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.
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. ♦
