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Tag: New Jersey

  • Police investigating after crash involving bicyclist in South Jersey

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    A large police presence is responding to what appears to be a crash involving a bicyclist in South Jersey on Thursday night.

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    The crash looks like it happened at the intersection of the Black Horse Pike and Berlin Cross Keys Road in Washington Township on Nov. 6.

    In surveillance video obtained by NBC10 from a nearby business, a bicyclist appears to be traveling westbound crossing at the intersection before a car going south on Black Horse Pike can be seen crashing into them.

    “Honestly it didn’t look real. Like, I never seen anything like that before. It was crazy,” witness Ethan Vallecillo said. “The whole view was in front of me so I was just eating my food just looking and all I seen was a bike go flying and all I heard was the cars sounded like tires were rubbing really hard on the road.”

    SkyForce10 was over the scene just before 10 p.m. where a large police presence could be seen along with at least one fire truck.

    A bicycle was visible laying on its side as well as debris on the roadway.

    Several lanes of the intersection were closed off as police investigated.

    No word yet on if anyone was hurt or what led to the crash.

    This is a developing story. Check back here for updates.

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    Emily Rose Grassi and Shaira Arias

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  • Former NYPD officer pleads guilty after road rage shooting leaves NJ man paralyzed

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    A South Jersey family’s fight for justice continues more than one year after their son was shot while driving home from work. The road rage incident left 30-year-old Kishan Patel permanently disabled.

    Now, a former New York Police Department officer is expected to spend a decade behind bars after pleading guilty to shooting Patel.

    Patel has spent the last year in a specialized facility in Texas as a quadriplegic with limited brain function requiring around the clock care.

    On Friday, May 17, 2024, police responded to a multi-vehicle crash at the intersection of Route 73 and Cooper Road in Voorhees Township, New Jersey. When they arrived, they found Kishan Patel, 30, of Voorhees, suffering from a gunshot wound. Patel was taken to the hospital for treatment.

    After analyzing surveillance video, cellphone records and ballistics evidence, Voorhees Township Police and the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office identified Hieu Tran, 27, of Yonkers, New York, as the suspect in the shooting. Police said Tran – an officer with the New York City Police Department – used his department-issued firearm and shot Patel during an apparent road rage incident.

    Investigators said Tran was off-duty at the time of the incident and had just left a wedding in the area. After the shooting, Tran “calmly drove north, stopped for gas, went home to New York, reloaded his weapon and went to work the next day,” according to attorneys for Patel’s family.

    Investigators said shell casings at the crime scene matched Tran’s department-issued service weapon.

    Attorney Joseph Marrone is representing the Patel family who filed a lawsuit against the city of New York alleging that the city knew the former officer had significant mental health challenges with longstanding alcoholism.

    “It was known by his superiors and other officers and they did nothing,” Marrone said.

    The New York City law department declined to comment but the NYPD confirmed that Tran was terminated from the department.

    Tran pleaded guilty to attempted murder and is expected to be sentenced on Dec. 15.

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    Siobhan McGirl, Emily Rose Grassi and David Chang

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  • From a few to more than 350, children and parents ride together to school as a ‘bike bus’

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    MONTCLAIR, New Jersey (AP) — On a sunny fall morning, children wearing helmets and backpacks gathered with their parents in Montclair, New Jersey, for a group bicycle ride to two local elementary schools. Volunteers in orange safety vests made sure everyone assembled in a neighborhood shopping area was ready before the riders set off on their 5-mile “bike bus” route.

    Every few blocks, more adults and kids on bikes joined in. Eventually, the group grew to over 350 people. Older students chatted with friends, while younger ones focused on pedaling. Cars along the way stopped to let the long line of cyclists pass. Pupils and parents peeled off toward the first school before the remainder reached the group’s final stop.

    It’s a familiar Friday scene in Montclair. For the past three years, what began as a handful of parents hoping to encourage their kids to bike to school has grown into a weekly ritual for both the township of about 40,000 residents and many of its families.

    “It was so fun,” second grader Gigi Drucker, 7, said upon arriving at Nishuane Elementary School. “The best way to get to school is by bike because it gives you more exercise. It’s healthier for the Earth,” she added.

    But traveling to school on two wheels isn’t just for fun, according to organizer Jessica Tillyer, whose are 6 and 8 years old. She believes that biking together each week helps promote healthy habits for the children and strengthens the sense of community among parents.

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    “And it really started because a small group of us, about five parents, all wanted to ride to school with our kids and just felt like it wasn’t safe. And for me, I felt kind of lonely riding by myself to school. So, bike bus just took off as a small effort. And now we can have up to 400 people riding together to school,” Tillyer said.

    The bike bus movement isn’t new. Hundreds of them exist throughout the U.S. and Europe, as well as in Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia and Israel, according to Bike Bus World, a nonprofit organization that promotes and provides information about bike buses.

    Co-founder Sam Balto, who established a bike bus in Portland, Oregon, more than three years ago, said interest has grown so much that he offers free coaching calls to help others launch their own. He estimates there are more than 400 routes worldwide, and the number continues to grow.

    “Children and families are craving community and physical activity and being outdoors. And when you present that versus a school car line, people naturally gravitate to something that’s super joyful and community-driven,” Balto said.

    Organizers hope the bike bus movement will not only get more children on their bikes but also push elected officials in the United States and abroad to invest in safer biking infrastructure.

    While starting a bike bus may not be difficult, keeping it running year-round through different seasons takes more effort. Organizers of successful rides shared advice for parents hoping to create their own.

    Plan and communicate

    Andrew Hawkins, one of the leaders of Montclair Bike Bus, said that once enough families express interest, the first step is to plan a route carefully. That means identifying streets with low traffic while considering how many students can join at the starting point and along the way.

    “It took us a while to come up with a route we were happy with, but we’re still ready to adjust if necessary,” Hawkins said. “Things can change. It could be that new groups of students move into a certain block, or traffic patterns shift, and you have to adapt.”

    The Montclair group started via word of mouth and social media posts. As the number of participants grew, the organizers created a chat group to coordinate and share weekly updates. They also reached out to other families through PTAs, school forums and other parent communication channels.

    One unexpected benefit, several parents said, is the bike bus motivates children to get up and out the door more quickly on Friday mornings.

    “He’s more excited to get out of bed for the bike bus than for the regular bus. So actually, I have an easier time getting him ready for school,” said Gene Gykoff, who rides with his son to the boy’s elementary school.

    To keep momentum going all year, the Montclair Bike Bus team organizes themed rides on weekends and holidays. These events also allow families who can’t join on weekday mornings to experience what the bike bus is all about before committing to a regular schedule.

    Start young and go slow

    Montclair Bike Bus consists of multiple adult-led groups and routes that encompass all of the township’s elementary schools and middle schools. Organizers think the primary grades are when children benefit most from cycling with a group. Students in the first few years of school can learn about riding safely and apply those skills when they bike on their own or in small groups as they get older.

    The Montclair parents found that most elementary school students can handle a distance of 3-5 miles, and the group travels at a speed of around 6 miles per hour so the younger kids can keep up.

    “The slow speed can be tough for some of our older kids who want to go a little bit faster. We tell them there’s no racing on the bike bus — everyone gets to school at the same time. But there have been occasions where we’ve had to split the ride into two groups so that some of the older kids can go a little bit faster than the younger kids,” Hawkins said.

    Be consistent no matter the weather

    Keeping a bike bus going year-round requires consistency, which means preparing to pedal when it’s raining or cold outside, Balto and Hawkins said. Leaders monitor weather forecasts and decide whether to cancel a Friday ride due to unsafe conditions or to proceed as planned while reminding families to dress appropriately.

    “As it gets colder, we tell everyone to make sure they have the right gear — gloves, neck warmers, warm jackets,” Hawkins said. “The idea is that kids should feel comfortable riding all year.”

    The Montclair bike bus secured reflective vests and bike lights from sponsors to increase visibility on dark winter mornings. Leaders also carry basic maintenance tools, such as tire pumps.

    Weather is often more of a concern for adults than it is for children, Balto observed. “Kids want to be outside with their friends,” he said. “If you’re going to do this in all weather, just do it consistently. People will get used to it, and they’ll start joining you.”

    Just do it

    Despite all the planning and coordination involved in running a regular bike bus, experienced organizers say the key is simply to start. It can be as informal as two families riding to school together and sharing a flyer to spread the word, Balto said.

    “If you’re consistent — once a week, once a month, once a season — it will grow,” he said.

    Tillyer said she gives the same advice to anyone who asks how to begin: just go for it.

    “Don’t ask for permission. Don’t worry about what it’s going to take,” she said. “Find a small group of people, get on your bikes and ride to school. Once people experience it and enjoy it, more will want to join.”

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  • Promises of lower energy bills win big on election day

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    Key races in New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia made it clear that energy affordability was on the ballot this election day as Democrats who campaigned on the issue swept the field.

    Candidates in the three states campaigned on tackling rising energy costs through renewables, such as wind and solar, or by supporting the Trump administration in promoting fossil fuels, such as oil, gas and coal.

    Trump has said that ramping up the production of fossil fuels will “unleash American energy” and save taxpayers money. But residential electric bills have increased about 10% nationwide this year — from 15.9 cents per kilowatt hour in January to 17.6 cents at the end of August, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

    At the same time, wind and solar remain the least expensive form of new-build electricity generation, according to the financial advisory firm Lazard.

    The race for New Jersey governor saw Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill face off against Republican Jack Ciattarelli after state residents saw a roughly 20% price spike in electricity rates this year driven by reduced supply and growing demand from data centers and a slow rollout of renewables, among other challenges.

    Sherrill campaigned heavily on the issue, vowing to declare a state of emergency on utility costs on her first day in office and institute a utility rate freeze.

    “Prices are spiking because of a huge power shortage — I’ll transform New Jersey’s energy picture to build new, cheaper, and cleaner energy generation, bring down families’ bills, and put the Garden State on track to hit our emissions and clean air goals,” Sherrill wrote in her campaign materials.

