Thank you for being a valued subscriber to The Washington Times. We appreciate your support for honest, in-depth journalism and hope you enjoy this exclusive conversation breaking down the 2025 election results with Susan Ferrechio, Seth McLaughlin and George Gerbo.
While the results were fairly predictable, election night 2025 was a strong showing for the Democratic Party with the sweep of key races in Virginia, New Jersey, California, and New York City.
But do these results have any consequences for the Republican Party as they plan for the midterms? How will Democrats handle young voters in the party swinging further to the left?
[GERGO] A significant moment and night for Democrats across the board, across the nation in multiple state races that were going on in places like California, Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere. We will dive into some of those results here in a moment. But off the top, Susan, your big takeaways from a night that heavily favored Democrats and the Democratic Party.
[FERRECHIO] Going into Tuesday, we knew that Democrats were pretty much favored to win in the blue state of New Jersey, and also in Virginia, where the polls showed that the Democratic candidate was ahead pretty consistently throughout the entire campaign. So those weren’t big shockers, and we also knew that Proposition 50 in California was favored in the polls as well. So it wasn’t a big upset night or a big surprise for the outcome.
The more interesting aspects of it are the margins by which Democrats ran and also some of the exit polling. So these are the things that we need to dive into because it may say a lot about what Republicans, who are in charge of government right now, will have to deal with when the midterm elections come around next year. People like to use these off-year elections as sort of a predictor or something that may suggest what’s going to happen a year ahead of time during the midterms. And there are some things there that you could interpret that way. But I also think it’s, like you said, we knew that these blue states were probably going to stay blue, and that Proposition 50 in deep blue California was probably going to make it across the finish line. So no big surprises there.
[MCLAUGHLIN] These elections all played out on Democratic-friendly turf. So everyone has to remember that when we’re analyzing all these results. Within that, though, with the margins of victory, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia won by 15 points. In 2017, when it was a similar setup, Ralph Northam in Virginia, who also rode sort of this anti-Trump sentiment, won by about 10 points. A similar story played out in New Jersey. Jack Ciattarelli, this go-around, Mikie Sherrill was up by 13 points in the last count. So Ciattarelli also went backwards. And in New Jersey, Republicans since the 2024 election and Trump’s performance there, where I think he was within five or six points of Kamala Harris, They have been bullish that his remake of the Republican coalition would allow them to play a little bit better in states like New Jersey. That did not come to fruition. So these, I think, are some of the top-line takeaways. New York, Susan can dive into because New York’s sort of a different beast altogether.
[GERBO] Yeah, let’s stick with the gubernatorial races for a second that you’ve covered pretty extensively, Seth. And in Virginia, I talked with our colleague, Kerry Picket, last week about Jay Jones and everything that surrounded him and the text messages that were revealed that he sent a few years ago that he threatened to kill the leader of the Republican leader of the Virginia State House, did not affect Jay Jones either, who took out incumbent Jason Miyares in the Attorney General’s race. There’s part of it where, like Susan said at the open, the party in power is always going to kind of have this repudiation, right? But it is significant, as you point out, the margin of 15 points for Spanberger. You could argue Winsome Earle-Sears, the current Lieutenant Governor and the Republican candidate, wasn’t that great of a candidate, and that will probably be a line the Republicans will use against her now in the wrap-up, in the postmortem. But for Spanberger to perform that well in Virginia, I think, is significant, as you mentioned, so much so over what Northam did in 2017.
[MCLAUGHLIN] I think a key with her and a key with Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey is they focused on rising costs and affordability. That seems to be the theme that everyone needs to hit on right now. I heard today, Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s running for governor of Ohio, he said, Republicans need to jump on this message. This is going to be the message that drives voters. And so I think Abigail Spanberger, she ran a pretty disciplined campaign, presenting herself as a pragmatic problem solver. And Winsome Earle-Sears, I think if Republicans were being honest, going into last night, they did not expect her to win. They did not feel that she had run a great campaign. And that showed in money, and it showed out in the get-the-vote operation, and it also showed in the totals, where she struggled in the suburbs. She underperformed Trump and Glenn Youngkin, the current governor, down in the southwest part of the state, which is the GOP stronghold. Meanwhile, Spanberger ran up those margins basically across the board.
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