Four takeaways after Democrats seal key wins

After scoring decisive victories in New York’s mayoral election and the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, it’s clear the Democratic Party will be buoyed by a big election night on Tuesday.

It’s a far cry from the scenes following last year’s presidential election, when the party was left searching for answers after the landslide victory of Donald Trump and the Republicans.

The results also mark a year before crucial midterm elections. As the night’s picture becomes clearer, here’s what we learned from the results.

Democrats scored key victories in winning the first major elections of Trump’s second term.

Joyful celebrations took place in the various candidates’ headquarters, a stark contrast to the pessimistic scenes that followed the party’s bruising defeat in 2024.

Abigail Spanberger won in Virginia, flipping the Republican governorship, while Mikie Sherrill was elected governor of New Jersey. Both won decisively, receiving more than 56% of the vote.

In New York, Zohran Mamdani defeated independent Andrew Cuomo and became the first candidate to receive one million votes since 1969.

Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, told the BBC that Mamdani had “changed the electorate” by urging young people and immigrants to vote.

“Above all, he built a movement,” he says.

This series of decisive victories could well boost a party that has at times struggled to counter President Trump’s quickly passed second-term agenda, and to bounce back from its 2024 defeat.

“The Democrats are back and we are winning,” Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Ken Martin said Wednesday. “We have the momentum we need for the midterm elections.”

The pledge to reduce the cost of rent, food and child care was central to Mamdani’s left-wing campaign, but it was also a winning issue for more moderate Democrats elsewhere.

Sherrill in New Jersey and Spanberger in Virginia have both put the fight against the high cost of living at the forefront of their gubernatorial campaigns. And that seemed to be a priority for voters, too.

Exit polling data from major U.S. networks indicated that, in all three races, the most important issue to voters was the economy and affordability.

And tellingly, according to exit polling data from the BBC’s US partner CBS News, a majority of voters who named the economy as their most important issue voted for the Democratic candidate in New York, New Jersey and Virginia.

That could well give the party a message to unite around ahead of next year’s crucial midterm elections — and pose a challenge for Republicans to overcome.

“I can’t see the future, but I see Republicans losing the House if Americans continue to pay paycheck to paycheck,” Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently told Semafor.

“It is clearer than ever that affordability must be the centerpiece of the Democrats’ midterm message,” political communications expert Andrew Koneschusky told the AFP news agency.

“The message of affordability cuts across demographics and highlights a major vulnerability for Republicans,” he said.

When Trump won his decisive victory over Kamala Harris last year, he racked up enormous support from Latino voters who had been a key part of the Democratic voting base for decades.

Trump saw a whopping 14 percentage point increase in support from this demographic compared to the 2020 election, according to exit polls. No Republican presidential candidate has ever had a higher percentage among Latino voters.

And even though he wasn’t on the ballot Tuesday night, there were potentially worrying signs for his Republican Party. The winning gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey both had wide leads of about 30% among Latino voters, according to exit poll data.

Interesting changes also appear when examining the results more closely.

New Jersey’s Passaic County — which census data shows is half Latino — is often cited by analysts as an indicator of support for Trump among these voters. He won it by 3 percentage points in 2024, but Sherrill won it by 15 on Tuesday.

Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant who specializes in Latin American voting trends, suggested that the cost of living – a key theme of Democratic campaigns – was a major factor.

“No poll in the country in the last month puts anything other than the economy as a priority for Latinos,” he said.

In liberal New York, Mamdani presented himself as a democratic socialist who will tax millionaires and corporations to the tune of $9bn (£6.9bn), to fund policies such as free daycare and buses.

It was a different story in the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, where Republicans have had much more electoral success in the past.

In these states, both Democratic candidates were establishment-backed moderates who emphasized pragmatic policies more likely to appeal to less liberal voters than those in New York City.

The evening itself illustrated the stark differences within the party between the left and the centrists, and raised questions about how it will approach elections and candidate selection in the future.

Koneschusky suggested that Democrats should run candidates who reflect the specific electorate, rather than taking a “one size fits all” approach.

“In some cases, that might mean running progressive candidates. In other cases, that might mean moderate or centrist candidates,” he said.

New York City Comptroller and Mamdani ally Brad Lander echoed that point, telling the BBC’s Nada Tawfik that Democratic leaders need to recognize that different things will work in different parts of the country and that they should allow the primary process to play out.