    Ciattarelli, meanwhile, vowed to implement a state energy master plan fueled by natural gas, nuclear and solar power but not offshore wind, which he promised to ban. “I will cap property taxes for families and freeze them for seniors, while killing offshore wind farms and expanding safe and clean natural gas and nuclear to lower electricity rates, which are currently out of control,” he told the NJ Spotlight News.

    Ciattarelli also called for pulling the state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a market-based program to reduce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in Mid-Atlantic states that is similar to California’s cap-and-trade program.

    Sherrill won the governor’s race with more than 56% of the vote.

    Energy prices are spiking in the U.S., in part, because the Trump administration has been cutting funding for wind, solar and battery energy storage, according to Nick Abraham, senior state communications director with the nonprofit League of Conservation Voters. The administration also has moved to block some projects that were almost completed.

    “These races were about energy costs and affordability, and there were two clear cases made by candidates on both sides,” Abraham said. “One side wanted to stick with the Trump agenda — trying to ban clean energy and focusing on fossil fuels — and one side was trying to lower costs and implement clean energy strategies. And the results speak for themselves.”

    According to Lazard, the cost of utility-scale solar ranges from $38 to $78 per megawatt hour and offshore wind from $37 to $86 per megawatt hour.

    That’s compared with $71 to $173 per megawatt hour for coal and $149 to $251 per megawatt hour for gas peaking plants, among fossil fuels.

    The issue was also top-of-mind with voters in Virginia, who took to the polls in a governor’s race between Democrat Abigail Spanberger and Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. The state is now home to more than a third of all data centers worldwide.

    Spanberger focused heavily on affordability in housing, healthcare and energy during her campaign and said she would expand and incentivize the development of solar energy projects, along with technologies such as fusion, geothermal and hydrogen.

    “Specific to energy, we have to have more generation here on the ground in Virginia,” Spanberger said in an interview with CBS in Richmond, adding that the state is already leading the way with the largest offshore wind farm in the country. The 2.6-gigawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is slated to produce enough clean energy to power up to 660,000 homes when completed in 2026.

    Earle-Sears focused on an “all of the above” approach to energy generation including oil, natural gas and renewables, but also worked to remove the state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which she described as an “energy tax” driving higher costs. She also promised to repeal the Virginia Clean Economy Act, a 2020 law that requires the state’s utilities to produce 100% renewable electricity by 2050.

    Spanberger won the governor’s race with more than 57% of the vote.

    Meanwhile, voters in Georgia also turned out in a race for two seats on their five-member Public Service Commission, which oversees the state’s utilities. The commission approved six utility bill rate hikes over the last two years.

    Democratic challengers Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson won out over Republicans in Tuesday’s race with the largest statewide margins of victory by Democrats in more than 20 years, according to the Associated Press.

    Both candidates made rising costs key in their campaigns, with Hubbard vowing to “bring clean, reliable and affordable energy to Georgia” and Johnson pushing for “bold investments in solar and wind.”

    Their opponents, Republicans Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson, backed a rate freeze but also resorted to Trump-style attacks, with Echols stating at a campaign event that Johnson, a Black woman, wanted to “bring DEI and wokeness” to the Public Service Commission.

    Policy experts said the races were not only a bellwether for the 2026 midterms, but a strong signal that Americans support the clean energy transition.

    “Voters chose leaders who see clean energy as the path to long-term affordability and reliability,” said Frederick Bell, associate director for state climate policy at the Center for American Progress, a think tank.

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    Hayley Smith

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  • Warning signs for the GOP, lessons for Democrats: How Tuesday’s results will shape the 2026 midterms

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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?”

    Voters cast their ballots at a polling station in Arlington, Virginia, on November 4. Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images via CNN Newsource

    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.

    Trump world deflects blame

    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.

    Democratic ideological rifts remain

    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.

    A supporter for independent mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo watches election night returns during a watch party for Cuomo in New York on Tuesday. Credit: Heather Khalifa / AP via CNN Newsource

    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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  • Democrats Are Hopeful Again. but Unresolved Questions Remain About Party’s Path Forward

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — For a day, at least, beleaguered Democrats are hopeful again. But just beneath the party’s relief at securing its first big electoral wins since last November’s drubbing lay unresolved questions about its direction heading into next year’s midterm elections.

    The Election Day romp of Republicans stretched from deep-blue New York and California to swing states Georgia, Pennsylvania and Virginia. There were signs that key voting groups, including young people, Black voters and Hispanics who shifted toward President Donald Trump’s Republican Party just a year ago, may be shifting back. And Democratic leaders across the political spectrum coalesced behind a simple message focused on Trump’s failure to address rising costs and everyday kitchen table issues.

    The dominant performance sparked a new round of debate among the party’s establishment-minded pragmatists and fiery progressives over which approach led to Tuesday’s victories, and which path to take into the high-stakes 2026 midterm elections and beyond. The lessons Democrats learn from the victories will help determine the party’s leading message and messengers next year — when elections will decide the balance of power in Congress for the second half of Trump’s term — and potentially in the 2028 presidential race, which has already entered its earliest stages.

    “Of course, there’s a division within the Democratic Party. There’s no secret,” Sen. Bernie Sanders told reporters at a Capitol Hill press conference about the election results.

    Sanders and his chief political strategist pointed to the success of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, as a model for Democrats across the country. But Rep. Suzan Del Bene, who leads the House Democrats’ midterm campaign strategy, avoided saying Mamdani’s name when asked about his success.

    Del Bene instead cheered the moderate approach adopted by Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill in successful races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey as a more viable track for candidates outside of a Democratic stronghold like New York City.

    “New York is bright blue … and the path to the majority in the House is going to be through purple districts,” she told The Associated Press. “The people of Arizona, Iowa and Nebraska aren’t focused on the mayor of New York.”

    Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a likely Democratic presidential prospect who campaigned alongside Democrats in several states leading up to Tuesday’s elections, noted the candidates hit on a common issue that resonated with voters, regardless of location.

    “All of these candidates who won in these different states were focused on peoples’ everyday needs,” Shapiro said. “And you saw voters in every one of those states and cities showing up to send a clear message to Donald Trump that they’re rejecting his chaos.”

    Amid Democrats’ celebratory phone calls and news conferences, members of the party’s different wings had some sharp critiques for each other.

    While Shapiro cheered the party’s success during a Wednesday interview, he also acknowledged concerns about Mamdani in New York.

    Shapiro, one of the nation’s most prominent Jewish elected leaders, said he’s not comfortable with some of Mamdani’s comments on Israel. The New York mayor-elect, a Muslim, has described Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks as “genocide” against the Palestinian people and has been slow to condemn rhetoric linked to anti-Semitism.

    “I’ve expressed that to him personally. We’ve had good private communications,” Shapiro said of his concerns. “And I hope, as he did last night in his victory speech, that he’ll be a mayor that protects all New Yorkers and tries to bring people together.”

    Meanwhile, Sanders’ political strategist, Faiz Shakir, warned Democrats against embracing “cookie cutter campaigns that say nothing and do nothing” — a reference to centrist Democrats Spanberger and Sherrill.

    Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat who defeated democratic socialist Omar Fateh to win a third term, said at a news conference Wednesday that “we have to love our city more than our ideology.”

    “We need to be doing everything possible to push back on authoritarianism and what Donald Trump is doing,” Frey said. “And at the same time, the opposite of Donald Trump extremism is not the opposite extreme.”

    Despite potential cracks in the Democratic coalition, it’s hard to understate the extent of the party’s electoral success.

    In Georgia, two Democrats cruised to wins over Republican incumbents in elections to the state Public Service Commission, delivering the largest statewide margins of victory by Democrats in more than 20 years.

    In Pennsylvania, Democrats swept not only three state Supreme Court races, but every county seat in presidential swing counties like Bucks and Erie Counties, including sheriffs. Bucks County elected its first Democratic district attorney as Democrats there also won key school board races and county judgeships.

    Maine voters defeated a Republican-backed measure that would have mandated showing an ID at the polls. Colorado approved raising taxes on people earning more than $300,000 annually to fund school meal programs and food assistance for low-income state residents. And California voters overwhelmingly backed a charge led by Gov. Gavin Newsom to redraw its congressional map to give Democrats as many as five more House seats in upcoming elections.


    Key groups coming back to Democrats

    Trump made inroads with Black and Hispanic voters in 2024. But this week, Democrats scored strong performances with non-white voters in New Jersey and Virginia that offered promise.

    About 7 in 10 voters in New Jersey were white, according to the AP Voter Poll. And Sherrill won about half that group. But she made up for her relative weakness with whites with a strong showing among Black, Hispanic and Asian voters.

    The vast majority — about 9 in 10 — of Black voters supported Sherrill, as did about 8 in 10 Asian voters.

    Hispanic voters in New Jersey were more divided, but about two-thirds supported Sherrill; only about 3 in 10 voted for the Republican nominee, Jack Ciattarelli.

    The pattern was similar in Virginia, where Spanberger performed well among Black voters, Hispanic voters and Asian voters, even though she didn’t win a majority of white voters.


    Democrats will soon face a choice

    The debate over the party’s future is already starting to play out in key midterm elections where Democrats have just begun intra-party primary contests.

    The choice is stark in Maine’s high-stakes Senate race, where Democrats will pick from a field that features establishment favorite, Gov. Jan Mills, and Sanders-endorsed populist Graham Platner. A similar dynamic could play out in key contests across Massachusetts, New York, Texas and Michigan.

    Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is aligned with the progressive wing of the party, said the people he speaks to are demanding bold action to address their economic concerns.

    “Folks are so frustrated by how hard its become to afford a dignified life here in Michigan and across the country,” he said.

    “I’m sure the corporate donors don’t want us to push too hard,” El-Sayed continued. “My worry is the very same people who told us we were just fine in 2024 will miss the mandate.”

    Associated Press reporter Mike Catalini in Newark and Joey Cappelletti in Washington contributed.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

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  • California Legislation Could Lead to Better Online Privacy Nationwide

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    The privacy changes web browsers will be required to make under a new California law could set the de facto standard for the entire country, changing how Americans control their data when using the internet, according to experts.

    Assembly Bill 566, recently signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, requires companies that make web browsers to offer users an opt-out “signal” that automatically tells websites not to share or sell their personal information as they browse.

