Virginia and New Jersey, the two states that voted for governor, both voted for Vice President Kamala Harris over President Donald Trump by 52 to 46 percent margins. Democrats ran significantly better in both states Tuesday. One reason is that Trump Republicans, as an increasingly downscale party, see its turnout sag in off-years than when the presidency is up. But that wasn’t their only problem this time.
In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer and congresswoman, won by 58 to 42 percent, well ahead of her standing in most polls. Republicans who dismiss this result as reflecting the weakness of nominee Winsome Earle-Sears should note that Democrat Jay Jones beat incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares 53 to 47 percent, despite the October 3 revelation of Jones’s email that he’d like to murder a colleague and see his children die in their mother’s arms.
Some 46 percent of Virginia voters said this was disqualifying, but even some of them voted for Jones. It’s evidence that hatred of Trump’s party runs deep among many Democrats.
DEMOCRATS WANT OPEN BORDERS, MOST AMERICANS DON’T
The most significant swing from 2024 was in Northern Virginia, part of metro Washington, which cast 33% of the state’s votes. That’s a high-education, upscale community with a high percentage of federal and government contractor employees, but Republicans would be unwise to dismiss the Democratic gains as just a response to the government shutdown. It could be a forecast of what’s in store for them in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania; Oakland County, Michigan; and Waukesha County, Wisconsin.
In New Jersey, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D), a Navy veteran, beat Republican Jack Ciatarelli by 56 to 43 percent, a big improvement on incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy’s 51 to 48 percent squeaker against Ciatarelli four years ago. Sherrill’s majority looked much like the 57 to 41 Democratic advantage in the 2012, 2016, and 2020 presidential elections, which caused it to seem a solid blue state.
The big difference is that Ciatarelli was unable to duplicate the big gains that Trump made among Hispanic voters. Trump carried heavily Hispanic Passaic County with 50 percent; it voted only 42 percent Republican this year. Similarly, in Virginia, even Jason Miyares, despite his Hispanic ancestry, won only 37% in heavily Hispanic Prince William County.
New Jersey and Virginia also have large Asian populations. But Ciatarelli won only 37 percent in heavily South Asian Middlesex County, behind Trump’s 44 percent, and in heavily Asian Loudoun County, Virginia, Republican Winsome Earle-Sears’s 35 percent was below Trump’s 40 percent.
Has the Trump administration’s rough-and-ready immigration enforcement hurt his fellow Republicans? Or are we just seeing sags in turnout from low-propensity voters in low-propensity constituencies, as we have in previous contests a year after their side wins, as Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini suggests?
A possible cross-current: The Republican percentages held up pretty closely to Trump’s 2024 percentage in Monmouth and Ocean Counties on the Jersey Shore, whose demographics are similar to much of Florida’s, and in rural Southside and Southwest Virginia.
Then there is New York City, similarly sized (8 million-plus) to New Jersey and Virginia, whose record (since 1969) turnout of 2 million-plus was nonetheless lower than each of those states’ 3 million-plus.
Since he won the June primary, the young (he turned 34 last month) Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani has had wide leads in polls. His cheerful demeanor and clever ads, plus his emphasis on cost-of-living issues (free buses, city-owned grocery stores) has naturally produced sympathetic coverage from most media.
These media outlets have been happy to gloss over his positive attitudes toward terror-sponsoring Hamas and his immediate reaction to its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. They weren’t bothered by his protracted stubbornness in renouncing the “globalize the intifada” slogan (which means kill Jews everywhere) he once embraced. For months, he had wide leads in the polls thanks to split opposition from widely disliked former Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.
But the results, with 91% of the votes in, have been somewhat different. In a city that voted 68 to 30% for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, Mamdani is leading Cuomo by a decisive but far from overwhelming 50 to 42%, with just 7% for Sliwa.
While Democrats improved on Harris’s performance in Virginia and New Jersey, Mamdani far underperformed Harris in New York City. One-quarter of New York’s Harris voters voted for the Republican or for the candidate endorsed by Trump. Mamdani’s core constituency is high-education, lower-income singles who congregate in central cities and university towns — what I’ve called the barista proletariat — a large bloc in New York City and decisive in the 2023 mayor race in Chicago but a small segment of the electorate in most of America.
As the Democratic nominee, Mamdani ran better among black people in central Brooklyn and southeast Queens than he had in the primary, and ran well below but still carried Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhoods in the Bronx and northern Manhattan and, narrowly, heavily Mexican Corona. And he lost heavily Asian parts of Queens, though not quite as lopsidedly as Italian neighborhoods in Staten Island and Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn.
Mamdani’s weakness among some Democratic constituencies does not represent a danger for the party across the country generally. But it does suggest that the socialist wing of the party, and those Democrats whose antipathy to Israel can verge on antisemitism, are far from a majority force nationally. It underlines the importance, in my view, for conservatives to follow the example of Ronald Reagan and William Buckley in denouncing those like Tucker Carlson who have provided a friendly forum for the Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes.
VOTERS SEND TRUMP A COURSE CORRECTION MESSAGE
In the meantime, Trump faces a tough constituency today: the Supreme Court. Will the justices, including those he appointed, accept his claim that the gauzy language of a 1977 law gives him the power to raise and lower his beloved tariffs singlehandedly? There’s a serious chance the majority-Republican-appointed Court may reject that claim, as a totally Democratic-appointed Court in 1952 rejected Harry Truman’s claim that he could seize the steel mills in wartime.
A Supreme Court rebuff to Trump could turn out to be a political gift to the Trump Republican Party. Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs in April thrust his job approval downward and 3% inflation, which, though low, can be plausibly linked to continuing tariffs, provides a basis, as Mamdani has shown, for Democratic campaigns. Also, should Trump acquiesce to an adverse Court decision, as Truman did 73 years ago, voters’ fears of an authoritarian presidency will be mitigated.
