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Democrats have been blissed out since Tuesday’s romp in the off-cycle elections in New Jersey, Virginia, New York City and state legislative and local elections from coast to coast.
After a year of raising canes…
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Democrats have been blissed out since Tuesday’s romp in the off-cycle elections in New Jersey, Virginia, New York City and state legislative and local elections from coast to coast.
After a year of raising canes, they were finally raising Cain this week, and it no doubt felt very good for them. But does it mean anything?
Democrats did well in the 2023 off-cycle elections, even holding on to the governorship in deep-red Kentucky, scoring big legislative gains in New Jersey and Virginia and flipping a court seat in swing-state Wisconsin. But a year later, Democrats got soundly thumped in the 2024 presidential cycle.
We could tell the story of Democrats’ successes in midterms, off-cycle and special elections in the first Trump term — and even their ducking disaster in the 2022 midterms — as being about voter intensity.
You know it well: In the new partisan coalition of the Trump era, Democrats have the high-propensity voters — affluent, college-educated, suburban and urban — while Republicans increasingly dominate with the lower-propensity, working-class electorate — noncollege, rural and small town. In lower-turnout contests like midterms, it gives Democrats the edge, but when the universe of voters expands by a third or more for a presidential election, the blue team gets swamped.
We know a lot about this phenomenon because it was exactly the story for Republicans in the 1990s, 2000s and into the 2010s. The midterm years were often great, but out of the eight presidential elections between 1992 and 2020, Republicans won the national popular vote just once, George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection. Over the same period, the GOP dominated the House of Representatives, governorships and state legislatures. The smaller the overall turnout, the better for the GOP when it was the party of the affluent, college-educated high-turnout voters.
The great news for Democrats on Tuesday seemed to confirm that Democrats are now the party of big wins in small races. The size of the rebound from last year looked like an exclamation point on the analysis. And while it’s great to punch above your weight class, in our current system of barely bridled executive authority and intense partisanship, losing presidential elections is too high a price to pay.
There are a hundred questions we could ask about the trend, perhaps most consequentially: Does the trend hold when President Trump is no longer a presidential contender? Would the Republican Party of heir apparent** Vice President Vance** do as well at motivating working class voters or to keep the upper quintiles so locked in with the Democrats? We can’t know that any more than we can know what faction will be in control of the Democratic Party coming out of next year’s elections. If it’s a nationalist versus a socialist in November of 2028, heaven help the folks in the suburbs who have to choose.
But we did see two significant signs of encouragement for Democrats in the results this week.
First, Democrats’ persistent unpopularity is self-inflicted. One of the big stories in politics of the past year has been about how no matter how low Trump’s approval ratings have slid, Democrats have still managed to be more unpopular. While Republicans have been underwater with voters, Democrats have been worse.
But a new poll right before Tuesday’s results came in suggested that is something of a mirage. A CNN survey said that Democrats were far* *more motivated to vote next year than Republicans — 67 percent to 48 percent — even as Democrats had far worse opinions about their own party, 15 points worse than Republicans’ view of their own home team.
The Democratic Party is unpopular, because it is unpopular among Democrats. And that CNN poll shows us that not only did that not impede Democrats from going out and voting for a variety of candidates of different ideological stripes, it didn’t seem to put independents off either. In the two races with the greatest implications for next year, New Jersey and Virginia, the Democratic candidates for governor won with independents in a rout.
The Democrats are in for a long, rough run between now and the spring of 2028 as they settle an internal conflict that has been simmering since 2020 and the grudging acceptance of **former President Biden **as their nominee, but it didn’t cost them a thing this week. Trump is still enough to keep both parties remarkably unified, and there was no sign that the Democratic brand is so damaged that independents won’t take relief there when they’re fed up with the GOP.
And the turnout in both places was up significantly from four years ago, particularly in New Jersey, where turnout passed 3.2 million, climbing 23 percent from 2021. That’s still a million fewer votes than were cast there in 2024, but there was no correlation between higher gubernatorial turnout and a better showing for Republicans. In fact, it was the opposite.
And then there’s this, which was first detailed by Nate Cohn at the New York Times: clear evidence that Democrats flipped some 2024 Trump voters. Using exit polls and the voter files already available in some jurisdictions from Tuesday’s vote is that some of the same voters who helped move the country toward the GOP last year pushed back the other way this week — something like 7 percent of the 2024 Trump voters in each state.
Again, these are little elections with imperfect predictive power for even next year’s midterms. But there are signs here for a Democratic Party that has been struggling to stay afloat for the past year that the sailing may get easier.
[Programming alert: Watch The Hill Sunday with Chris Stirewalt with newsmakers from both parties with the latest on the government shutdown, a breakdown of the election results, our best-in-the-business panel of journalists and an interview with author **Malcom Gladwell **about the lessons of “Revenge of the Tipping Point” for our current chaotic national moment.]
Holy croakano! We welcome your feedback, so please email us with your tips, corrections, reactions, amplifications, etc. at WHOLEHOGPOLITICS@THEHILL.COM. If you’d like to be considered for publication, please include your real name and hometown. If you don’t want your comments to be made public, please specify.
**NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION **
Trump Job Performance
**Average Approval: **40.4%
**Average Disapproval: **57.6%
**Net Score: **-17.2 points
**Change from last week: **↓ 2.4 points
**Change from one month ago: **↓.2.6 points
[Average includes: CNN 37% approve – 63% disapprove; NewsNation 41% approve – 57% disapprove; NBC News 43% approve – 55% disapprove; ABC News/WaPo 41% approve – 59% disapprove; Quinnipiac University 40% approve – 54% disapprove]
Surge in American who see role of faith increasing
Do you think religion is gaining influence or losing influence in American life?
