Within the Margin

On Monday night, I posted some thoughts to make sure they were recorded for posterity before events overtook us and I semiconsciously retconned my priors to match. I approached the exercise with circumspect caution: positive portents abounded in the national polling, the data out of early voting in several states pointed to reasonably strong Democratic engagement levels, and local vibes were good in my homeland of Dutchess County, NY with all its competitive town and county elections. But we just didn’t know enough yet when I wrote those thoughts up. I couldn’t be sure that the national tide had truly shifted, that Black and Latino voters were starting to come back, that the reluctant Trump voters who backed him in ’24 because of cost of living concerns would pivot away from the party that has failed to address them despite unfettered control of the federal government (and here in Dutchess, control of most of county government). I couldn’t be sure that the “Mamdani Effect” that has re-engaged younger voters would overcome the corresponding fearmongering campaigns throughout the country but especially in the Hudson Valley, where the GOP sure seemed to think he was on the ballot in places besides NYC. Funny how they’re quick to condemn people for voting against Trump in local races, though.

So with all that in mind, I offered some tempered optimism: an 8-10 point win for Abigail Spanberger in Virginia with narrow wins for Ghazala Hashmi (lieutenant governor) and Jay Jones (attorney general) but uncertainty about how many House of Delegates seats she’d pull along with her; a 4-5 point win for Mikie Sherill in New Jersey; and juju-proof vagaries in Dutchess County.

Well, Democrats exceeded those expectations, and then some. Spanberger’s winning margin stands at 14.8% for the largest blowout in a Virginia gubernatorial since 2009. Polls close awfully early in Virginia, so the race was called even before Democrats in New York gathered for results watch parties that featured a a newly optimistic tenor. Hashmi and Jones won comfortably, too – however unfortunate that may be, in the latter case.¹ In New Jersey, Sherill ran well ahead of most polling for a 13.5% margin of triumph.

Democratic successes were abundant downballot as well. They exceeded even the rosiest expectations for the Virginia House of Delegates, picking up 13 GOP-held seats to grow a 51-49 majority to 64-36, the largest Democratic majority in the Commonwealth since the 1987 elections. In New Jersey, Democrats have flipped three Assembly seats but Republicans concede that two more losses are likely. That’ll bring Dems to at least a 57-23 majority, the largest for either party since the GOP’s 58-seat win in 1991.

In Pennsylvania, where three Democratic justices on the state Supreme Court faced a retention vote, each passed the rest with flying colors – over 61% of Pennsylvania voters opted to retain all three justices. They carried the day in the usual Pennsylvania swing counties like Bucks and Erie, but elsewhere, too. Beaver, Fayette and Westmoreland counties spent decades as mighty Democratic strongholds in southwest PA before moving slowly to the GOP in the 1990s and 2000s, and sharply in the 2010s. But they supported all three Democrats for retention. Blue-trending Cumberland in the south-central portion of the state did, too – a result unthinkable 20 years ago. Luzerne County, home to Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton in the Anthracite Kingdom of northeastern PA, is often used to depict eroding Dem fortunes among working-class voters in the age of Trump. It, too, supported all three Dems. The red-for-decades Columbia, Montour and Union in the Susquehanna Valley? All three. Pike County on the NY border, which has neither an ancestral Dem heritage nor a notable recent trend toward Dems? All three. York County voted to retain two of them and Yes (retain) trails by only 20 votes for the third (David Wecht). Even Northumberland County – where Democrats are a half-century removed from their heyday – supported retention for one of the three.

The downballot triumphs in Pennsylvania are too numerous to list, but highlights include flipping the sheriff and district attorney positions in swingy Bucks County – the latter for the first time since the 1800s. Bucks was ground zero for Moms for Liberty victories in 2021; they were wiped out this time around. Clearfield County gave Trump 75% of its vote a year ago, but Democrat Josh Maines flipped a county court judgeship – beating the incumbent Republican district attorney for good measure. The small borough of Beaver went deep-red even when the surrounding county of the same name was a Democratic stronghold; it last voted for a Democratic presidential nominee in 1912. It had an unbroken streak of Republican mayors dating to World War II. Well, that streak is broken.

To bring it home, I’ll note that in Dutchess County – where I hedged mightily despite increasing signs for optimism as the election drew to a close – Democrats had the strongest night in the party’s history. There have been great federal and state elections before for Dutchess Dems, but in county races, nothing like this. I’ll be writing in more detail in a future post, but Dems held the Comptroller position and flipped a county court judgeship – by margins not previously seen for Democrats in countywide offices. And they decisively flipped the county legislature, last held by Dems in 2008-09, along with a dozen and a half town-level seats.

I was too cautious, it turns out – Democrats won, they won bigger and more widely than both the polls and the incorrigible optimists foresaw, and they did it both via increased turnout over similar contests in previous years and, as Nate Cohn notes at the New York Times, by flipping 2024 Trump voters. What a night. More to come from me on these happenings.

1. I rarely vote for a Republican, but I would have in the Virginia AG race because I simply do not believe Jay Jones can hold a law enforcement position with any credibility with his history of graphic, violent texts. I understand all the counter-arguments; I also disagree with them. ↩︎