The blue wave that crashed across the country Tuesday swept away two Republican incumbents in Virginia but appears to have crested just shy of ousting a third.
John McGuire seems to have hung on in the 5th District, although Democrat Tom Perriello insists that the race is “too close to call” until provisional ballots and the final mail ballots are counted.
Nationally, we saw things Tuesday we haven’t seen in a generation: Texas went blue. Twice, if you count both the Senate race and the governor’s race. South Carolina elected a Democratic senator. So did Kansas, for the first time in nearly a century. Georgia elected the nation’s first Black woman as a governor — ever.
We will be talking about this election for a long time, so let’s get started now. Here are some first impressions and a first review of the numbers.
1. Trump did this to himself and Republicans paid the price
Midterms almost always go against the party in power; the question usually is whether it’s a little or a lot. Given those historic trends, Republicans were always on defense this year, but that didn’t necessarily mean they’d lose the House or the Senate.
President Donald Trump, though, made things worse. He came into office promising three things: to lower inflation, to keep the country out of “forever wars” and to “drain the swamp.” In office, though, his signature economic policy of tariffs has raised prices, and he’s initiated a war with Iran that has spiked gasoline prices. James Carville famously advised the Bill Clinton campaign in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.” I’d offer some slight modification: It’s not the economy, it’s what people think about the economy. The economy was improving some in 2024 but people’s minds were already made up; they blamed Democrats for inflation and voted accordingly. This year, people are in an even more sour mood about the economy, as measured by the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment index, which shows people feel worse about the economy now than they did in 2024 — and even worse than when they had their most negative feelings about Joe Biden’s economy.
Trump has done little, to nothing, to assuage voters’ feelings about the economy. His closing argument Monday was to hold a news conference by the Reflecting Pool to talk about renovations — and suggest that he might name it after himself. Trump has seemed more concerned about his ballroom and enriching his family than enriching voters.
Nationally, Trump’s efforts to remake the Republican Party in his image resulted in weaker candidates: Instead of Thom Tillis in North Carolina, there was Michael Whatley. Instead of John Cornyn in Texas, there was Kenneth Paxton. Instead of Brian Kemp in Georgia, there was Mike Collins. Instead of Ralph Norman in South Carolina, there was Darline Graham. As a result, all those states elected Democrats.
It is difficult to read the results as anything other than a severe spanking for Trump. Whether this represents a repudiation of Trumpism is more difficult to say. That requires a thought experiment: Would the results have been the same if Trump had tamed inflation, not launched a war with Iran and been more focused on economic results than on vanity projects?
2. Democrats were enthusiastic about voting, Republicans often weren’t
We now have a lot of numbers to dig into, but we saw even in the early voting that some Democratic localities in Virginia were nearing presidential-level turnout while some Republican localities lagged at barely half their 2024 totals. On Tuesday, we saw some Democratic precincts in Charlottesville exceed their presidential numbers while Republicans struggled to produce their usual vote in rural areas. That’s why the 5th District race wound up so close.
3. There will be a robust debate as to whether this represents a Democratic mandate
Many Democrats will certainly say it is, although that’s debatable. It’s definitely a vote for Democrats to thwart Trump’s agenda, but there wasn’t a unified Democratic campaign to promote a particular plan beyond blocking tariffs, the Iran war and whatever else Trump is doing. Instead, the Democratic campaigns could be summed up in these signs I saw in Botetourt County: They’re not the party of Trump.
Parties almost always believe they have more of a mandate than they do, so Democrats now run the risk of overreach. However, the reality is they aren’t in a position to overreach that much: They can pass whatever they want but will run right into Trump’s veto pen. We now face two years of dramatic gridlock, which apparently many voters find preferable to the status quo.
4. The three constitutional amendments won in some surprising places
All three passed, with the reproductive rights/abortion amendment leading the pack with 61.45% of the state. The amendment guaranteeing the right to a same-sex marriage won with 56.55% of the vote; the restoration of rights amendment took 55.41%. Those totals shouldn’t be a surprise given Virginia’s recent voting history and the nature of this year’s electorate. What’s surprising is that the first two of those amendments won in some places that otherwise vote Republican.
Goochland County voted 54.46% for Republican John McGuire for Congress but 52.43% for something he strongly opposed: the right to an abortion. Caroline County, Essex County, Lancaster County, Orange County, Rappahannock County, Spotsylvania County and Westmoreland County all voted yes.
Lynchburg, the home of Liberty University, appears to have voted “yes” on amendment 1.
The same-sex marriage amendment won in fewer unexpected places but still carried enough that pop out on a map: Goochland County, Caroline County, Lancaster County, Rappahannock County, Spotsylvania County.
5. McGuire appears to have the advantage in the 5th District
Tom Perriello’s campaign energized a Democratic vote in the district, but his challenge was always that the Democratic vote starts to run out once you get outside of a few places. McGuire’s advantage, as I write these words, is 5,626 votes. Once you start trying to make up that difference one by one, things get hard. There don’t appear to be enough provisional votes in the district to make up the difference (Charlottesville has 1,854 and they’ll break Democratic, while Lynchburg is said to have at least 1,236 but they’ll go Republican).
6. Macy couldn’t break through in a Republican district
Democrat Beth Macy challenged Republican incumbent Ben Cline in ways he hadn’t been challenged before, but in the end, she still lost by almost 12 percentage points. Once you get outside of Roanoke, the 6th District is a very red district except for a few blue dots here and there up the valley.
Macy overperformed compared to other Democrats in her hometown of Roanoke; she took 69.9% of the vote there, when the “normal” Democratic share is usually in the low 60s. However, she couldn’t crack the Republican code in other parts of the district, despite outspending Cline more than 3-to-1 on television and almost 8-to-1 on radio. She shaved a few percentage points off the usual Republican totals but not enough. Cline took just under 56% of the vote. The 6th is just a very Republican district.
7. Taylor won in the 1st. So did the suburbs.
The 1st District has been trending toward Democrats for a while now. Much of this has to do with demography and how population changes have shifted the weight of this district. Shannon Taylor won in the suburbs, carrying the parts of Henrico County and Chesterfield County that are in the 1st, as well as James City County and Williamsburg. Republican Rob Wittman won the rural counties. Those just weren’t enough. In demographic terms, the suburbs outvoted the rural areas.
8. Luria won the battle of the beach
Democrat Elaine Luria reclaimed the seat that she lost to Republican Jen Kiggans four years ago. In that 2022 race, Luria took exactly half the vote in Virginia Beach but lost in enough of the outlying localities that she found herself ousted from office. This time around, Luria won Virginia Beach by a clear margin: 54.58% to 43.13%. With a margin like that, she could withstand losses elsewhere.
The best thing about an election, no matter who wins, is that it gives us lots and lots of numbers.
We’ll be digging more into them in the coming days to see what else they can tell us, but this is the quick overview about why things turned out the way they did.
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