Dems’ Election Day Sweep Is Not A Harbinger, It’s A Wake-Up Call

The third time wasn’t the charm for Republican businessman and former New Jersey lawmaker Jack Ciattarelli in Tuesday’s race for the Garden State’s next governor. And Virginia didn’t elect its first black governor — a woman at that.

New Jersey and Virginia remain squarely in the blue state column.

But Tuesday’s election, contrary to the left and their corporate media partners, wasn’t an early verdict on Republican President Donald Trump or a bellwether of next year’s midterms. 

The Democratic National Committee proclaimed far-left Abigail Spanberger’s victory over Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia’s race for governor “another sign that voters are rejecting Donald Trump and his Republican allies’ extreme agenda that is raising health care and utility costs and destroying jobs.”

It’s not a sign, and the agenda stuff, per usual, is dizzying political spin. 

In New Jersey’s governor’s race, where Democrat Rep. Mikie Sherrill beat Republican businessman and former state lawmaker Jack Ciattarelli, NBC News reporter Bridget Bowman opined that the Democrat’s win “sends a signal” that Republicans shouldn’t expect Trump’s impressive gains in 2024 will carry over to the 2026 midterms. “Instead, the party is facing headwinds, as voters react to the president’s handling of the economy and other issues.”

Which voters are reacting? Very motivated, angry Trump-hating Democrats — in very blue states. A good many of them that would like to see the president dead. 

This wasn’t a revolution or an omen. It was D.C-area leftists turning out and outnumbering unmotivated Republicans in Virginia and Dem boss-dominated New Jersey once again being Dem boss-dominated New Jersey. 

The Election Day results, however, do serve as a wakeup call that the GOP has a lot of work to do to in the coming year to turn out the difference-making numbers of low-propensity voters that backed Trump in 2024. To do that, congressional Republicans need to do something worthy of voter support, and the party will have to sharpen its early-voting ground game once again. 

‘Historic’ Beating

With 95 percent of New Jersey’s votes in, Sherrill was crushing Ciattarelli by 13 points, 56.2 percent to 43.2 percent. Polls in the final days before the election showed a tight race. It didn’t turn out that way for Ciattarelli, who will have to lick his political wounds for a third-straight  — and for Jersey Republicans’ sake, last — gubernatorial election. 

In Virginia, Spanberger walloped Earle-Sears by 15 percentage points, with 97 percent of the precincts reporting. In one fell swoop, Democrats wrested back control of Virginia’s executive branch after Glenn Youngkin’s surprising victory in 2021.

The lieutenant governor would have been Virginia’s first black governor. Spanberger, who posed as a moderate, will be the first woman to lead the commonwealth. For all the left’s talk about “equity” and “diversity,” race-centric Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to make racial history in Virginia. 

Democrats took history in another direction by electing state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi lieutenant governor. Hashmi, notably, is the first Muslim woman in the U.S. to be elected to a statewide office. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whose executive director has been involved with an organization that backed Hamas, cheered Hashmi’s victory. 

“We hope this historic moment will inspire American Muslims to continue pursuing public service in Virginia and across the country,” CAIR said in a press release. The group, too, was delighted with New York City’s Muslim mayor-elect,  Zohran Mamdani. CAIR called the avowed socialist’s victory a “major turning point” for Muslim political engagement and a “historic rebuke” of both anti-Muslim hate and anti-Palestinian politics.

Elsewhere in Virginia, former delegate and political assassination fantasizer Jay Jones defeated incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares. Jones’ win proved once again that Democrats are the party of political violence. Jones, a former Biden Justice Department staffer, took a beating in the polls after text messages surfaced showing him declare that if he had two bullets and was given the choice to kill Adolf Hitler, Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, and former Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert, a Republican, he’d put two bullets in Gilbert’s head. 

While some Democrats condemned Jones for his violent comments, they refused to call for him to end his campaign for attorney general. And then they elected him attorney general — thanks in very large part to the big blue blob of big government employees and other liberal voters occupying Northern Virginia adjacent the nation’s capital. 

Trump Gap

Spanberger turned out a half million more voters than Earle-Sears did in what was long-expected to be an uphill battle for the Republican candidate. With 97 percent of the precincts reporting, Earle-Sears had collected about 1.44 million votes to Spanberger’s 1.96 million. In 2024, Trump garnered 2.01 million votes compared to the Democrats’ replacement candidate Kamala Harris’ 2.23 million votes. 

Turnout was definitely a problem for Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey. With 95 percent of New Jersey’s precincts reporting, Ciattarelli had about 1.36 million votes compared to Sherrill’s 1.77 million. In last year’s presidential contest, Trump received nearly 2 million votes. Ciattarelli turned out some 635,000 less than Trump. In Passaic County, where Trump won by nearly 6,000 votes in 2024, Ciattarelli was losing by more than 20,000 votes, with 94 percent of the votes counted. 

Trump, as he did across the country, picked up a greater share of Hispanic and black voters in New Jersey. He won in Democrat strongholds Union City and Perth Amboy, where the Hispanic populations top 80 percent, according to a New Jersey Monitor analysis. 

A Party Worth Voting For

The GOP says it “invested heavily” in the get-out-the-vote campaigns in New Jersey and Virginia. Trump tapped into his own war chest to turn out voters who traditionally sit out off-year elections. Fox News reported that Trump’s political team pumped a combined $2 million into microtargeting efforts into the statewide races. Based on the turnout numbers, it didn’t work.  

Republicans will need to get their GOTV mojo back for a midterm election without Trump on the ballot. By then, they should be able to point to the leftist disasters wrought by the people elected to high office in New Jersey, Virginia and New York City as a kind of scared straight message. But the GOP will have to make a much better case about the America First achievements and plans at stake, victories that will be sacrificed at the altar of liberal extremism should Democrats take back congressional control. 

For that, Republican congressional leaders must do something meaningful in the next year to motivate voters — particularly low propensity voters — to get off the sidelines. There’s some dejection in conservative circles. While they see Trump busting his hump for the MAGA cause, many of his Republican allies in congress have been missing in action. Americans voted for fundamental change last year, an offramp from the leftist-driven destruction of the Biden years. Many Republicans in congress have yet to get the message. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.