Where’s the Off-Year Blue Wave?

Republicans obviously would like to celebrate victories in Tuesday’s New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections. But they can celebrate almost as much if the GOP nominees simply lose by as much as or less than President Trump lost each state by last year.

That seems counterintuitive. After all, a loss is still a loss. It’s important, though, to put contests into the context of their political demography. A narrow loss in a Democratic state implies a pro-GOP tilt even though it wasn’t enough.

This is especially important to keep in mind when looking at New Jersey and Virginia. Both are Democratic states at the national level despite some high-profile GOP statewide victories in recent decades.

The Republican presidential nominee has not carried the Garden State since 1988, while George W. Bush was the last one to win the Old Dominion, in 2004. The drought extends even further when it comes to the U.S. Senate. Republicans last won a Virginia Senate seat in 2002, while you have to go back to 1972 to find the last GOP triumph in New Jersey.

State races are barely any better for Team Red. Republicans have won only two gubernatorial elections in each state since the turn of the century.

Republicans, then, should go into each election cycle hoping to win but expecting to lose.

Savvy political analysts from both parties know this. They will be looking as much at the margins of victory should the Democratic nominees prevail to gauge how much the national political climate has shifted since last fall.

President Trump did quite well against baseline expectations in both states, owing to large shifts rightward among the state’s non-white voters. His 5.8-point defeat in Virginia was more than four points better than his 2020 loss, while his 5.9-point deficit in New Jersey was a whopping ten points less than four years earlier.

We should expect Democrats to do better than that in a midterm election. In off-year races, voters typically swing against the party that won the White House, and these states’ histories are proof of that.

Every gubernatorial nominee in these states of the party that lost the White House in the year before has done better than that party’s nominee the year before going back to 2009.

Sometimes the shift is huge, like Chris Christie’s and Bob O’Donnell’s 2009 wins. These GOP nominees shifted their states by between 19 and 24 points from John McCain’s sizeable losses in 2008.

Sometimes it’s tiny. New Jersey Democrat Chris Murphy did only 0.1 percentage point better in 2017 than Hillary Clinton had in 2016. Virginia Republican Ken Cuccinelli could shave only 1.4 points off Mitt Romney’s 3.9-point loss in 2012.

But the important point is that nominees from the party out of power in the White House always do better than their party’s presidential nominee did twelve months earlier.

This suggests that both Democratic nominees should be easily walking away with their contests given their states’ historic Democratic leans.

Polls, however, suggest that’s not the case. Virginia Democrat Abigail Spanberger is ahead by only 7.4 points in the RealClearPolitics polling average, only a slight improvement on Kamala Harris. The New Jersey race is too close to call, with Democrat Mikie Sherrill ahead of Jack Ciattarelli by a mere 3.6 points.

If this is what happens on Tuesday, it implies that not much has changed since last fall -- excellent news for the GOP given Trump’s popular-vote triumph.

Results from other sharply contested partisan races can confirm this conclusion. Polls show that the Virginia lieutenant governor’s race is closer, with three recent polls showing the Democrat ahead by no more than two points.

Republicans also look likely to win Virginia’s attorney general race, with incumbent Jason Miyares ahead in nine of ten polls taken since vile texts from his Democratic opponent, Jay Jones, were reported on by National Review.

Taken together, the evidence shows no sign of a blue wave similar to that which swamped both states in 2017 after President Trump’s first win.

Polls can be off, as we see all too often. But if the results next week fall in line with these averages, Republicans should feel confident that they will head into 2026 in the same strong position with which they started 2025.