This week’s elections in New York, Virginia and New Jersey were a triumph for the Democrats, who had been in the doldrums since Donald Trump regained the presidency. Their heads are now up. Hope is a powerful drug.
But the real shocker was how thoroughly the Republicans were routed. The voters mutinied against their Maga overlords in every corner of the US where they had the chance to vote. No Republican dared to claim the elections were “stolen” – Trump’s lame excuse in 2020 – because the winning margins were too big to rig.
In New York, the leftwing populist Zohran Mamdani, 34, won the battle for mayor by nine points. In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy pilot, beat her opponent for governor by 13 points. Former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger became the first woman governor of Virginia by nearly 15 points.
The only thing the radical mayor and the two moderate governors had in common was a message about the rising cost of living and hatred of Trump. What happened is that the amorphous “No Kings” movement, which saw seven million Americans take to the streets last month, showed up at the ballot box to kick the President in the pants.
In a terse, all caps, social media message, Trump naturally exonerated himself from blame. “Trump wasn’t on the ballot, and [government] shutdown, were the two reasons that Republicans lost the elections tonight,” he grumped as the extent of the Republican losses became clear.
Predictably, Trump’s answer to defeat is more “me, me, me”. More authoritarianism, not less. His grandiose claim, first made in the 2016 election campaign, that “I alone can fix it” – a reference to every problem faced by the US and, quite possibly, by the planet – is his most elemental belief.
The morning after the elections, Trump delivered a bizarre speech to Republican senators about how the Chinese president keeps his ministers in line. “I want my cabinet to be like Xi’s,” he marvelled. “I’ve never seen men so scared in their lives.”
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Trump went on to remark that JD Vance “doesn’t behave like that. He butts into conversations”. This could be just banter but the Vice-President won’t be pleased. On the CBS show, Sixty Minutes, last weekend, Trump repeated the idea that “a lotta people want me to run” in 2028 and claimed the Republicans had a “strong bench” without mentioning Vance.
The electoral debacle will have furthered Trump’s urge to run for a third term in 2028 or find a way to prolong his presidency. Whatever his ultimate intentions, if he doesn’t double-down on the idea of hanging on to office, he will soon be treated as a lame-duck president.
Indeed, his power may already be waning. This week, the Supreme Court pointedly questioned Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs and John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, suggested his peremptory order to jettison the “filibuster” – a voting procedure that encourages bipartisan politics – was a non-starter. “It’s just not happening,” Thune said.
The Republicans are in a quandary. With Trump’s health turning dicey – the cankles, the bruises, the mysterious MRI scan and some new verbal stumbles, such as muddling up South Africa with South America – the 79-year-old president can’t carry on indefinitely.
Nor will they want him to, if he leads them to defeat in next year’s midterm elections. On the one hand, Trump is the Republicans’ best campaigner. They miserably failed to win this week without his name on the ballot. On the other hand, Trump’s record in office is clearly turning voters off.
The extravagant Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago, the $300 million White House ballroom and the crypto-billions being raked in by his family are a terrible look while grocery bills are rising, food stamps are suspended and federal workers are not being paid during the Government shutdown.
Crucially, the new voters Trump attracted only a year ago are swinging back to the Democrats. Here’s one example: a CNN exit poll in New Jersey in 2024 put Trump’s support among Latino voters at 46 per cent, compared to 52 per cent for Kamala Harris. This week, Sherrill won Latinos by 68-31 per cent.
This is what happens when the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sends masked men to terrorise your friends and family.
Sherill also won 92 per cent of Black voters and 84 per cent of Asian voters, according to CNN. Dinesh d’Souza, normally a huge Trump booster, posted on X: “A very loud group on the Right said, ‘Indians go home,’ and so many of them did – to the Democratic party.”
On this week’s evidence, Trump’s style of politics will drag the Republicans to defeat if they keep bowing and scraping to his every command. Yet the Maga movement could collapse into irrelevance and infighting if he leaves the stage.
Can’t win with Trump and can’t win without him? This could be the Republican party’s fate in 2028.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting
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