    It will likely be easier for companies to roll out the service for the entire country, rather than for users only in California.

    “It’s such a trivial implementation,” said Emory Roane, associate director of policy at Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, an organization that pushed for the legislation. “It’s really not that difficult technically.”

    The legislation, a first of its kind in the country, was sponsored by the California Privacy Protection Agency, the state’s consumer privacy watchdog, as well as several consumer advocacy and privacy rights groups.

    Under the law, browsers like Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Edge will have until the beginning of 2027 to create a way for consumers to select the signal. Combined with recent changes from other states, the new law could be a tipping point in how web traffic is treated in the United States.

    “We expect it to have a national impact,” Roane said.

    California already offers privacy protections under the California Consumer Privacy Act, including customers’ right to opt out from having their information sold.

    But advocates for the new law point out this still puts the burden on the consumer to navigate to web pages and individually select web pages to opt out from. The new tool will effectively automate that process, giving consumers a single toggle to keep their data protected.

    “I would argue if you have to go to every individual website and click the link saying you ‘don’t want your information sold or shared,’ that’s not really a meaningful privacy right,” said Caitriona Fitzgerald, deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, another organization that pressed for AB 566.

    Already, some browser makers have voluntarily offered similar settings under a framework called the Global Privacy Control. Mozilla’s Firefox, for example, includes a setting called “tell websites not to sell or share your data.” With that setting on, the browser communicates to sites that the visitor wants the site to respect the user’s preference.

    But until now, browsers haven’t been required to offer a setting that uses the Global Privacy Control or another standard to communicate users’ preferences. “There are browser extensions but those aren’t very widely used,” said Nick Doty, senior technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

    Since it would likely be burdensome for companies to carve out a way to only allow the signal to be used by Californians, according to experts, the tool will likely be available across the country. How, exactly, that will look still remains to be seen. The legislation doesn’t require browser makers to use a specific standard.

    Spokespeople for Google and Microsoft declined to comment on the companies’ plans.

    There’s still a risk that some websites may try to detect which state a visitor is from, and only respect the signal if they find the visitor is from a state that mandates it.

    This is legally risky, though, according to Roane, who points out that AB 566 applies to residents of California, regardless of whether they’re using the web from California.

    “If I’m safe saying I’m a resident and you’re assuming I’m not and you’re flagrantly not respecting my privacy wishes, that is a violation of the law,” Roane said.


    Pushback from Google and the industry

    The law didn’t get across the finish line without friction. As CalMatters reported in September, despite not being publicly against the legislation, Google organized opposition to the bill through a group it backs financially.

    AB 566 also wasn’t the first attempt at such legislation. Newsom vetoed a similar, but slightly more expansive, version of the bill in 2024.

    But now that the door is open, some advocates say they are going to continue to push to further expand privacy preferences.

    Roane notes that legislation could be drafted that requires connected smart devices to offer an opt-out preference, or for vehicles that gather data on drivers to respect opt-out preference requests.

    “We are finally, finally starting to have real privacy rights,” Roane said, “but we’re far away from them being really easy to exercise across the country and across the border and even in states like California where we have these rights.”

    This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

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    Associated Press

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  • 5 Takeaways for Business Owners from Tuesday’s Blue Wave Election Results

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    Election Day 2025 was a sweeping victory for Democrats, with major wins in two gubernatorial races and the New York City mayoral contest, along with California voters approving a ballot measure to redraw congressional districts, which could give Democrats an advantage in the House of Representatives starting in 2026. It could also be a learning experience for business owners.

    While political experts will be sifting through the results for days, trying to discern what this means for next year’s midterm elections and the overall state of the Democratic and Republican parties, there are also lessons to be found for entrepreneurs.

    Affordability is everything

    The economy was the driving force of the 2025 election. Exit polls found that in the New York City mayor race, both the New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races and the Proposition 50 battle in California, voters cited the economy as the most important issue. That likely doesn’t come as a shock to business owners. Plenty of holiday sales predictions have underlined it as well. (Deloitte, for example, forecasts U.S. consumers will spend 10% less than they did in 2024.) There’s a fine line between maintaining your company’s profitability and offering your customers a deal, but the electorate’s laser focus on their own financial situation underscores just how critical it is to thread that needle.

    It’s time to learn more about Democratic Socialism

    Despite opposition from big business and billionaires, Zohran Mamdani easily won the mayoral race in New York City, getting the most votes of any candidate since the 1960s. Mamdani is a democratic socialist, who made campaign promises that included free child care, free buses, and a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments.

    Bernie Sanders has been the face of democratic socialism until now, helping raise awareness of the party, but democratic socialists are still a small fraction of the overall voter population. As Tuesday showed, though, interest is growing fast. Voters are growing disenfranchised with their parties and looking for alternatives. Mamdani has emphasized more regulatory breaks for small businesses and fewer breaks for corporations, which could help him win over an even larger base. 

    Small businesses that can figure out how to communicate with and interact with that audience could find a loyal customer base. As Mamdani demonstrated, the political movement isn’t afraid to do battle with corporate entities.

    There’s power in the youth market

    Mamdani’s victory was fueled by the youth vote. Two-thirds of people under the age of 45 supported his campaign, according to exit polls. Young voters were also driven to the polls in California to vote on Prop 50. It was, in many ways, the first election where Generation Z had a major influence on results.

    Smart business owners have had Gen Z on their radar for a while. The group makes up nearly one-fifth of the workforce and is expected to have a spending power of $12 trillion by 2030. The 2025 election underlines that they’re a market that needs to be taken seriously.

    While traditional polls didn’t blow it quite as bad as they did in the 2024 elections, several made some of the high-level races seem a lot closer than they turned out to be when voting ended. Prediction markets, however, didn’t miss. That will almost certainly boost their reputation as political predictors, but business owners who study them could also get advance looks at evolving trends and coming waves. That could give them time to adapt and be ready to ride new waves in everything from tech to culture to the economy over the months and years to come.

    Sometimes you have to throw out the playbook

    Even with Tuesday’s victories, the Democratic party is still in the midst of an identity crisis. Mamdani’s victory could signal a change in how voters want to approach things. And California governor Gavin Newsom’s win on Prop 50 came after weeks of social media posts meant to mock Trump’s style. Whether these approaches will work on a more national level remains to be seen, but both were different than what voters were used to seeing. Both politicians saw that the status quo wasn’t working and gambled on something new, a lesson that business owners can learn from.

    Just because you create a new playbook, it doesn’t mean you have to completely do away with what has worked before, however. New Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger and New Jersey governor-elect Mikie Sherrill took a more centrist approach in their campaigns and still scored victories.

    The early-rate deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Chris Morris

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  • Democrats Dominate First Big Votes of Trump’s Second Term, but Uncertainties Remain

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    WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Democrats took a victory lap on Wednesday after sweeping the first major elections since Donald Trump returned to the White House, a much-needed balm for a wounded party that had spent much of the last year desperately trying to find its footing.

    A new generation of Democrats, including the 34-year-old New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, won closely watched contests in New Jersey, New York and Virginia, while California voters resoundingly approved a new congressional map aimed at improving Democratic odds of winning the U.S. House next year.

    Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, boasted that Republicans got “wiped out” in a post on X on Wednesday.

    The impressive performance – including lower-profile victories in swing states Pennsylvania and Georgia – gave a boost of momentum to Democrats, who remain locked out of power in Washington after losing the presidency, the House and the Senate a year ago to Trump’s Republicans. But most of the biggest contests took place in Democratic-leaning states, and there are still plenty of pitfalls for the party to confront before the 2026 midterm elections next November.

    The Democratic brand remains broadly unpopular, according to opinion polls. While Trump’s approval rating has fallen, voters are still split between the parties; a Reuters/Ipsos poll in late October found respondents were equally likely to say they would vote for a Republican or a Democrat for the House if the election were held that day.

    Intraparty tensions may also persist. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, energized young voters as an anti-establishment insurgent, while Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, the two women who won the Virginia and New Jersey governor races, are both moderate Democrats with national security backgrounds.

    However, all three candidates focused intensely on economic issues, particularly the cost of living, an issue that helped propel Trump to the White House last year but has remained top-of-mind for voters.

    “I think the lesson for the president is that it’s not enough to diagnose the crisis in working-class Americans’ lives,” Mamdani said at his first press conference as mayor-elect on Wednesday. “You have to deliver.”

    Trump, a brawler by nature, wrote on social media just after midnight in all capital letters, “…and so it begins!” On Wednesday morning, the White House posted a campaign-style video celebrating the one-year anniversary since Trump regained the presidency, writing, “The golden age of America is here to stay.”

    Democrats have argued that the party can succeed with candidates of all ideological stripes, as long as they focus on the problems that matter most to everyday Americans.

    “There’s many different ways of being a Democrat,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin told Reuters ahead of the election. “No one should confuse unity with unanimity.”

    Mamdani, the first Muslim to be elected mayor of the biggest U.S. city, defeated former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, 67, who ran as an independent after losing the nomination to Mamdani earlier this year. Cuomo, who resigned as governor four years ago after sexual harassment allegations that he has denied, painted Mamdani as a radical leftist whose proposals were unworkable and dangerous.

    Mamdani has proposed raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy to pay for ambitious policies such as frozen rents, free childcare and free city buses.

    Republicans have already begun portraying Mamdani as the new face of the Democratic Party.

    “His election is proof that the Democrat Party has abandoned common sense and tied themselves to extremism,” Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters said in a statement.

    While Sherrill’s and Spanberger’s victories were perhaps unsurprising in Democratic-leaning states, the double-digit margins of their wins far exceeded Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ performance last year.

    Both candidates had sought to tie their opponents to Trump in an effort to harness frustration among Democratic and independent voters over his chaotic tenure.

    More than one-third of voters in those states said opposing Trump was a factor in their vote, according to exit polls conducted for a consortium of U.S. networks and the Associated Press. Those voters overwhelmingly cast ballots for the Democrats.

