TOI Correspondent from Washington: Donald Trump’s Republican Party got smoked in the first elections since he returned to power ten months ago, with Democrats convincingly winning the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey and a raft of local body polls, including in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani became the first person of Indian heritage and first Muslim to win City Hall.
In what is widely viewed as a rebuke of President Trump’s second term, albeit in mostly Democratic strongholds, Republican candidates were crushed by women and minorities who are often disparaged by the MAGA supremo. Voters also rejected Trump candidates and policies in Ohio, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and California
In one of the more consequential races in a state abutting Washington DC, Abigail Spanberger, a 46-year old former CIA agent and Democratic Congresswoman, became Virginia’s first female governor in 250 years after 74 men, going back to Patrick Henry in 1776, preceded her. Hyderabad-born Ghazala Hashmi became the state’s first Muslim lieutenant governor, and Democrat Jay Jones won a race to become the state’s first black attorney general.
Up north in New Jersey, Democrat Michelle Sherill, a former navy officer, won the gubernatorial race, defeating Trump surrogate Jack Ciattarelli. Both Spanberger and Sherill are white women with strong national security credentials – the kind favored by Trump, except they are on the other side of the political spectrum. Trump pointedly did not endorse Republican candidate Winsome Earle-Sears, a black woman who was pitted against Spanberger in Virginia.
In California, Democrats won a ballot measure to redraw their congressional districts to gain five more seats, countering a move to increase Republican seats by five in Texas. Republicans also failed to gain control of the Apex Court in Pennsylvania, a state Trump won in 2024, with Dems retaining three critical seats on the state's highest court.
“And so it begins…” Trump posted rather cryptically as the results rolled in. After his withering attacks on Mamdani as a “communist” and his support for Andrew Cuomo (a Democrat turned Independent) failed to stop the Democrat Socialist’s win, Trump said it was no longer Republicans against Democrats, it’s “America v Communism.” He also cited unknown pollsters to assert that Republicans lost because HE wasn’t on the ballot, absolving himself of any responsibility for the defeat.
Other Republicans were candid in acknowledging the rout. .”We got our asses handed to us,” Vivek Ramaswamy, a Trump acolyte who is running for governor of Ohio in November 2026, said in a short video. He called on Republicans to focus on affordability (which was Mamdani key talking point) and abjure identity politics.
Democrats of progressive persuasion like Pramila Jayapal, Congresswoman from Seattle, rejoiced over the potential rejuvenation of the party. “Standing up and fighting for what we believe in is not just the moral necessity in these times, but a politically winning strategy,” Jayapal, an early Mamdani supporter, said.
Centrist and moderate Democrats worried about the edging further left, although for the moment though they relished victories for a party that is fighting to make a comeback against a rampant Trump, even as MAGA Republicans were full of dark forebodings.
“The soul of the Democrat Party belongs to the radical left now — AOC, Mamdani, Jay Jones, Omar Fateh. A communist, a socialist, and a man with a murder fetish — this is who they’ve become. I warned in 2019 this would be @AOC’s party. Tonight proved it,” said MAGA commentator and Trump partisan Laura Ingraham, referring to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the Latina Congresswoman from Bronx who is Mamdani’s ideological soulmate, both acolytes of Socialist veteran
Bernie Sanders.
Rajghatta is author of Kamala Harris: Phenomenal Woman