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By Richard W. Stevenson, Mohammed Hadi, Nestor Ramos, Nikita Stewart, Michael Mason, Gilad Thaler, David Seekamp, Lauren Pruitt, Luke Piotrowski and Edward Vega
December 31, 2025
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Richard W. Stevenson, Mohammed Hadi, Nestor Ramos, Nikita Stewart, Michael Mason, Gilad Thaler, David Seekamp, Lauren Pruitt, Luke Piotrowski and Edward Vega
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(CNN) — Democrats’ dominance in Tuesday’s elections reset expectations ahead of next year’s midterm battle for House and Senate control, reinvigorating a party that has been in the political wilderness and leaving Republicans lamenting that the gains President Donald Trump made a year ago with key portions of the electorate all but evaporated.
“Last night, if that wasn’t a message to all Republicans, then we’ve got our head jammed in the ground,” said West Virginia GOP Sen. Jim Justice.
The list of Democratic winners spanned the party’s ideological spectrum — from Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist elected mayor of New York City, to Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, the moderates with strong national security credentials elected governors of Virginia and New Jersey, respectively.
Their wins could rally Democrats in competitive House, Senate and governor’s races next year around a message all three made central to their campaigns, in different forms: pledges to reduce the cost of living.
But the playing field won’t be easy for Democrats. Strategists in both parties agree that control of the House will be in play, but the net effect of redistricting moves around the country — particularly if the Supreme Court decides to weaken the Voting Rights Act — could leave fewer competitive seats for Democrats. And the 2026 Senate map includes only a handful of GOP-held seats that appear to be in play and multiple seats Democrats will have to defend.
Still, Tuesday’s results may embolden Democrats to continue their strategy in the ongoing government shutdown, while igniting new debates over what kinds of candidates can win, and where.
Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster, said the elections should be viewed within the broader context of a year in which the party’s voters have packed town halls and rallies, won key races like the Wisconsin Supreme Court contest in the spring and a slew of special elections, and scored candidate recruitment victories for next year’s midterms.
“Take the whole year into account and it tells a pretty similar story, which is that Democrats are motivated and Republicans are less motivated,” Omero said.
Trump, she said, “lost popularity and he’s lost altitude on all of his top issues, like the economy and immigration.”
“Where does that leave his supporters in a midterm or off-year election?” Omero said. “What are they coming out for, if he’s less popular and his policies are less popular and his agenda’s less popular?”
In addition to the wins in governor’s races and mayoral elections, and a critical victory in a statewide vote to green-light a redistricting effort to add five more seats that favor Democrats in California, the party also scored a long list of lower-profile victories on Tuesday.
They broke the GOP’s supermajority in the Mississippi state Senate. They flipped two seats on Georgia’s Public Service Commission. They defeated a voter identification ballot initiative in Maine. Their incumbent Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices prevailed in retention votes.
The results showed that many of the gains Trump had made in 2024 have evaporated. In New Jersey, Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli couldn’t match Trump’s support levels with Latino and Black voters. In Virginia, Spanberger notched the most impressive Democratic performance in recent years — besting the margins of the party’s last two presidential nominees and carrying a scandal-plagued nominee for attorney general, Jay Jones, to victory on her coattails.
For the GOP, the fallout could come in a number of forms — including altering the party’s push for redistricting to add winnable congressional seats in deep-red states, and changing how Republicans in competitive midterm races approach Trump.
“The picture is pretty clear,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “It is not a muddled message.”
Ayres pointed to several lessons Republicans should take from Tuesday’s results. In Virginia and New Jersey, two states Trump lost in all three of his presidential runs, Republican gubernatorial candidates tied themselves to the president, a “losing strategy from the start,” he said.
Republicans might also be inclined to rethink their strategy on redistricting, he said.
“Given the Democratic margins yesterday, about the last thing you want to do if you want to hold on to the House is weaken Republican incumbent House members, and that’s exactly what will happen if you’re trying to carve out more Republican districts,” he said.
For his part, Trump and his top allies publicly downplayed the election results, with the president noting on social media that he wasn’t on the ballot. He partially blamed the ongoing federal government shutdown, telling Republican lawmakers in a closed-door session Wednesday morning that they are getting “killed” politically by the impasse, a source told CNN.
Vice President JD Vance said that “it’s idiotic to overreact to a couple of elections in blue states.” But he also warned that the GOP needs “to do better at turning out voters than we have in the past.”