    For Republicans, Tuesday’s elections were an early warning sign that the party may struggle to mobilize Trump’s coalition when he is not on the ballot. Vice President JD Vance acknowledged that problem in a social media post on Wednesday, saying Republicans must do a better job of turning out the less reliable voters that backed Trump in 2024.

    (Reporting by Joseph Ax in Washington; additional reporting by Susan Heavey, James Oliphant and Bhargav Acharya; editing by Paul Thomasch and Howard Goller)

    Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

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  • Democratic wins nationwide, a major rebuke of Trump, offer the left hope for 2026

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    NEW YORK — At the top of his victory speech at a Brooklyn theater late Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani — the 34-year-old democratic socialist just elected New York’s next mayor — spoke of power being gripped by the bruised and calloused hands of working Americans, away from the wealthy elite.

    “Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it,” he said. “The future is in our hands.”

    The imagery was apropos of the night more broadly — when a beaten-down Democratic Party, still nursing its wounds from a wipeout by President Trump a year ago, forcefully took back what some had worried was lost to them for good: momentum.

    From coast to coast Tuesday night, American voters delivered a sharp rebuke to Trump and his MAGA movement, electing Democrats in important state and local races in New York, New Jersey and Virginia and passing a major California ballot measure designed to put more Democrats in Congress in 2026.

    The results — a reversal of the party’s fortunes in last year’s presidential election, when Trump swept the nation’s swing states — arrived amid deep political division and entrenched Republican power in Washington. Many voters cited Trump’s agenda, and related economic woes, as motivating their choices at the ballot box.

    The wins hardly reflected a unified Democratic Party nationally, or even a shared left-wing vision for a future beyond Trump. If anything, Mamdani’s win was a challenge to the Democratic Party establishment as much as a rejection of Trump.

    His vision for the future is decidedly different than that of other, more moderate Democrats who won elsewhere in the country, such as Abigail Spanberger, the 46-year-old former CIA officer whom Virginians elected as their first female governor, or Mikie Sherrill, the 53-year-old former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who won the race for New Jersey governor.

    Still, the cascade of victories did evoke for many Democrats and progressives a political hope that they hadn’t felt in a while: a sense of optimism that Trump and his MAGA movement aren’t unstoppable after all, and that their own party’s ability to resist isn’t just alive and well but gaining speed.

    “Let me underscore, it’s been a good evening — for everybody, not just the Democratic Party. But what a night for the Democratic Party,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said during his own remarks on the national wins. “A party that is in its ascendancy, a party that’s on its toes, no longer on its heels.”

    “I hope it’s the first of many dominoes that are going to happen across this country,” Noah Gotlib, 29, of Bushwick said late Tuesday at a victory party for Mamdani. “I hope there’s a hundred more Zohrans at a local, state, federal level.”

    On a night of big wins, Mamdani’s nonetheless stood out as a thunderbolt from the progressive left — a full-throated rejection not just of Trump but of Mamdani’s mainstream Democratic opponent in the race: former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

    Mamdani — a Muslim, Ugandan-born state assemblyman of Indian descent — beat Cuomo first in the Democratic ranked-choice primary in June. Cuomo, bolstered by many of New York’s moneyed interests afraid of Mamdani’s ideas for taxing the rich and spending for the poor, reentered the race as an independent.

    Trump attacked Mamdani time and again as a threat. He said Monday that he would cut off federal funding to New York if Mamdani won. He even took the dramatic step of endorsing Cuomo over Curtis Sliwa, the Republican in the race, in a last-ditch effort to block Mamdani’s stunning political ascent.

    Instead, city voters surged to the polls and delivered Mamdani a resounding win.

    “To see him rise above all of these odds to actually deliver a vision of something that could be better, that was what really attracted me to the [Democratic Socialists of America] in the first place,” said Aminata Hughes, 31, of Harlem, who was dancing at an election-night party when Mamdani was announced the winner.

    “A better world is possible,” the native New Yorker said, “and we’re not used to hearing that from our politicians.”

    In trademark Trump fashion, the president dismissed the wins by his rival party, suggesting they were a result of two factors: the ongoing federal shutdown, which he has blamed on Democrats, and the fact that he wasn’t personally on people’s ballots.

    Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s chief advisors, posted a paragraph to social media outlining the high number of mixed-status immigrant families in New York being impacted by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and mass deportation campaign, which Miller has helped lead.

    Democrats in some ways agreed. They pointed to the shutdown and other disruptions to Americans’ safety and financial security as motivating the vote. They pointed to Trump’s immigration tactics as being an affront to hard-working families. And they pointed to Trump himself — not on the ballot but definitely a factor for voters, especially after he threatened to cut off funds to New York if the city voted for Mamdani again.

    “President Trump has threatened New York City if we dare stand up to him. The people of New York came together and we said, ‘You don’t threaten New York,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “We’re going to stand up to bullies and thugs in the White House.”

    “Today we said ‘no’ to Donald Trump and ‘yes’ to democracy,” New Jersey Democratic Chair LeRoy J. Jones Jr. told a happy crowd at Sherrill’s watch party.

    “Congratulations to all the Democratic candidates who won tonight. It’s a reminder that when we come together around strong, forward-looking leaders who care about the issues that matter, we can win,” former President Obama wrote on social media. “We’ve still got plenty of work to do, but the future looks a little bit brighter.”

    In addition to winning the New York mayoral and New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, Democrats outperformed Republicans in races across the country. They held several seats on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and won the Virginia attorney general’s race. In California, voters passed Proposition 50, a ballot measure giving state Democrats the power to redraw congressional districts in their favor ahead of next year’s midterms.

    Newsom and other Democrats had made Proposition 50 all about Trump from the beginning, framing it as a direct response to Trump trying to steal power by convincing red states such as Texas to redraw their own congressional lines in favor of Republicans.

    Trump has been direct about trying to shore up Republicans’ slim majority in the House, to help ensure they retain power and are able to block Democrats from thwarting his agenda. And yet, he has suggested California’s own redistricting effort was illegal and a “GIANT SCAM” under “very serious legal and criminal review.”

    Trump had also gone after several of the Democrats who won on Tuesday directly. In addition to Mamdani, Trump tried to paint Spanberger and Sherrill as out-of-touch liberals too, attacking them over some of his favorite wedge issues such as transgender rights, crime and energy costs. Similar messaging was deployed by the candidates’ Republican opponents.

    In some ways, Trump was going out on a political limb, trying to sway elections in blue states where his grip on the electorate is smaller and his influence is often a major motivator for people to get out and vote against him and his allies.

    His weighing in on the races only added to the sense that the Democrats’ wins marked something bigger — a broader repudiation of Trump, and a good sign for Democrats heading into next year’s midterms.

    Marcus LaCroix, 42, who voted for the measure at a polling site in Lomita on Tuesday evening, described it as “a counterpunch” to what he sees as the excesses and overreach of the Trump administration, and Trump’s pressure on red states to redraw their lines.

    “A lot of people are very concerned about the redistricting in Texas,” he said. “But we can actually fight back.”

    Ed Razine, 27, a student who lives in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, was in class when he heard Mamdani won. Soon, he was celebrating with friends at Nowadays, a Bushwick dance club hosting an election watch party.

    Razine said Mamdani’s win represented a “new dawn” in American politics that he hopes will spread to other cities and states across the country.

    “For me, he does represent the future of the Democratic Party — the fact that billionaires can’t just buy our election, that if someone really cares to truly represent the everyday person, people will rise up and that money will not talk,” Razine said. “At the end of the day, people talk.”

    The Associated Press and Times staff writer Connor Sheets contributed to this report.

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    Kevin Rector, Summer Lin

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  • A Next-Generation Victory for Democrats

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    None of the three Democrats who won convincingly on Tuesday was in politics when Donald Trump was first elected President. In 2016, Abigail Spanberger, the governor-elect of Virginia, had recently left the C.I.A. and was working for an educational consultancy. Mikie Sherrill, who just won the race to be New Jersey’s next governor, was a helicopter pilot turned federal prosecutor. Zohran Mamdani, the thirty-four-year-old state assemblyman who will soon be New York City’s mayor, was rapping as Young Cardamom and volunteering for left-wing City Council candidates. For much of the past decade, the Democratic Party has seemed stuck in a pre-Trump past; Tuesday seemed like the turning of a generational page. At his victory party on Tuesday night, Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist and the most ideological of the trio, was the most explicit about the shift: “We are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn.”

    The 2025 elections were always going to be about the Democrats, not just because this year’s major races were set in blue places but because the Party has been adrift since last year’s Presidential election. Lately, the most reliable rhythm in political news has been commentators explaining what the Democrats “should” and “must” do. (“The Democrats must add to their collective vocabulary two words . . . equality and oligarchy,” Fintan O’Toole wrote, in The New York Review of Books, urging a more populist turn. More ecumenically, Ezra Klein wrote, in the Times, “The Democratic Party does not need to choose to be one thing. It needs to choose to be more things.”) For some more centrist Democrats, what the Party needed was to avoid being tagged with Mamdani’s more expansive left-wing views. Asked on CNN whether Mamdani was the future of the Party, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries pointedly said no. (“Good to know,” Mamdani said, when told about Jeffries’s comment.) Senator Chuck Schumer refused to say who he voted for. “People do want us to be aspirational and dream big,” Spanberger said of Mamdani, a few days before the election. “They also don’t want us to lie to them.”

    But despite all the prickly talk and the very careful factional positioning—left versus center—the Democrats who won Tuesday all shared the same theme: that the most important things cost too much. Asked to define his closing message, Mamdani said it was “the same message that we opened 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, following Spanberger during the last days of her campaign, found her “laser-focussed” on an economic message, because, as she put it, “We see the hardships of this moment.” In Sherrill’s final ad, she said, “I’ll serve you as governor to drive your costs down.” Mamdani’s support of a rent freeze was seen as a socialist-style proposal, but Sherrill had herself campaigned on declaring a state of emergency on her first day in office, in order to freeze utility costs for New Jersey families, including suburban homeowners. These ideas came from opposite factions in the Party, but, when you listened to them, they sounded very much the same.

