A Next-Generation Victory for Democrats

None of the three Democrats who won convincingly Tuesday were in politics when Donald Trump was first elected president. In 2016, Abigail Spanberger, governor-elect of Virginia, had recently left the CIA and was working for an education consulting firm. Mikie Sherrill, who just won the race to become New Jersey’s next governor, was a helicopter pilot turned federal prosecutor. Zohran Mamdani, the thirty-four-year-old state lawmaker who will soon be mayor of New York, was rapping under the name Young Cardamom and volunteering for left-wing candidates for city council. For much of the last decade, the Democratic Party seemed stuck in a pre-Trump past; Tuesday seemed to be the turning of a generational page. During his victory party Tuesday evening, Mamdani, a democratic socialist and the most ideological of the trio, was the most explicit about this change: “We breathe the air of a city that is reborn.”

The 2025 elections were always going to be Democratic-focused, not only because this year’s primary elections were going blue, but also because the party had been adrift since last year’s presidential election. Lately, the most reliable beat in political news has been commentators explaining what Democrats “should” and “must” do. (“Democrats need to add two words to their collective vocabulary…equality and oligarchy,” wrote Fintan O’Toole in The New York Review of Bookscalling for a more populist shift. In a more ecumenical way, writes Ezra Klein, in the Times“The Democratic Party does not need to choose to be one thing. It must choose to be more things.”) For some more centrist Democrats, what the Party needed was to avoid being labeled with Mamdani’s broader left-wing views. Asked on CNN whether Mamdani was the future of the party, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said emphatically no. (“Good to know,” Mamdani said when informed of Jeffries’ comment.) Sen. Chuck Schumer declined to say who he voted for. “People want us to be ambitious and dream big,” Spanberger said of Mamdani, days before the election. “They don’t want us to lie to them either.”

But for all the tough talk and very careful factional positioning – left versus center – the Democrats who won on Tuesday all shared the same theme: The most important things cost too much. When asked to define his closing message, Mamdani said it was “the same message we started with, which is that this is the most expensive city in the United States of America, and it’s time to make it affordable.” NBC News, which followed Spanberger in the final days of her campaign, found her “laser-focused” on an economic message because, as she put it, “we see the difficulties of this moment.” In Sherrill’s latest announcement, she said: “I will serve as your governor to reduce your costs.” » Mamdani’s support for the rent freeze was seen as a socialist-style proposal, but Sherrill herself had campaigned to declare a state of emergency on her first day in office, to freeze utility costs for New Jersey families, including suburban homeowners. These ideas came from opposing factions within the Party, but when you listened to them, they sounded pretty much the same.

Leaving aside the endless and sometimes dull and abstract debate over whether Democrats should move to the left or the center, two ideas emerge from Tuesday’s results, both of which could provide some hope to a party that has recently lacked it. First, the prospect that the 2024 elections would mark an electoral “realignment” in which young, non-white voters without college degrees would have turned inexorably toward the Republicans now seems increasingly unlikely. The margins in Virginia, where Spanberger won by about fifteen percentage points, and New Jersey, where Sherrill won by twelve, suggest that these weaknesses were largely circumstantial, with some racially diverse areas that had moved away from Democrats, such as Hudson County, New Jersey, swinging back toward them on Thursday. In Washington Job/An ABC News poll conducted shortly before the election found that 66% of young voters disapproved of President Trump’s performance, as did more than 70% of racial minorities. (“This is not a glaring realignment,” noted analyst Ronald Brownstein.) Exit polls released by NBC show Spanberger and Sherrill winning by ten points among men under twenty-nine — the demographic group most seen as shifting to the right. Mamdani won them by forty. This time, it was the New York socialist who brought new voters into the political process.

Perhaps more importantly, as Mamdani, Sherrill, and Spanberger all seemed to recognize, Trump presented them with not just an issue but a theme that the Party could pursue into the midterms. After winning the presidency in part because of concerns over the rising cost of living, Trump governed in a way that made the problem worse. His so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act amounted to a vast transfer of money from the poor to the rich. He is personally obsessed with escalating tariffs that make ordinary goods much more expensive. During the current government shutdown, he at one point refused a court order requiring his administration to disburse funds to pay food stamp recipients, as lines outside food pantries grew longer. Millions of people are now at risk of losing their health insurance because of the president’s hard line in budget negotiations. The most natural campaign for Democrats to run – one the Party was built for in the 20th century – is that of ordinary people against the rich. Trump returns the favor. Spot the ads: billionaire pardoned after investing in Trump family’s crypto projects; the twenty billion dollars sent to support the Argentine president, political ally of the White House, at the expense of American farmers; bulldozers razing the East Wing in a project backed by Trump donors.

How much more optimistic should Democrats allow themselves to be? Trump is still the president, and the pressures of his policies and authoritarian tendencies continue to grow. Tuesday’s elections were fought mostly in safe Democratic cities and states, among an off-year electorate that has recently tended to be bluer than in presidential years, and the party is still full of conflicting instincts and mutual antipathy. Nevertheless, the winning campaigns suggested themes that could contribute to the renewal of the Party, and their margins of victory gave hope for a strong midterm. Tuesday night on CNN began with the death of Dick Cheney and ended with a live broadcast hosted by Ben Shapiro and Charlamagne tha God. The old system was under pressure everywhere. “I am young, despite all my efforts to age,” Mamdani said on his election night. For the first time in a long time, he could have said the same thing about his party. ♦