“I said it in 2022, and I’ve said it repeatedly since: our coalition is ‘lower propensity’ and that means we have to do better at turning out voters than we have in the past,” Vance said Wednesday morning on X.
Vance also urged Republicans to focus on affordability. He said the Trump administration “inherited a disaster from Joe Biden and Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz called the election results a “great lesson for the Republican Party,” blaming the losing Virginia gubernatorial nominee, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, for failing to excite Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
“Your candidate needs to be able to turn out ALL FACTIONS of our party, and they do that by being MAGA all the way,” he wrote on X.
Though Tuesday’s GOP losses were wide-ranging, Republicans focused on elevating one Democratic winner: Mamdani, the 34-year-old Muslim and democratic socialist mayor-elect of New York City.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise called Mamdani “the new leader of the Democrat Party.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is “apparently a socialist now,” since Jeffries endorsed Mamdani.
Mamdani’s victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York City emboldened the left wing of the Democratic Party. Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, a group created to oust “corporate Democrats” and elect progressives, said Mamdani’s win marks a “turning point” for their movement and shows the importance of competitive races.
One long-simmering debate Tuesday’s results didn’t settle is the ideological battle within the Democratic Party over the way forward, with a host of competitive House and Senate primaries just months away and the 2028 presidential primary already looming large.
“Democratic primaries can and should be the battleground for the control of our party’s direction,” Andrabi said.
However, in New Jersey and Virginia, the winning Democratic candidates are moderates with strong national security credentials. Spanberger, the Virginia governor-elect, criticized Mamdani in an interview with CNN just days before the election, suggesting his proposals aimed at reducing the cost of living will ultimately disappoint his supporters.
“We don’t need to settle,” said Omero, the Democratic pollster. “We’re able to have more moderate candidates in some places and more progressive candidates in some places. That feels like an important lesson.”
One area where Democrats appeared broadly on the same page Wednesday is the ongoing government shutdown — fueled in part by Democrats’ demand that Republicans make concessions on health care funding in order to pass a measure that would fund the government.
Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy wrote on X that it is “not a coincidence these big wins came at the exact moment when Democrats are using our power to stand for something and be strong. A huge risk to not learn that lesson.”
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Eric Bradner, Arit John and CNN
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The Missouri House on Tuesday approved a congressional map designed to weaken one of the state’s two Democratic incumbents, intensifying the partisan redistricting battles that are shaping the political landscape ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
The measure, which passed in late August by a 90-to-65 vote, makes Missouri the second Republican-led state to adopt a plan targeting the seats of Black Democratic representatives. The Missouri Democrat most impacted, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), said that he will run for re-election. Earlier this summer, Texas Republicans pushed through a map that could put as many as five Democratic lawmakers at risk. Democrats in California have mounted a counteroffensive of their own: last month, the Legislature advanced a proposal to the ballot that would reshape five Republican-held districts.
As the vote was taking place in Missouri, thirteen members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Rep. Cleaver, spoke emphatically about the state of play for Black elected officials targeted by redistricting. They spoke about what happened in Texas and how they knew that other states would follow. The group was strong in their statements on the current situation. “Texas has more African Americans than any other state in this country right now. Under the proposed maps, they want to make it so that Texas only has two districts in which African Americans have an opportunity to choose their representation. What does that mean for black voices in Texas? That means that it is approximately 1/5 the voting strength of their white Texan neighbors. That is what is going to be, not three-fifths, but we are going to be reduced to 1/5, so my colleagues have laid out a number of things that they believe are going on as to why it is that this is happening. But I’m going to start with number one, Trump himself. He’s racist,” said Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas).
“We will not be silenced. They’ve tried to bury us before, not knowing that we were seeds. We will grow and we will be resilient, just as we have time and time before,” added Crockett. “We are about to experience something that we never thought we’d see in our lifetimes, especially after having experienced what happened at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which is probably the reason a good many of us in Congress are in Congress. It was at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday that John Lewis and a host of other people of goodwill suffered grave, gross, and inhumane injustices… Bloody Sunday is the reason we have the Voting Rights Act of 1965. We would not but for Bloody Sunday,” said Rep. Al Green (D-Texas). “We are going to fight this. We are not going to back down. And I believe that the Voting Rights Act will be upheld and that these maps in Texas will be overturned. But again, Texas is just the beginning. This is a nationwide fight, and it’s bigger than who holds the majority in the House of Representatives. This is about maintaining our democracy and our republic,” Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas). When asked by Black Press USA whether or not there is an actual plan to combat what is happening to Black elected officials around the country, several members answered yes. Rep. Veasey added that perhaps there needed to be a special group to deal with the redistricting attacks against Black members at the DNC. The members also relayed that legal strategies are ongoing, and in some cases have been for years, on redistricting.