    Set aside the endless and sometimes annoyingly abstract debate over whether the Democrats should move to the left or to the center, and a pair of insights emerge from Tuesday’s results, both of which might give some hope to a Party that has lately been starved for it. First, the prospect that the 2024 election marked an electoral “realignment,” in which young and nonwhite voters without college degrees moved 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, suggested that these weaknesses had been largely circumstantial, with some racially diverse areas that had been drifting away from the Democrats, such as Hudson County, in New Jersey, swinging back toward them on Thursday. In the Washington Post/ABC News poll taken shortly before the election, sixty-six per cent of young voters disapproved of the job that President Trump is doing, as did more than seventy per cent of racial minorities. (“That’s not screaming realignment,” the analyst Ronald Brownstein noted.) Exit polls published by NBC had Spanberger and Sherrill winning men under twenty-nine—the demographic most thought to be fleeing to the right—by ten points. Mamdani won them by forty. This time, it was the New York socialist who brought new voters into the political process.

    Maybe more significant, as Mamdani, Sherrill, and Spanberger all seemed to recognize, Trump has handed them not just an issue but a theme that the Party might carry through to the midterms. Having won the Presidency in part because of concerns about the escalating cost of living, Trump has governed in ways that have deepened the problem. His so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act amounted to a vast transfer of money from the poor to the rich. He has been personally fixated on an escalation of tariffs that has made ordinary goods much more expensive. During the ongoing government shutdown, he has at one point refused a court order requiring his Administration to disburse funds to pay food-stamp recipients, as lines at food pantries grow. Millions of people now stand to lose health insurance because of the President’s hard-line position in budget negotiations. The most natural campaign for Democrats to run—one that the Party was built to run in the twentieth century—is ordinary people against the rich. Trump is handing it back to them. Cue the ads: the billionaire pardoned after investing in the Trump family’s crypto projects; the twenty billion dollars sent away to bolster the Argentinean President, a political ally of the White House, at the expense of American farmers; the bulldozers razing the East Wing in a project underwritten by Trump’s donors.

    How much more optimistic should Democrats allow themselves to be? Trump is still the President, and the pressures of his policies and his authoritarian tendencies are still mounting. Tuesday’s elections took place mostly in safely 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 contradictory instincts and mutual antipathy. Even so, the winning campaigns suggested the themes that might help renew the Party, and their margins of victory offered hope for a strong midterm. Tuesday night on CNN had begun with Dick Cheney’s death and ended with a live stream hosted by Ben Shapiro and Charlamagne tha God. The old system was under pressure everywhere. “I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older,” Mamdani told his Election Night party. For the first time in a while, he might have said the same of his party, too. ♦

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    Benjamin Wallace-Wells

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  • Key takeaways from the 2025 elections

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    After last year’s stunning electoral setbacks, Democrats needed a big night on Tuesday.

    And they got it.

    “Democrats Sweep Election Night, Fueling Momentum Going Into 2026 Midterms,” screamed the headline from a Democratic National Committee (DNC) email late in the evening, as the party pointed to double-digit victories in the gubernatorial elections in blue-leaning New Jersey and Virginia, and convincing victories in crucial ballot box showdowns in Democrat-dominated California and battleground Pennsylvania.

    In arguably the most closely watched election this autumn, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani made history as the first Muslim and first Millennial elected New York City mayor.

    HEAD HERE FOR FOX NEWS ELECTION 2025 COVERAGE

    New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill speaks during an election night party in East Brunswick, N.J., Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025. (Matt Rourke/AP Photo)

    While Mamdani’s victory in the nation’s most populous city is a shot in the arm for the rise of the socialist movement, it also appears to be a political gift for Republicans.

    Here are three key takeaways from Election Night 2025.

    1. The Mamdani factor

    Since Mamdani’s Democratic mayoral primary victory in June, Republicans have repeatedly aimed to make the now-34-year-old Ugandan-born state lawmaker from New York City the new face of the Democratic Party, as they work to characterize Democrats as far-left socialists.

    And as Mamdani was on his way to a roughly 9-point win in Tuesday’s general election over former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was running as an independent, the GOP struck again.

    HEAD HERE FOR FOX NEWS LIVE UPDATES ON THE 2025 BALLOT BOX SHOWDOWNS

    “Democrats have officially handed New York City over to a self-proclaimed Communist, and hardworking families will be the ones paying the price,” Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Joe Gruters claimed in a statement. “His election is proof that the Democrat Party has abandoned common sense and tied themselves to extremism.”

    National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spokesman Mike Marinella charged that “the Democrat Party has surrendered to radical socialist Zohran Mamdani and the far-left mob who are now running the show.”

    Zohran Mamdani celebrating

    Socialist Zohran Mamdani won his New York City mayoral race over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

    And as Fox News Digital first reported on Wednesday morning, the NRCC immediately launched ads linking Mamdani to House Democrats who face challenging re-elections in next year’s midterms, when the GOP aims to defend its fragile majority in the chamber.

    Longtime Republican strategist Colin Reed told Fox News Digital that Democrats “are now going to have an ascendant and emboldened Mayor-elect Mamdani dominating the national spotlight.”

    WHAT THE RESULTS OF THE 2025 ELECTIONS MAY MEAN FOR DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS

    But veteran Democratic strategist Joe Caiazzo, pointing to the gubernatorial victories by moderate Democrats Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and former Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, emphasized “tonight proved that the Democrats’ pathway back to majorities in both chambers and the White House runs directly through the idea of building a big enough tent to encompass moderates and progressives.”

    2. Did Democrats get their mojo back?

    Democrats lost control of the White House and Senate and failed to win back the House majority in last year’s elections, as Republicans made major gains with key parts of the Democratic Party base, including minorities and younger voters.

    And Democrats have been mostly powerless to blunt President Donald Trump‘s unprecedented and explosive second-term agenda.

    But Democrats see Tuesday’s impressive victories as the first step in a political rebound, and an affirmation of the party’s campaign trail emphasis this year on the issue of affordability.

    “American voters just delivered a Democratic resurgence. A Republican reckoning. A Blue Sweep. And it happened because our Democratic candidates, no matter where they are, no matter how they fit into our big tent party, are meeting voters at the kitchen table, not the gilded ballroom,” DNC chair Ken Martin highlighted.

    And Martin argued, “To all the Republicans who have bowed a cowardly knee to Trump all year, consider this: We’re coming after your jobs next.”

    Abigail Spanberger celebrates Virginia gubernatorial win

    Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger celebrates as she takes the stage during her election night rally at the Greater Richmond Convention Center on Nov. 04, 2025. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

    Caiazzo said that the Democrats’ ballot box victories show that “voters are hungry for candidates that speak to their concerns and offer to unite, not divide.”

    But Reed countered that “Democrat candidates winning in blue parts of the country isn’t unexpected. The fact that there was any suspense at all heading into the evening was the more surprising development.”

    And he pointed out that “the battle for next year’s midterms is taking place in friendlier terrain.”

    3. No MAGA momentum

    While he lost both New Jersey and Virginia in last year’s presidential election, Trump made major gains in both states.

    And a big question heading into the 2025 elections was whether MAGA supporters, who tend to be low-propensity voters, would cast ballots in an off-election year when Trump wasn’t on the ballot.

    Many didn’t.

    The president, in a quote on social media that he attributed to “pollsters,” said that “TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT.”

    Veteran Republican strategist Chris LaCivita, who served as a co-campaign manager of Trump’s 2024 White House bid, highlighted, “Candidate quality matters. Tonight was a great lesson for the Republican Party: running squishy Rs who are lukewarm on Trump and MAGA, even in “purple” states, doesn’t work.”

    Winsome Sears cheers

    Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears greets supporters on Election Night in Leesburg, Virginia. (Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

    LaCivita specifically called out Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, the GOP gubernatorial nominee who lost to Spanberger by 15 points.

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    And he warned that “Republicans must get smart and run only MAGA candidates moving forward; otherwise, there will be massive turnout problems when @realDonaldTrump is not on the ballot!”

    Reed emphasized that for the GOP, “the task remains re-assembling the winning Trump coalition without his name on the ballot. The good news for the Republican side is the deep bench of talented and proven leaders to carry that flag into battle.”

    Paul Steinhauser is a politics reporter based in the swing state of New Hampshire. He covers the campaign trail from coast to coast.”

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  • Here’s a recap of Tuesday’s election results in Pennsylvania and New Jersey

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    Tuesday proved to be a successful election day for Democrats competing in closely watched races around the country, including several locally.

    The main event for this region was between Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli for governor of New Jersey. Sherrill won by a margin that proved not to be as close as several polls had predicted. Other races that wrapped up with little drama were the retention elections for Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the contest for Philadelphia District Attorney.

    Below is a recap of those and other elections relevant to the region.

    Additional judicial election results for Philadelphia’s Common Pleas Court and Philadelphia Municipal Court are available on the city’s election website, along with results of the retention elections in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court. And results of judicial elections and retention elections in Pennsylvania Superior Court and Commonwealth Court are posted on the state’s election website.

    New Jersey Governor results

    Democrat Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli in Tuesday’s election. Sherrill will succeed New Jersey’s current governor, Democrat Phil Murphy, who was term limited after eight years in office. Sherrill, a former Navy pilot and currently the congresswoman representing New Jersey’s 11th District, will be the second woman to serve as New Jersey’s governor. The first was Republican Christie Todd Whitman who was elected to two terms between 1994 and 2001.

    Pennsylvania Supreme Court retention results

    The retention elections for Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty and David Wecht set a record for campaign spending on a nonpartisan judicial race with a total expenditure of more than $15 million. Despite all the attention, the races proved not to be close with all three justices cruising to retention victories.

    Their return to the bench on state’s highest court means the liberal justices will maintain their 5-2 advantage over the conservative justices. By winning election, Donohue, Dougherty and Wecht are each elected to new 10-year terms. Donohue, who is 73, will only serve two more years before reaching the mandatory judicial retirement age of 75.

    Philadelphia District Attorney results

    Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner easily won election to a third term on Tuesday, defeating Pat Dugan, a former Philadelphia Municipal Court judge. This is the second time Krasner defeated Dugan this election cycle: Dugan also lost to the progressive prosecutor in May’s Democratic primary election.

