develop an identity for their party that is not tethered to Donald Trump. They had better do it soon.