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Lauren Victoria Burke and NNPA
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Eva Przybyla, front, and Nicholas Wells process ballots at the Salt Lake County Government Center in Salt Lake City on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
President Donald Trump this week vowed to “lead a movement to get rid of” voting by mail ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
“WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections,” the president said in a post on Truth Social Monday.
Trump, who has long opposed voting by mail, continued to claim, without evidence, that it’s fraught with fraud.
Utah has been the only red state among eight that have conducted universal by-mail elections, including six Democratic strongholds and one swing state — a fact that some conservatives here have balked at, while others have defended the state’s by-mail system as a popular, convenient and safe voting method.
After Trump’s post, Utah’s top election official, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican, issued a short statement on social media without addressing the president directly.
“The constitutional right of individual states to choose the manner in which they conduct secure elections is a fundamental strength of our system,” Henderson said.
The president, however, asserted that states should do what the federal government wants.
“Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump said. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
Another high-ranking Republican and member of GOP legislative leadership — Senate Majority Assistant Whip Mike McKell, R-Spanish Fork — disagrees.
McKell told Utah News Dispatch in an interview Tuesday that, like Henderson said, states have the right to choose how to administer their elections, and that he’d push back on an effort to completely undo voting by mail.
“In Utah, we’re in a good place. I think there’s strong support for vote by mail. There’s also strong support for security,” McKell said.
He added that’s “the needle we tried to thread” earlier this year when the 2025 Utah Legislature passed a bill that he sponsored to require voter ID and eventually phase out automatic voting by mail in this state by 2026. The aim of that bill, he said, was to preserve voting by mail as an option for Utah voters while also adding a new layer of security.
Even though local polls have shown a vast majority of Utahns remain confident in their elections, Gallup polling shows trust nationally has decreased especially among a faction of Republican voters since 2006 as elections have become more polarized. After Trump lost the 2020 election, he ramped up rhetoric to cast doubt on election security and voting by mail.
Asked about Trump’s comments this week, McKell reiterated it’s a matter of states rights.
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“It is a federalism issue,” he said. “If it’s not enumerated in the (U.S.) Constitution, it’s reserved for the states. That’s article 10. I think states have the right to dictate how they run their elections.”
McKell also defended Utah’s track record as a state that has used voting by mail for years, starting with optional pilot programs that counties opted into before moving to universal voting by mail.
“In the state of Utah, Republicans have done really well with vote by mail. We elect Republicans,” he said, also noting that Trump in 2024 won the red state handily. “There’s generally broad support for vote by mail, especially among rural voters and elderly voters in Utah.”
He added that “it’s OK if there’s some tension between the federal government and state government,” but he argued the Constitution clearly reserves elections for states to control and administer.
Pressed on how he’d respond to pressure from the Trump administration to get rid of voting by mail, McKell said, “I would resist a movement that didn’t originate in the state,” adding that he responds to his constituents, not the federal government.
“If there’s a movement to change vote by mail, it needs to come from — it must come from — the state,” he said. “It’s a state issue. The states need to be in control of their own elections. Right now, I don’t feel like there’s a reason to eliminate vote by mail. I think we do a good job.”
Not all Republicans in Utah embrace voting by mail, however, Earlier this year, McKell’s bill was the result of a compromise between the House and Senate to more drastically restrict the state’s universal vote-by-mail system.
Asked whether Trump’s comments could further inflame skepticism around the security of voting by mail in Utah, McKell said it’s nothing new. “We saw these comments before, and even going into the last legislative session, there were folks that opposed vote by mail.”
But McKell said multiple state audits “have shown that our elections are safe and secure,” while legislators have also made efforts to continually improve the system where issues have cropped up, like in voter roll maintenance.
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s comments could fan some Republican lawmakers’ appetite to go after voting by mail during their next general session in January, but McKell said typically every year there’s a slew of election bills for legislators to sort through.
Asked whether he plans to make any tweaks to his 2025 bill, McKell said he’s still talking with clerks about any possible changes.
“I feel like we did strike a really appropriate balance, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look at ways to make it better,” he said, adding that he doesn’t have any specific proposals yet, “but that could change as we get closer to the legislative session.”
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