    Philadelphia City Controller results

    The Philadelphia City Controller is the chief auditor of the city and the School District of Philadelphia. The auditor’s office works independently of city government, and its analyses are intended to provide objective information to city leaders and the public about Philadelphia’s finances and how its money is being spent. Incumbent Christy Brady easily defeated Republican Ari Patrinos in Tuesday’s election.

    New Jersey Assembly District 1 results

    District 1 represent parts of Atlantic and Cumberland counties and all of Cape May County. Incumbent Republicans Antwan McClellan and Erik Simonsen are running against Democrats Carolyn Rush and Carol Sabo.

    New Jersey Assembly District 2 results

    District 2 represents parts of Atlantic County including several shore towns. Assemblyman Don Guardian and Assemblywoman Claire Swift are the Republican incumbents. They face challenges from Democrats Joanne Famularo and Maureen Rowan in Tuesday’s general election.

    New Jersey Assembly District 3 results

    District 3 covers Salem County and parts of Gloucester and Cumberland Counties. Democrats Dave Bailey Jr. and Heather Simmons are the incumbents, and they are running against Republicans Chris Konawell and Lawrence Moore. 

    New Jersey Assembly District 4 results

    District 4 represents parts of Camden, Atlantic and Gloucester counties. Democrats Dan Hutchinson and Cody Miller are the incumbent members of the state assembly representing this district. They are challenged for their seats on Tuesday by Republicans Amanda Esposito and Gerard McManus.

    New Jersey Assembly District 5 results

    District 5 represents portions of Gloucester and Camden Counties. Assemblymen William Moen Jr. and William Spearman, both Democrats, are the incumbents and are running for reelection against Republicans Constance Ditzel and Nilsa Gonzalez, along with Green Party candidate Robin Brownfield.

    New Jersey Assembly District 6 results

    District 6 represents parts Camden and Burlington counties. Democrats Louis Greenwald and Melinda Kane hold the assembly seats in this district. They are running against Republicans John Brangan and Peter Sykes.

    New Jersey Assembly District 7 results

    District 7 represents municipalities in the portion of Burlington County along the Delaware River. Carol Murphy and Balvir Singh, two Democrats, are the current assembly people representing this district. Republicans Douglas Dillon and Dione Johnson are running against them. 

    New Jersey Assembly District 8 results

    District 8 represents parts of Atlantic and Burlington counties. Headed into Tuesday’s election, its assembly seats are split between Republican Michael Torrissi Jr. and Democrat Andrea Katz. The other candidates in this election are Republican Brandon E. Umba. and Democrat Anthony Angelozzi.

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  • What Mikie Sherrill’s Victory in New Jersey Means for Businesses

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    The race for New Jersey governor initially looked like a blowout. Earlier this summer, Democrat Mikie Sherrill held a 20 point lead in the polls over Republican Jack Ciattarelli, a former entrepreneur who owned and ran medical publisher Galen publishing. Ciattarelli, who campaigned on reducing corporate taxes and state spending, fought back with a key endorsement from Donald Trump, eventually pulling to a virtual tie, according to at least one poll, in the days leading up to the race. But Sherill came out on top on election night, capturing about 56 percent of the vote.

    Sherrill is a former naval officer. Since 2019, she has served as the U.S. representative for New Jersey’s 11th congressional district. Before that, she was a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office for many years.

    The race, one of just two gubernatorial battles this year (the other occurring in Virginia, which was also won by the Democratic candidate) was closely watched as it was the first for voters to register their feelings about the current presidential administration. New Jersey is often seen as a bellwether for what is to come in next year’s midterm elections. 

    New Jersey’s economy may well have been the deciding factor for voters. Over half of the people surveyed by Emerson College/Pix 11/The Hill listed it as their top concern. Outgoing Governor Phil Murphy had seen his popularity plunge in recent months, with only a 34 percent approval rating in the days leading up to the election.

    Now the question becomes what Mikie Sherrill’s election will mean for small businesses in the state.

    During the campaign, Sherrill was endorsed by several key Democratic party members, including Barack Obama. She also was the candidate of choice of several labor groups, including the Teamsters Joint Council 53 and the New Jersey State AFL-CIO, which said, “She understands the dignity of work, the importance of strong unions, and the role that labor plays in building a fair economy.” (The National Federation of Independent Business’s New Jersey PAC endorsed her opponent.)

    Here’s where Sherrill stands on four business-critical issues.

    Taxes

    Sherrill has said she plans to eliminate the state’s business registration fee to attract more companies to the state. She also wants to offer tax relief to businesses, in hopes of creating job growth. To make up for that income, she says, she plans to develop non-tax revenue sources, which will be used to find the transit system. This could be anything from higher parking fees at stations to more ads on New Jersey Transit buses and trains. Sherrill also says she plans to cut permitting and licensing wait times and expand the Business Action Center, a state agency that helps businesses in several ways, from offering guidance on regulation and permits to help accessing grants and other financing options.

    Energy costs

    Upon taking office, Sherrill plans to declare a State of Emergency on Utility Costs and freeze utility rates. She plans to build cheaper and cleaner power generation options and increase transparency from utility companies. More state properties will host solar projects, including closed landfills, carports and NJ Transit facilities and solar options will be expanded. She also plans to collaborate with neighboring states to upgrade New Jersey’s energy infrastructure. This would include expanding battery storage, which she says will bring down costs.

    Minimum wage

    Saying she is “committed to boosting wages for working families,” Sherrill stopped short of pledging to raise the state’s minimum wage. She noted it was indexed to inflation in the state to account for cost of living increases. Her focus, instead, seems to be on cutting costs, rather than increasing minimum incomes.

    AI data centers

    Mikie Sherrill’s Day One State of Emergency on Utility Costs will launch an initiative to build out new power generation systems, she says. Increasing those should make the state more appealing to data center developers. She also has said she plans to take the state’s grid operator to court, alleging mismanagement and failure to add readily available clean energy sources to the grid. Doing so, she says, has cost the state business contracts.

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  • Here’s what CBS News exit polls told us about the 2025 elections

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    The Trump factor

    He may not have been on the ballot, but President Trump was on the minds of voters in the 2025 elections. 

    He was a factor for many voters in each of the places where exit polls were conducted: Virginia, New Jersey, New York City and California. And more said their vote in these races was to oppose him, than support him.

    These are historically Democrat-leaning places, and more voters here disapproved than approved of his overall job as president. They also found that his administration’s actions on immigration enforcement have gone too far. 

    New York City: Cost of living and bringing needed change

    New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won a decisive victory over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on a campaign of affordability, and the cost of living was the most important issue to voters in New York City. Mamdani handily won the majority of voters who picked it. More specifically, he focused on the cost of housing, which seven in 10 voters in New York said was a major problem where they live, and he won among renters, who made up more than half of the electorate.

    Voters who made up their minds in the last month of the campaign voted overwhelmingly for Cuomo, but it wasn’t enough to make up for the majority of voters who decided on Mamdani before October.

    Cuomo led Mamdani among Jewish voters — most of whom said a candidate’s position on Israel was important in their vote. 

    Mamdani’s coalition was led by enormous support among voters under 30 and very liberal voters, but his support extended to all voters under 45 and to those who considered themselves only somewhat liberal, while older voters, as well as moderates and conservatives, voted for Cuomo.

    image5.png

    The Republican candidate in the New York City mayoral race, Curtis Sliwa, came in a distant third and didn’t even win self-identified Republicans (they voted for Cuomo). Had he dropped out of the race, it might not have made a difference. Though most of Sliwa’s supporters said they would have voted for Cuomo, exit polls indicate that in a hypothetical two-way race, Mamdani still would have been victorious.

    Mamdani also ran on change, and that was picked as the most important quality in how voters made their decision. A changing electorate was also a hallmark of Mamdani’s win — his strongest support was not just young voters, but also those who were voting in a mayoral race for the first time and those who had moved to New York within the past 10 years.

    New Jersey and Virginia: The economy, women voters

    Economic issues also loomed large in the Democratic wins in the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia. In New Jersey, Jack Ciattarelli won voters who were most concerned about taxes and who said electricity was a major problem for them, but voters who said the most important issue was the economy overall voted for Sherrill. In Virginia, those “economy” voters voted for Abigail Spanberger over Winsome Earle-Sears by more than 20 points.

    Women voted in big numbers for the women Democratic candidates in Virginia and New Jersey. Sherrill and Spanberger’s margins with women were far larger than Kamala Harris’ were nationally in 2024.

    Independents were key, too. They swung toward Spanberger in Virginia, after Glenn Youngkin won them in 2021. Independents also backed Sherrill in New Jersey. 

    image1.png

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    California Prop 50: Getting back at Republicans’ plans

    The proposition, pushed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, authorizes temporary changes to the state’s congressional district maps in response to redistricting in Texas. 

    “Yes” voters didn’t necessarily think this ballot initiative was the best way to draw congressional district line — but they overwhelmingly said it was to counter the changes made by Republicans in other states. 

    image2.png

    Polls may have updated since this post was published.

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  • Maps show election results for NYC mayor and New Jersey, Virginia governor’s races

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    Results are still coming in as votes are counted in closely watched elections in New York City, New Jersey and Virginia. 

    New York City mayor’s race

    Democrat Zohran Mamdani will win the three-way race for New York City mayor, CBS News projects — defeating former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who’s running as an independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

    Mamdani, 34, is a democratic socialist who promised rent freezes and free buses during his campaign. Cuomo was backed by several establishment Democrats — and even by President Trump. The closely watched race is all but certain to fuel debate over Democrats’ future going into the midterms, a year after losing the presidency, the House and the Senate in 2024. 

    NYC mayoral candidates Zohran Mamdani (L), Andrew Cuomo (C) and Curtis Sliwa (R).

    (L) Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images, (C) TIMOTHY A.CLARY/AFP via Getty Images, (R) Stephanie Keith/Getty Images


    For more on the New York City mayoral race, follow updates here.

    Watch the live results as they’re reported in the map below. 

    New Jersey governor’s race

    In the New Jersey governor’s race, Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli, CBS News projects. 

