Democratic leaders, including the party’s would-be 2028 presidential candidates, are sure to frame the results as a massive rebuke of Trump and Republican congressional majorities just a year after the GOP won unified control of the federal government.

Most of these elections took place in blue areas and the Democratic candidates had led in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City throughout the campaign season. But some of the victory margins were bigger than the public polling had predicted.

Republicans had entertained hopes of pulling off an upset in New Jersey, which has teased the GOP in recent election cycles. Four years ago, Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli outperformed the RealClearPolitics polling average by about 5 points, coming within less than 3 points of unseating Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ). This time around, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) led Ciattarelli by just 3.3 points, according to this year’s average.

But this year, it was Sherill who outperformed her poll numbers. She received 56% of the vote, beating Ciattarelli by nearly 13 points. Republicans have not won a governor’s race in New Jersey since former Gov. Chris Christie’s last reelection bid in 2013.

The other silver lining Republicans hoped for failed to materialize. Attorney General Jason Miyares (R-VA) built a paper-thin lead in the polls after Democratic challenger Jay Jones’s text messaging expressing violent fantasies about political opponents’ children were released. Weighed down by the top of the GOP ticket and perhaps the early votes Jones had banked before the text message scandal became widely publicized, Miyares instead lost by 5.4 points.

The rest of the Virginia Republican ticket fared worse. With only a small percentage of votes outstanding, former Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger led Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears by 15 points. That is a landslide, with Spanberger taking more than 57% of the vote.

Earle-Sears’s campaign had been widely criticized, including on Tuesday night by one of Trump’s former 2024 campaign managers. There had also been in-fighting among the Republican ticket and an overall lack of party unity. But the federal government shutdown, which many blamed on Trump despite Senate Democrats holding up a clean spending bill that would resolve the impasse, helped drive up huge numbers for Spanberger and the rest of the Democratic ticket in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Arguably the most important result of the night for the future of the Democratic Party came in New York, where the party’s mayoral nominee, socialist Zohran Mamdani, defeated Democrat-turned-independent former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Mamdani’s winning margin exceeded Republican Curtis Sliwa’s vote totals. Sliwa significantly underperformed his poll numbers as the anti-Mamdani vote consolidated and Trump threw his last-minute support behind Cuomo, who had struggled to put together a bipartisan anti-socialist coalition in the general election after losing the Democratic primary earlier this year.

New York City’s results could matter more to Democrats nationally because it may embolden the progressive, even socialist, wing of the party. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has been mentioned as a possible primary challenger to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) or a 2028 presidential candidate. Progressives will be competing in other primaries during next year’s midterm elections. While Spanberger and Sherill positioned themselves as centrists, despite Republican attempts to call attention to their uniformly liberal platforms, there was little pretense about Mamdani.

Mamdani did, however, try to project an aura of reasonableness not unlike that of Barack Obama circa 2008 in an attempt to wave off critics’ charges of radicalism. Mamdani downplayed defunding the police and cultural issues to emphasize the city’s high cost of living. He almost always wore a suit and tie. But Republicans plan to test whether his appeal translates beyond the five boroughs, making him a national symbol of a Democratic Party that polls show voters still view as too far left. Some Republicans quip that Mamdani was there only win on Tuesday.

What all three of the top Democratic candidates had in common was a focus on affordability. Inflation remains a persistent issue. Even though it is now running well below the 41-year high seen during its peak under former President Joe Biden, its effect is cumulative, prices won’t come down, and inflation is still above the rate preferred by the Federal Reserve. Prices are noticeably higher than they were before the pandemic and during Trump’s first term. This caused voters to turn against Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump and the GOP could be next.

Inflation hadn’t been something voters had grappled with since the early 1980s, outside the lifetimes of many adults. While federal overspending Democrats have little interest in rolling back is the principal cause, Trump’s tariffs make it easier to blame the GOP for price increases, although Reuters reported on Monday, “Importers for the most part have eaten the tariffs, according to academic studies and comments from executives, reducing profit margins but limiting higher consumer prices and protecting market share.”

The results could also heighten Republican divisions over the shutdown. Trump is set to have lunch with Republican senators on Wednesday, where he is likely to press them on abolishing the filibuster. The Democrats’ gains could reinforce Trump’s argument that the shutdown needs to be resolved quickly, even if it means nuking a procedural hurdle to liberal legislation the next time Republicans are in the minority, and that the GOP needs to legislate as much as possible before the midterm elections while its majorities remain intact. At the same time, Tuesday’s elections could prompt Capitol Hill Republicans to become more independent of Trump, who is a drag on GOP candidates in many parts of the country.

Democrats will also look at the election outcomes as they ponder their next steps in the shutdown battle. They may be able to persuade jittery swing-district Republicans they have the upper hand.

2025 ELECTIONS LIVE UPDATES: LATEST ON RACES IN VIRGINIA, NEW JERSEY, AND NEW YORK

The next step for Democrats is wiping out the razor-thin Republican House majority and the somewhat bigger GOP majority in the Senate. That won’t necessarily be easy. Republicans are defending far fewer House seats in congressional districts that voted Democratic at the presidential level than in 2018, Trump’s first midterm election and the last blue wave. Republican Glenn Youngkin’s’ big 2021 win in Virginia was followed by only modest GOP congressional gains in 2022, though they were still sufficient to flip the House.

Republicans’ biggest concern is that Democrats retain their edge with higher-propensity voters, an advantage the GOP has persistently failed to counteract without Trump on the ballot. The question is what other Republicans can do to motivate Trump’s low-propensity voters to turn out or whether they will return in the next presidential election year.