Thursday, November 6, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.
What do Tuesday’s victories mean?
#1.After Tuesday’s losses, some Republicans and their delusional leader continue to see Trump as the magic potion that brings victory.
Trump and Republicans admonish others for their election losses
Supporters attend the election night watch party for New Jersey Republican gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli at the Bridgewater Marriott in Bridgewater, New Jersey, on Nov. 4, 2025
Donald Trump attributed Republicans’ Tuesday night losses in part to his absence from the ballot. Some of his closest allies blamed poor candidate quality. One Republican said the GOP failed to address rising costs.
It all added up to a night of finger-pointing and recriminations from Republicans, who sought to cast blame for their resounding losses in Virginia, New Jersey, California and several other statewide races in the first major election since Trump took office in January.
“‘TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,’ according to Pollsters,” Trump wrote in all caps on Truth Social shortly after Democrats were projected winners in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City.
Off-year elections often prove an early referendum on how voters feel about the White House’s performance. Trump largely declined to enter the fray on behalf of GOP candidates up and down the ballot this year, and Republicans were quick to cast Tuesday night’s gloomy results as a factor of Democratic motivation in blue-leaning states rather than dissatisfaction with Trump himself — cushioning the blow of what 2025’s returns might mean for next year’s crucial midterm elections, while acknowledging some warning signs.
“It’s not doomsday but not a good tea leaf. Not a great night if you’re in the president’s party. But it’s also an off-year,” one White House ally said, who was granted anonymity to frankly discuss the election results. “Part of this is the struggle that has always been: how do you transfer his voters into other elections? There are people who only turn out when he’s on the ballot.”
“People aren’t feeling the promises kept,” the person added. “You won on lowering costs, putting more money back into people’s pockets. And people don’t feel that right now.”
The losses for Republicans, however, were stark. Democrats won all three statewide Virginia races and flipped 13 seats in the state House of Delegates; Democrat Mikie Sherrill beat Republican Jack Ciattarelli by 13 points and Democrats took several counties Trump won in 2024; three Democratic Supreme Court justices kept their seats on the Pennsylvania high court; and California voters approved Proposition 50, which will redraw the state’s congressional maps to favor Democrats.
In red-leaning Georgia, Democrats even ousted two Republicans in a statewide election for the Georgia Public Service Commission.
Vivek Ramaswamy, a close Trump ally running for governor in Ohio, offered a blunt assessment, blaming the GOP’s poor showing in part on the party failing to address rising costs.
“We got our asses handed to us,” he said in a video posted on X.
Aides close to Trump pointed the finger at Winsome Earle-Sears and Ciattarelli, the two GOP candidates who got blown out in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey that had Republicans, at least in New Jersey, feeling optimistic at the start of their campaigns. Chris LaCivita, a former Trump campaign manager and longtime Virginia campaign operative, summed up Earle-Sears’ poor performance as a disaster of her own making.
“A Bad candidate and Bad campaign have consequences - the Virginia Governors race is example number 1,” he wrote on social media shortly after news outlets called the race for Winsome-Sears’ opponent, Democrat Abigail Spanberger.
Alex Breusewitz, head of a Trump-aligned super PAC and a former Trump campaign and White House adviser, accused Earle-Sears of being “no friend of President Trump” while urging Republican candidates to more strongly embrace the president in order to win elections.
Both Earle-Sears and Ciattarelli boasted their support for Trump throughout their campaigns — but Trump kept his distance from the Virginian in particular, who criticized him repeatedly in the years in between his presidency.
“Tonight was a great lesson for the Republican Party: running squishy Rs who are lukewarm on Trump and MAGA, even in ‘purple’ states, doesn’t work,” Breusewitz wrote on social media. “Your candidate needs to be able to turn out ALL FACTIONS of our party, and they do that by being MAGA all the way.”
“To be clear, NJ is not a referendum on Trump,” Mike Hahn, a GOP strategist based in New Jersey who advised a candidate Ciattarelli defeated in the primary and former Trump campaign staffer, said. “It is a reflection on Jack Ciattarelli, who has now lost three times and was always vulnerable.”
races in Virginia, New York and California — a tacit acknowledgement that wading into campaigns in historically Democratic states could backfire. But Trump’s last-minute telerallies for Republicans on Monday laid bare how little he stood alongside the party’s most prominent GOP candidates.
Andrew Kolvet, the Turning Point USA spokesperson, said in a livestream on Charlie Kirk’s Youtube channel that he thinks Trump should have offered more support to Ciattarelli, who seemed to be the likeliest of the Republican candidates to pull out a victory heading into Election Day. Unlike Earle-Sears, Trump had specifically endorsed the New Jersey Republican by name.
“Do I think Trump should have gone out in New Jersey? Yes. Trump should absolutely have been out in New Jersey,” Kolvet said. “The people that love Trump, they would have been motivated by that.” (Politico)
#2. This analysis is the one I embrace.👇
Let the Cult think otherwise and cling to their Orange Raft. We will beat them again and again and right our Ship of State.
From Nat Cohn, the chief political analyst for The New York Times.👇
Democrats Won Big Because They Won Over Trump Supporters.
It wasn’t just about superior turnout. Party switchers played a significant role in Virginia and New Jersey.
Mikie Sherrill won the governor’s race in New Jersey, in part with large Hispanic support
In the Trump era, Democrats have seemed to excel among the highly engaged, highly educated voters who predominate in low-turnout, off-year elections, only to struggle when more irregular and less educated voters flock to the polls in presidential years.