    Photos of Jack Ciattarelli and Mikie Sherrill from a debate

    Candidates in the New Jersey governor’s race: Republican Jack Ciattarelli and Democrat Mikie Sherrill.

    AP Photos


    Gov. Phil Murphy is serving his second term as governor, and Sherrill’s victory means the governorship will be under Democratic control for three straight terms — the first time either party has held the governor’s seat for three terms in a row since 1961.

    Here are the live results as they’re reported, county by county, in New Jersey.

    Virginia governor’s race

    In Virginia, former Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears to be Virginia’s next governor, CBS News projected. Spanberger is making history as the first woman to serve in the role. 

    Election 2025 Virginia

    Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earle-Sears, left, and Democratic candidate Abigail Spanberger, right.

    AP


    Running as a moderate, Spanberger flipped the governorship, which is currently held by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Youngkin is prohibited from running for a consecutive term under state law. The race is widely seen as a referendum on President Trump, who did not endorse Earle-Sears.

    Here are the live results as they’re reported, county by county, in Virginia.

    For more on the results of the 2025 elections, follow live updates here. 

    CBS News 24/7 is streaming live election coverage throughout the night. And you can go deeper with analysis and opinion from The Free Press, a Paramount publication.

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  • Election Day 2025: Live updates of key races, storylines and ballot measures around the country

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    Former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who was outraised by the Democrat and failed to earn the endorsement of President Donald Trump.The win flips control of the commonwealth’s governor’s mansion. While local issues and the biographies of the candidates played a strong role in the race, the results also reflect a contest where Trump’s presence loomed.Virginia has a concentration of federal workers in the north and has deeply felt both the impact of the president cutting the workforce and of the government shutdown.Virginia was one of two states, along with New Jersey, where voters were picking a governor on Tuesday. Voters were also selecting a new mayor in New York City, and in California, were deciding whether to approve a new congressional map that is designed to help Democrats win five more U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections. Here are the latest time-stamped updates from Election Day 2025 (ET): 8:15 p.m.Results for two high-profile mayoral races have come in.According to AP, Democrat Aftab Pureval has won the Cincinnati mayoral election over Cory Bowman, who is the half-brother of Vice President JD Vance.And in Atlanta, Democrat Andre Dickens won reelection over three challengers.8 p.m.Democrat Abigail Spanberger has won Virginia’s gubernatorial election, becoming the first female governor in the commonwealth’s history, according to AP projections.Spanberger, a former congresswoman and CIA case officer, defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.Spanberger ran a mostly moderate campaign, offering a model for Democrats who want the party anchored by center-left candidates.Spanberger tied Earle-Sears to President Donald Trump but kept her arguments mostly on Trump’s economic policy and her support for abortion rights.Notably, Trump did not endorse Earle-Sears.7:30 p.m. Economic worries were the dominant concern as voters cast ballots for Tuesday’s elections, according to preliminary findings from the AP Voter Poll.The results of the expansive survey of more than 17,000 voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City suggest they are troubled by an economy that seems trapped by higher prices and fewer job opportunities.The economic challenges have played out in different ways at the local level. Most New Jersey voters said property taxes were a “major problem,” while most New York City voters said this about the cost of housing. Most Virginia voters said they’ve felt at least some impact from the recent federal government cuts.7 p.m.Polling locations have closed in Virginia.Polls across the commonwealth’s counties and cities were open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Voters in line at a polling place at 7 p.m. can still cast ballots.Virginia voters are choosing a new governor and lieutenant governor. They’re also deciding whether Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares should get another term or if Democratic challenger Jay Jones should replace him. All 100 seats in the House of Delegates are also up for election.There are well over 6 million registered voters in Virginia. The last time these statewide races were on the ballot in 2021, overall voter turnout was 55%.This year, nearly 1.5 million people have cast absentee ballots, mostly through the mail or in person.Video below: Spanberger makes last push before Tuesday’s election for VA governor6:55 p.m.New York City’s Board of Elections released another turnout update Tuesday evening.As of 6 p.m., 1.7 million people have voted in the mayoral election.That’s the biggest turnout in a New York City mayoral election in at least 30 years. Just under 1.9 million people voted in the 1993 race, when Republican Rudy Giuliani ousted Mayor David Dinkins, a Democrat.6:45 p.m.Here is when polls close in states with key races. New York: 9 p.m.New Jersey: 8 p.m.Virginia: 7 p.m.California: 11 p.m. (8 p.m. PT)6:30 p.m.It’s not a presidential election year or even the midterms, but the stakes for Election Day 2025 remain undeniably high, with outcomes that could leave a lasting impact on the nation’s direction.Will California redefine the congressional landscape ahead of 2026? Could New York City elect a democratic socialist as its next mayor? And how will the perception of the Trump administration impact critical gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia?This week holds the answers to those pressing questions. Here’s what you need to know before the results start rolling in Tuesday night.

    Former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, who was outraised by the Democrat and failed to earn the endorsement of President Donald Trump.

    The win flips control of the commonwealth’s governor’s mansion. While local issues and the biographies of the candidates played a strong role in the race, the results also reflect a contest where Trump’s presence loomed.

    Virginia has a concentration of federal workers in the north and has deeply felt both the impact of the president cutting the workforce and of the government shutdown.

    Virginia was one of two states, along with New Jersey, where voters were picking a governor on Tuesday. Voters were also selecting a new mayor in New York City, and in California, were deciding whether to approve a new congressional map that is designed to help Democrats win five more U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections.

    Here are the latest time-stamped updates from Election Day 2025 (ET):

    8:15 p.m.

    Results for two high-profile mayoral races have come in.

    According to AP, Democrat Aftab Pureval has won the Cincinnati mayoral election over Cory Bowman, who is the half-brother of Vice President JD Vance.

    And in Atlanta, Democrat Andre Dickens won reelection over three challengers.

    8 p.m.

    Democrat Abigail Spanberger has won Virginia’s gubernatorial election, becoming the first female governor in the commonwealth’s history, according to AP projections.

    Spanberger, a former congresswoman and CIA case officer, defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.

    Spanberger ran a mostly moderate campaign, offering a model for Democrats who want the party anchored by center-left candidates.

    Spanberger tied Earle-Sears to President Donald Trump but kept her arguments mostly on Trump’s economic policy and her support for abortion rights.

    Notably, Trump did not endorse Earle-Sears.

    7:30 p.m.

    Economic worries were the dominant concern as voters cast ballots for Tuesday’s elections, according to preliminary findings from the AP Voter Poll.

    The results of the expansive survey of more than 17,000 voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City suggest they are troubled by an economy that seems trapped by higher prices and fewer job opportunities.

    The economic challenges have played out in different ways at the local level. Most New Jersey voters said property taxes were a “major problem,” while most New York City voters said this about the cost of housing. Most Virginia voters said they’ve felt at least some impact from the recent federal government cuts.

    7 p.m.

    Polling locations have closed in Virginia.

    Polls across the commonwealth’s counties and cities were open from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Voters in line at a polling place at 7 p.m. can still cast ballots.

    Virginia voters are choosing a new governor and lieutenant governor. They’re also deciding whether Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares should get another term or if Democratic challenger Jay Jones should replace him. All 100 seats in the House of Delegates are also up for election.

    There are well over 6 million registered voters in Virginia. The last time these statewide races were on the ballot in 2021, overall voter turnout was 55%.

    This year, nearly 1.5 million people have cast absentee ballots, mostly through the mail or in person.

    Video below: Spanberger makes last push before Tuesday’s election for VA governor

    6:55 p.m.

    New York City’s Board of Elections released another turnout update Tuesday evening.

    As of 6 p.m., 1.7 million people have voted in the mayoral election.

    That’s the biggest turnout in a New York City mayoral election in at least 30 years. Just under 1.9 million people voted in the 1993 race, when Republican Rudy Giuliani ousted Mayor David Dinkins, a Democrat.

    6:45 p.m.

    Here is when polls close in states with key races.

    New York: 9 p.m.

    New Jersey: 8 p.m.

    Virginia: 7 p.m.

    California: 11 p.m. (8 p.m. PT)

    6:30 p.m.

    It’s not a presidential election year or even the midterms, but the stakes for Election Day 2025 remain undeniably high, with outcomes that could leave a lasting impact on the nation’s direction.

    Will California redefine the congressional landscape ahead of 2026? Could New York City elect a democratic socialist as its next mayor? And how will the perception of the Trump administration impact critical gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia?

    This week holds the answers to those pressing questions. Here’s what you need to know before the results start rolling in Tuesday night.

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  • Trump pushes hard against Mamdani as New Yorkers select a mayor

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    NEW YORK — Voters were casting ballots in high-stakes elections on both coasts Tuesday, including for mayor of New York, new congressional maps in California and governor in both New Jersey and Virginia, states whose shifting electorates could signal the direction of the nation’s political winds.

    For voters and political watchers alike, the races have taken on huge importance at a time of tense political division, when Democrats and Republicans are sharply divided over the direction of the nation. Despite President Trump not appearing on any ballots, some viewed Tuesday’s races as a referendum on him and his volatile second term in the White House.

    In New York, self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, 34, was favored to win the mayoral race after winning the Democratic ranked-choice mayoral primary in June. Such a result would shake up the Democratic establishment and rile Republicans in near equal measure, serving as a rejection of both former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a more establishment Democrat and Mamdani’s leading opponent, and Trump, who has warned that a Mamdani win would destroy the city.

    On election eve, Trump warned that a Mamdani win would disrupt the flow of federal dollars to the city and took the dramatic step of endorsing Cuomo over Curtis Sliwa, the Republican in the race.

    “If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the Election for Mayor of New York City, it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds, other than the very minimum as required, to my beloved first home, because of the fact that, as a Communist, this once great City has ZERO chance of success, or even survival!” Trump wrote Monday on his social media platform.

    A vote for Sliwa “is a vote for Mamdani,” the president added. “Whether you personally like Andrew Cuomo or not, you really have no choice. You must vote for him, and hope he does a fantastic job. He is capable of it, Mamdani is not!”

