Election results give new hope to US Democrats: they regain votes among Latinos and in swing states

The Democrats’ time in the desert is over. After sweeping every single one of Tuesday’s major elections — from one end of the country to the other and by wide margins — the opposition has finally put its long mourning period following defeat in the presidential election behind it, and is winning back voters in communities that turned their backs on them a year ago. Now preparations begin for the next battle, the midterm elections that will decide control of Congress, with a feeling that has been absent among Democrats since November 2024: enthusiasm.

“Enough with the premature obituaries. The Democratic Party is back,” posted House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries as the vote counts made the scale of victory clear. “Tonight, we sent a message — we sent a message to every corner of the Commonwealth; a message to our neighbors and our fellow Americans across the country; we sent a message to the whole world — that in 2025, Virginia chose pragmatism over partisanship,” declared Abigail Spanberger, the winner of the Virginia gubernatorial election, in her victory speech.

The endorsement is undeniable: the electoral victories weren’t limited to states already under Democratic control or those won by former vice president Kamala Harris last year. The same pattern was repeated in swing states that rejected the party in 2024. The same Latino and Asian American communities that stayed home or voted Republican a year ago turned out to vote for the Democrats.

Trump himself, unusually contrite, acknowledged it Wednesday. “I don’t think it was good for Republicans. I’m not sure it was good for anybody, but we had an interesting evening and we learned a lot, and we’re going to talk about that,” he said from the White House, at a breakfast with Republican senators.

Spanberger won her election by a 15-point margin, more than double the six-point margin by which Harris had won the state 12 months earlier. In New Jersey, the other state where the governorship was at stake, her former roommate, Mikie Sherrill, won by 13 percentage points, seven more than the former vice president had achieved in 2014.

Additionally, in California voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition 50, which allows for the redrawing of electoral districts in a way that guarantees at least five more seats for the Democrats in the House of Representatives. This counters a similar measure already passed in Texas and opens new opportunities for Democrats to gain control of at least the lower chamber in Congress in next year’s midterm elections.

In Georgia, one of the swing states that decided last year’s election, for the first time in years voters chose Democratic blue on their ballots for two seats on a state commission that has been dominated by Republicans since time immemorial. In Pennsylvania, the quintessential swing state, three judges were re-elected, keeping the state’s Supreme Court under Republican control.

Each election was very different, with candidates ranging from the progressive Zohran Mamdani in New York to the moderates Spanberger and Sherrill. But they all had something in common: “The unpopularity of the president and many of his policies, as well as widespread dissatisfaction with the direction the country is heading,” note analysts from the prestigious political consulting firm Cook Political Report.

Exit polls indicate that 60% of voters in Virginia and New Jersey expressed dissatisfaction or anger with the way things are going in America. Democratic candidates garnered over 75% of the vote among these disaffected voters.

Among the Latino community, which last year had shifted toward the Republicans, the pendulum seems to have swung back again. Drastically. In some of the counties with the highest concentration of this population segment in both states, Spanberger and Sherrill achieved some of their most decisive victories. The Manassas Park district, with the largest Hispanic population in Virginia, flipped 22 percentage points toward the Democrats compared to a year ago. In Hudson County, New Jersey, Sherrill won by 22 percentage points compared to what Harris obtained in November 2024.

“The results of all of Tuesday night’s election contests — combined with Democratic overperformance in special elections earlier this year by an average of 15 points — point to serious danger for the GOP going into the 2026 midterms,” wrote the analysts at Cook Report. “A blue wave is building; the only question now is whether it can be sustained for another twelve months.”

Republican strategists also acknowledge this. Tuesday’s drubbing “shows there is discontent, certainly against the current administration, and demonstrates that candidates and campaigns matter, too,” Mike DuHaine, former political director of the Republican National Committee, told NBC.

But there is still a long time between now and next November. And it remains to be seen what effect, among other things, the Republicans’ efforts to alter the electoral districts in the states they control in their favor will have, something that could give them an additional advantage in maintaining — or expanding — their current dominance in Congress.

House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared defiant at a press conference following the final vote count. “What happened last night was blue states and blue cities voted blue. We all saw that coming, and no one should read too much into last night’s election results. Off-year elections are not indicative of what’s to come. That’s what history teaches us.”

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