Democrats Romp in New Jersey, and Everywhere Else

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, November 04, 2025

 

In the end, it wasn’t close. Democrats are on their way to routing Republicans across the board as Americans witness the first statewide elections of the second Trump era.

 

As of this writing, Democrats managed an easy victory in the race for Virginia governor. The networks declared Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger the prospective governor-elect within an hour of polls closing. Her victory was so sweeping that she had coattails. Democrats have flipped at least two seats in Virginia’s House and won the race for lieutenant governor. Even disgraced attorney general candidate Jay Jones is on a path to victory — fulfilling what the Washington Post editorial board prophesized would be “a sad reflection of a discomfiting willingness among voters to prioritize partisanship over human decency.”

 

The out-party’s victories extended beyond Virginia. Democrats won a special election for public service commissioner in Georgia. “This is the first Democrat to win a state-level race in Georgia in 20 years,” elections analyst Jacob Rubashkin observed. The second didn’t take long. Democrats quickly captured the second public service commissioner’s contest on the Georgia ballot. Pennsylvania voted overwhelmingly to retain the three Democrat-affiliated state Supreme Court justices on the ballot. Democrats are expected to emerge victorious in several mayoral races, including New York City’s, and push through their ballot initiatives, such as a California proposition to redraw the state’s congressional districts.

 

But it was in New Jersey where the Democratic Party’s strength may prove the most stinging for Republican stalwarts. It will take several days before governor-elect Mikie Sherrill’s margin of victory is established, but it was clear as soon as the first Election Day ballots began to roll in that GOP gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli had not replicated his performance in the suburbs and exurbs that kept the 2021 gubernatorial race so tight.

 

The early exit polling in New Jersey found a sizable gender gap, but not one that favored Ciattarelli. While the GOP nominee beat his opponent by eight percentage points among men, Sherrill trounced Ciattarelli among women by 20 points. Unaffiliated voters backed Sherrill over Ciattarelli by seven points — a margin that expands to an eleven-point lead when true independents who say they lean toward neither party were counted. The exit polls showed Ciattarelli winning just 32 percent of the Latino vote and a meager 5 percent among African-American voters (a finding supported by the election’s preliminary results). Ciattarelli’s underwhelming performance is an indication that the minority voters who backed Donald Trump in 2024, and who helped make the 2021 New Jersey governor’s race surprisingly competitive, are returning to the Democratic fold.

 

Indeed, Sherrill romped among the majority of New Jersey voters (54 percent) who disapprove of Donald Trump’s performance in office, earning 91 percent of that cohort’s vote. And while Ciattarelli won the lion’s share of the vote among Garden State voters who disapprove of two-term Democratic Governor Phil Murphy, Sherrill won nearly 20 percent of those voters, too. Even though a majority of New Jerseyans told exit pollsters they have a dim view of the Democratic Party, they still voted blue.

 

There were no exit polls in New Jersey in 2024, but, in neighboring Pennsylvania, pollsters found that Donald Trump’s victory was largely a result of the president’s ability to flip the gender dynamic that catapulted Sherrill to victory. Last year, Trump beat Kamala Harris among Pennsylvania men by a staggering 17 points while only managing to lose the Keystone State’s female voters by ten points. Those margins are practically reversed this year in New Jersey, and so are the results.

 

Republican voters’ disappointment might be tempered only by the fact that the GOP was not expected to win any of tonight’s contests. New Jersey’s governor’s race was only the most competitive statewide race of the night, and no poll of the state’s voters ever showed Ciattarelli in the lead. This is dark-blue New Jersey, after all. But Republicans had retailed that face-saving narrative in advance of the night’s vote, one that Democrats set out to preemptively rebut.

 

“Democrats say they’ll be happy with a win regardless of the percentage” in New Jersey, Politico reported before the first votes were counted. “But if Sherrill fails to at least match Harris, Republicans are prepared to declare it a sign of Democrats’ struggles — even if Ciattarelli loses.” But it seems Sherrill will end the night with a margin large enough to approach or perhaps even exceed Harris’s six-point victory in the Garden State. In fact, by retaining the governor’s mansion for a third consecutive term for the Democratic Party — a feat that has not been replicated since 1961 — Sherrill can claim to have made some history herself.

 

There’s no question about it: This has been a good night for Democrats. If it is a harbinger of what the electorate will look like in next year’s midterms, it’s not too late for the GOP to panic.