    Mamdani, a Ugandan-born naturalized U.S. citizen and New York state assemblyman who defeated Cuomo in the primary, has promised a brighter day for New Yorkers with better public transportation, more affordable housing and high-quality child care if he wins. He has slammed billionaires and some of the city’s monied interests, which have lined up against him, and rejected the “grave political darkness” that he said is threatening the country under Trump.

    He also mocked Trump’s endorsement of Cuomo — calling the former governor Trump’s “puppet” and “parrot.”

    Samantha Marrero, a 35-year-old lifelong New Yorker, lined up with more than a dozen people Tuesday morning at her polling site in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood to cast her vote for Mamdani, whom she praised for embracing people of color, queer people and other communities marginalized by mainstream politicians.

    Marrero said that she cares deeply about housing insecurity and affordability in the city, but that it was also “really meaningful to have someone who is brown and who looks like us and who eats like us and who lives more like us than anyone we’ve ever seen before” on the ballot. “That representation is really important.”

    New York mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo speaks to reporters as he marks his ballot in New York on Nov. 4, 2025.

    (Richard Drew / Associated Press)

    And she said that’s a big part of why people across the country are watching the New York race.

    “We’re definitely a beacon in this kind of fascist takeover that is very clearly happening across the country,” she said. “People in other states and other cities and other countries have their eyes on what’s happening here. Obviously Mamdani is doing something right. And together we can do something right. But it has to be together.”

    Elsewhere on the East Coast, voters were electing governors in Virginia and New Jersey, races that have also drawn the president’s attention.

    In the New Jersey race, Trump has backed the Republican candidate, former state Rep. Jack Ciattarelli, over the Democratic candidate, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, whom former President Obama recently stumped for. Long a blue state, New Jersey has been shifting to the right, and polls have shown a tight race.

    In the Virginia race, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a 46-year-old former CIA officer, defeated Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, according to an Associated Press projection.

    Trump had not endorsed Earle-Sears by name, but called on Virginians to “vote Republican” and to reject Democratic candidate Spanberger, whom Obama has also supported.

    “Why would anyone vote for New Jersey and Virginia Gubernatorial Candidates, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, when they want transgender for everybody, men playing in women’s sports, High Crime, and the most expensive Energy prices almost anywhere in the World?” Trump recently wrote on his social media site, repeating some of his favorite partisan attacks on Democrats from the presidential campaign trail last year.

    At a rally for Spanberger in Norfolk, Va., over the weekend, Obama put the race in equally stark terms: as part of a battle for American democracy.

    “We don’t need to speculate about the dangers to our democracy. We don’t need to wonder about whether vulnerable people are going to be hurt, or ask ourselves how much more coarse and mean our culture can become. We’ve witnessed it. Elections do matter,” Obama said. “We all have more power than we think. We just have to use it.”

    Voting was underway in the states, but with some disruptions. Bomb threats disrupted voting in parts of New Jersey early Tuesday, temporarily shutting down a string of polling locations across the state before law enforcement determined they were hoaxes.

    In California, voters were being asked to change the state Constitution to allow Democrats to redraw congressional maps in their favor through 2030, in order to counter similar moves by Republicans in red states such as Texas.

    Leading Democrats, including Obama and Gov. Gavin Newsom, have described the measure as an effort to safeguard American democracy against a power grab by Trump, who had encouraged the red states to act, while opponents of the measure have derided it as an antidemocratic power grab by state Democrats.

    Trump has urged California voters against casting ballots by mail or voting early, arguing such practices are somehow “dishonest,” and on Tuesday morning suggested on his social media site that Proposition 50 was unconstitutional.

    “The Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,” Trump wrote, without providing evidence of problems. “All ‘Mail-In’ Ballots, where the Republicans in that State are ‘Shut Out,’ is under very serious legal and criminal review. STAY TUNED!”

    Both individually and collectively, the races are being closely watched as potential indicators of political sentiment and enthusiasm going into next year’s midterm elections, and of Democrats’ ability to get voters back to the polls after Trump’s decisive win over former Vice President Kamala Harris last year.

    Voters too saw the races as having particularly large stakes at a pivotal moment for the country.

    Michelle Kim, 32, who has lived in the Greenpoint neighborhood for three years, stood in line at a polling site early Tuesday morning, waiting to cast her vote for Mamdani.

    Kim said she cares about transportation, land use and the rising cost of living in New York and appreciated Mamdani’s broader message that solutions are possible, even if not guaranteed.

    “My hope is not, like, ‘Oh, he’s gonna solve, like, all of our issues,’” she said. “But I think for him to be able to represent people and give hope, that’s also part of it.”

    Lin reported from New York and Rector from San Francisco. Times staff writer Jenny Jarvie in Atlanta contributed to this report.

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  • Photos of the First General Election Since Trump’s Return

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    Millions of voters are casting ballots Tuesday in U.S. state and local elections. The biggest contests are in Virginia and New Jersey, the only states electing governors this year. Read what to watch for on Election Day.

    This is a photo gallery curated by AP photo editors.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

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    Associated Press

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  • Tylenol, Kleenex, Band-Aid and more put under one roof in $48.7 billion consumer brands deal

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    Kimberly-Clark is buying Tylenol maker Kenvue in a cash and stock deal worth about $48.7 billion, creating a massive consumer health goods company.

    Shareholders of Kimberly-Clark will own about 54% of the combined company. Kenvue shareholders will own about 46% in what is one of the largest corporate takeovers this year. The deal must still be approved by the shareholders of both companies.

    The combined company will have a huge stable of household brands under one roof, putting Kenvue’s Listerine mouthwash and Band-Aid side-by-side with Kimberly-Clark’s Cottonelle toilet paper, Huggies and Kleenex tissues. It will also generate about $32 billion in annual revenue.

    Kenvue has spent a relatively brief period as an independent company, having been spun off by Johnson & Johnson two years ago. J&J first announced in late 2021 that it was splitting its slow-growth consumer health division from the pharmaceutical and medical device divisions.

    Kenvue has since been targeted by activist investors unhappy about the trajectory of the company and Wall Street appeared to anticipate some heavy lifting ahead for Kimberly-Clark.

    Kenvue’s stock jumped 12% Monday afternoon, while shares of Kimberly-Clark, based outside of Dallas, slumped by nearly 15%.

    Kenvue shares have shed nearly 50% of their value since approaching $28 in the spring of 2023. Morningstar analyst Keonhee Kim said Kenvue’s volatile journey as a public company may have been driven in part by poor execution and a lack of experience operating as a stand-alone business.

    He said the leadership of a more-established consumer products company like Kimberly-Clark could help unlock some of Kenvue’s value.

    He also noted that Kenvue brands include Neutrogena, Benadryl and other names that have been in store consumer health aisles for decades. Kim said he thinks Kimberly-Clark may have seen upside in adding those products.

    “I think that may have made the deal a lot more attractive … especially after the past couple of months of Kenvue’s stock price decline,” he said.

    Kenvue and Tylenol have been thrust into the national spotlight this year as President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promoted unproven and in some cases discredited ties between Tylenol, vaccines and the complex brain disorder autism.

    Trump then urged pregnant women against using the medicine. That went beyond Food and Drug Administration advice that doctors “should consider minimizing” the painkiller acetaminophen’s use in pregnancy — amid inconclusive evidence about whether too much could be linked to autism.

    Kennedy reiterated the FDA guidance during a press conference last week. He said that there isn’t sufficient evidence to link the drug to autism.

    “We have asked physicians to minimize the use to when it’s absolutely necessary,” he said.

    Kenvue has continued to push back on the Trump administration’s public statements about Tylenol and acetaminophen, the active ingredient it contains.

    “We strongly disagree with allegations that it does and are deeply concerned about the health risks and confusion this poses for expecting mothers and parents,” Kenvue said in a statement on its website.

    The merger could face other hurdles. Citi Investment Research analyst Filippo Falorni said he is concerned about the deal’s size given the recent history in the sector, particularly given the challenges faced by Kenvue.

    In July, Kenvue announced that CEO Thibaut Mongon was leaving in the midst of a strategic review, with the company under mounting pressure from activist investors unhappy about growth. Critics say Kenvue has relied too much on its legacy brands and failed to innovate.

    Industry analysts also point out the poor track record for mergers involving consumer packaged goods companies. In September, Kraft Heinz said it would break up its decade-old merger. Its net revenue has fallen every year since 2020.

    Kimberly-Clark and Kenvue, like Kraft Heinz, are facing increasing competition from cheaper store brands. In 2024, 51% of toilet paper and other household paper products sold in the U.S were store brands, according to Circana, a market research company, while store brands held a 24% share of sales of health products, including medications and vitamins.

    On Monday, a bottle of 100 extra-strength Tylenol caplets cost $10.97 on Walmart’s website. A bottle of 100 extra-strength acetaminophen caplets from Walmart’s Equate brand cost $1.98.

    Inflation drove some of that buyer behavior, Circana said. Shoppers are also shifting their purchases to stores with more private-label brands, like Aldi and Costco. And stores are improving their offerings and adding more of them; last year, Walmart and Target both launched new store brands to complement their existing ones.

    Still, both Kimberly-Clark and Kenvue make name-brand products in segments where consumers are less likely to shift to store brands, including hair care, skin care, feminine products and mouth care, according to Circana. Kenvue owns brands like Aveeno and Neutrogena, for example, while Kimberly-Clark makes Kotex and Depend.

    Kimberly-Clark Chairman and CEO Mike Hsu will be chairman and CEO of the combined company. Three members of the Kenvue’s board will join Kimberly-Clark’s board at closing. The combined company will keep Kimberly-Clark’s headquarters in Irving, Texas, but there will be significant operations around Kenvue facilities and locations as well.

    The deal is expected to close in the second half of next year. It still needs approval from shareholders of both both companies.

    Kenvue shareholders will receive $3.50 per share in cash and 0.14625 Kimberly-Clark shares for each Kenvue share held at closing. That amounts to $21.01 per share, based on the closing price of Kimberly-Clark shares on Friday.

    Kimberly-Clark and Kenvue said that they identified about $1.9 billion in cost savings that are expected in the first three years after the transaction’s closing.

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    AP Health Writer Tom Murphy contributed to this report.

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