But on Tuesday, when Democrats won the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races by wide margins, it wasn’t simply because more Democratic-leaning voters showed up to the polls while more Republican-leaning voters sat out. The Democratic candidates also succeeded at winning over a modest but meaningful sliver of President Trump’s supporters, based on exit polls and authoritative voter file records.
While it’s always challenging to nail down the details of an electoral shift, the available data generally suggests that Democratic gains were driven slightly more by flipping Mr. Trump’s supporters than by benefiting from a superior turnout, at least for Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey.
Together, the combination of a more Democratic electorate and success among those swing voters was enough to turn light blue Virginia and New Jersey into Democratic romps. It was also enough to allow Democrats to reverse last year’s losses among Hispanic voters, as many of Mr. Trump’s new Hispanic supporters from 2024 stayed home and many others returned to the Democrats.
Here are two ways we know this:
Exit polls
Exit polls aren’t perfect measures of the makeup of the electorate (they are estimates based on surveys of voters), but in this election they tell a clear story about turnout that’s consistent with other available data.
The most important exit poll question for evaluating the makeup of the electorate is how people say they voted in the last election. By this measure, the New Jersey and Virginia electorates this year were more Democratic-leaning than in 2024: Overall, exit poll respondents said they supported Kamala Harris last year by eight percentage points in New Jersey and by nine points in Virginia, compared with Ms. Harris’s actual six-point wins in the states.
Although this suggests an impressive Democratic turnout, it also implies that turnout alone didn’t explain the decisive victory — because Ms. Sherrill and Ms. Spanberger won by 13 and 15 points.
Instead, the two Democrats won so decisively because they also flipped a crucial sliver of voters who said they supported Mr. Trump in 2024. Ms. Sherrill and Ms. Spanberger both won 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters, according to the exit polls.
It may not seem like much to flip 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s backers, but consider: When a voter flips, it adds one voter to one party and also deducts one from the other, making it twice as significant as turning out a new voter.
Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican candidate for governor in New Jersey, countered by flipping 3 percent of Ms. Harris’s supporters. And Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, won 1 percent of Ms. Harris’s vote. But the overall effect of the flips was enough to turn electorates that favored Ms. Harris by single digits into Sherrill +13 and Spanberger +15 victories.
The same story holds among Hispanic voters, who snapped back toward Democrats in both states. The exit polls in New Jersey found that Ms. Sherrill won a whopping 18 percent of Mr. Trump’s Hispanic support in the state (no figures were reported for Virginia, where the Hispanic vote is smaller).
Ms. Sherrill also seemed to benefit from a much stronger turnout among Democratic-leaning Hispanic voters. In the New Jersey exit poll, Hispanic voters who cast ballots in 2025 reported backing Ms. Harris by 25 points; in the actual 2024 election, Ms. Harris won Hispanic voters by just nine points, according to New York Times estimates.
Together, it was enough for Ms. Sherrill to win Hispanic voters by 37 points, according to the exit polls.
Voter records
The gold standard for analyzing the electorate is the individual-level records of who voted in an election (but not whom they voted for).
Usually, this data takes months to become available. But in New Jersey, nine counties containing nearly half of the state’s electorate have already provided this data for both early and Election Day voters, allowing an unusually early and authoritative look at who cast ballots in 2025 — and their party registrations.
In these counties, Democrats had a roughly 19-point turnout edge by party registration, up from around a 16-point edge among 2024 voters. That’s a net 2.5-point shift (the figures are rounded), and largely consistent with what the exit polls found.
Alone, the net 2.5-point shift in party registration would not explain a nearly nine-point shift toward Ms. Sherrill in these counties (when compared with the 2024 vote for Ms. Harris). More sophisticated modeling, using Times/Siena poll data, shows a similar if slightly more pronounced pattern, with Ms. Sherrill gaining a net 3.5 points because of turnout alone — still not enough to account for her much bigger gains overall.
In other words, the voter records suggest the same thing the exit polls do: Ms. Sherrill benefited from Democrats’ improved turnout, but she benefited even more from flipping some of Mr. Trump’s 2024 supporters to her side.
It’s worth contrasting this with a similar analysis of special and off-year elections from 2023 and 2024. Back then, it often felt as if I could pull off something of a parlor trick: If you told me who showed up to vote in a special election, I could tell you the result just based off our model of how those people voted in the 2020 election. That’s because voters were consistent in their party support, and Democratic strength in those races was being driven by turnout alone.
My old trick wouldn’t have worked in these New Jersey counties in this election. Too many Trump voters flipped to the Democrats.
One more thing.
Remember these words. 👇
It wasn’t just about superior turnout. Party switchers played a significant role in Virginia and New Jersey.
Too many Trump voters flipped to the Democrats.
Mamdani won big in New York. His transition team is all female.
On a more Personal Note.My sister is better, not well but better.
She will soon leave the hospital for a skilled nursing facility, then hopefully go home, hospital bed and all.
She walked yesterday. I cried.
She is well enough that Eve and I leave for already planned but now a much needed rest in White Truffle country - the Piedmont area of Italy - until the 14th.
We thank the many of you for your support.
I am sure I will post from time to time from now until I return but not daily.
I will send pictures and thoughts.
Trump’s shutdown sets record.
37 days today.
Disgusting.
Americans are suffering.
Keep fighting.