2024 / 2025
Gaining: 18% / 31%
**Losing: **80% / 68%
[Pew Research Center surveys of U.S. adults]
**ON THE SIDE: IN PRAISE OF PICKY EATERS **
Writer Irina Dumitrescu offers her defense of hard-to-feed children* and their parents for Serious Eats:* “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person who has never raised a picky eater knows exactly how to make other people’s children eat. … If your kids don’t appreciate what you put on the table, it must be due to some moral failing on your part. There is another approach, too, one that sees picky eating as part of the general malaise of Western, developed countries. It’s not the parents’ fault; it’s the culture. … I regard these clever theories with bemused exasperation. …for the 12 years of my life, I categorically refused to eat most foods. For my parents, this posed a particular problem because, until I was six, we did not live in a land of excessive, enervating plenty. Romania in the early 1980s…”
SHORT ORDER
In blow to Democrats, Maine swing district Rep. **Jared Golden **reverses course, won’t seek re-election — Portland Press Herald
It’s official: Nancy Pelosi confirms she will retire at end of current term, kicking off San Francisco primary clash — The Hill
Illinois congressman games filing deadline to hand seat to chief of staff — The Hill
Whatley leans in on Medicaid cuts in North Carolina Senate run — Punchbowl News
Democrats win seats on Georgia public service commission, a first since 2000 — The Hill
Mississippi Democrats win special elections, break13-year GOP statehouse supermajority — WJTV
Virginia Democrats rack up statehouse wins, easing the path for gerrymandering — WTOP
Sabato’s Crystal Ball shifts 11 California races toward Democrats, 1 toward GOP — The Hill
Republicans sue to stop California gerrymander — NYT
Mainers nix GOP-backed effort on voter ID, approve ‘red flag’ rule on guns — WMTV
What’s your ‘political score?’ The data project that’s dissecting the electorate — NYT
TABLE TALK: REPRESENTATIVE OF WHAT?
“This is no way to treat a f—ing U.S. representative.” — Nancy Mace*, the Republican congresswoman running for South Carolina governor, to Charleston airport police who kept her waiting for an escort to her gate after she missed her scheduled appointment, according to the officers’ report. *
MAILBAG
“Great interview** with [Sen. Shelley Moore Capito] from ‘West by God Virginia’ as you said. She demonstrated again what an outstanding advocate for West Virginia she is and how the advantage of growing up in the Governor’s Mansion prepares one for a career in the upper tier of politics. We were a bit disappointed that you did not ask her what programs and federal agencies she would work to relocate to West Virginia during the next year. As surely as a whole hog is spinning on a rotisserie during Lent, our native West Virginia grows when high paying government jobs are relocated to the Mountain State. ‘Big Jim’ [Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV)] is doing his part as he is the biggest employer in Southern West Virginia, but he is the junior senator. [Sen. Capito] the senior senator, needs to address this as our president is breaking up the monopoly that the DMV has on all those high paying jobs.” —* Lynn W. Gardner, Arlington, Va.***
Ms. Gardner,
Now that’s a throwback! The main reason there is a life-sized statue of the late Sen. Robert Byrd in the rotunda of the West Virginia Capitol (for now) is because of exactly the kinds of old-school, pork-barrel politics at which Byrd was an undisputed master.
How much clout does a politician have to have in his home state to see a bronze statue of himself erected in a place like that while he was still in office. Byrd would serve until his death, another 13 years after the statue was dedicated in 1997. And the figurative pedestal on which all that clout was based were the billions and billions and billions of dollars he steered toward West Virginia. As he liked to say “one man’s pork is another man’s job.”
But West Virginia politics have changed a great deal since then. Of course, voters still love to get more than their fair share of federal funds. But the means to get that money is pretty unpopular, especially with primary voters. I think often of the case of Rep. **David McKinley **from what was then West Virginia’s 1st District who lost a primary in substantial part because he supported popular, bipartisan infrastructure spending.
The way lawmakers get clout in Congress is by getting reelected enough times to get to a level of seniority at which plum committee assignments and leadership posts open up. But then, to get the goodies for the folks back home, there’s a next step: dealmaking.
As long as the filibuster, which like Byrd’s statue, is still around for now, the need to work out deals with the other party remains a paramount skill for effective legislators. Capito certainly has accomplishments to which she can point in that regard, but she faces a problem that Byrd did not. There was never a time in his 51-year career that he paid any serious political price for the deals he did with Republican presidents and Republican senators to get the things he wanted for West Virginia. It wasn’t good for the size of the national debt, but it was definitely good for his status at home.
Certainly, there are rewards to be doled out by presidents of the party in power, but the only way to get to the front of the line for those things is to do things either a senator disagrees with or that would cause political pain at home. Partisan loyalty has its own limiting elements.
West Virginia is still in the elite tier for states getting money from the federal government, but we are in no golden age for the politics of pork.
All best,
c
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**FOR DESSERT: IT’S TRASH CAN, NOT TRASH CAN’T **
UPI: “A couple taking a sunrise walk along the shore of the Atlantic Ocean in South Carolina ended up using a traffic cone to rescue a raccoon struggling to swim. Will DeLeo and Elizabeth Heffron were walking along the shore in Charleston recently when they spotted a raccoon struggling in the water below. They watched as the exhausted animal tried without success to find an exit from the water, so they decided to step in and help. A video posted to Instagram shows DeLeo bring a nearby traffic cone to the ledge and lower it into the water, allowing the raccoon to grab hold. DeLeo was finally able lift the raccoon back onto dry land after it slipped off the cone multiple times. The raccoon took a moment to rest on the ledge before running away from the scene.”
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