Last week, we made our final predictions for this election cycle. We said we’d perform an autopsy on the results regardless of how “impressively correct or preposterously wrong” we are.
Well, unlike our highly accurate 2024 forecast, we were preposterously wrong this year.
Let’s get into the numbers.
Virginia – A Total Blowout
The earliest call of the night came in the Old Dominion. Major networks projected former Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger (D) to flip control of Virginia’s governor’s seat within the poll closing hour.
While we did predict a Spanberger win, that result was practically a foregone conclusion. The biggest question was what her final margin would look like. We assumed, incorrectly, that the controversy around the text messages of Attorney General candidate Jay Jones (D) would lower Spanberger’s threshold, as many reputable pollsters clocked a tightening race at that juncture. We estimated a Spanberger win by a margin of 3.5% to 6% – somewhere in that window.
Spanberger trounced Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears (R-VA) by a whopping 15.2% – 57.5%-42.3% – a blowout in the blue-leaning battleground. It’s the best gubernatorial performance by a Democrat in the commonwealth since 1961 and the first double-digit win for any party since 2009. With 1,967,646 votes reported as press time, Spanberger earned the most votes for any gubernatorial candidate in Virginia history.
Part of the political calculus in Virginia is that in every gubernatorial election going back to 1977, except 2013, Virginians elected a governor opposite the White House party.
What’s clear here is that this was a massive repudiation of not just the White House party, but President Donald Trump (R-FL) himself. We also underestimated just how politically toxic the ongoing government shutdown would be, which is quickly on track to become the longest in history. We ascribed blame for the shutdown to the Democrats and believed that either party would relent until it proved to be a toxic issue for them. Democrats made a dicey gamble and ended up winning big, as Northern Virginia (NoVA) is home to a massive chunk of the federal workforce that is currently either furloughed or were let go under the first round of the DOGE cuts.
Spanberger overperformed across the entire state, with the biggest shifts relative to 2024 coming from the NoVA-based Manassas Park (D+22 shift), Prince William County (D+16), Manassas (D+16), and the college town of Harrisonburg (D+15) – the latter home to James Madison University.
Earle-Sears, on the other hand, overperformed in just four counties and the independent city of Lynchburg. All were only marginal gains of less than 5%.
The Jay Jones text message controversy wasn’t even of a negative effect on the gubernatorial race, it seems like it was an entire non-issue. Moreover, Jay Jones himself defeated incumbent Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) by a decisive 6.5% margin – something that the polls, which are typically accurate in Virginia, missed by a long shot.
Democrats also flipped control of the Lieutenant Governor’s seat, with Ghazala Hashmi (D beating John Reid (R) by 11.4%.
Even more startling, the narrowly-divided Virginia House of Delegates saw a blue wave, with Democrats netting a whopping thirteen seats.
We severely underestimated the environment in Virginia, seeing as the Democratic ticket did not handle the fallout of the Jay Jones text messages that made some of the polls recoil sharply, especially in Jones’ A.G. race.
Spanberger will become the first female governor of Virginia.
New Jersey – A Stunning Overperformance
New Jersey, however, was an even bigger shocker, one that likely surprised Democrats more than it did Republicans.
Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill (D, NJ-11) has been elected governor of the Garden State, breaking a historical streak in the process. Since 1965, New Jersey has not elected the same party to govern the state three consecutive times. Sherrill broke that streak on Tuesday night – one of the main reasons we thought 2021 challenger Jack Ciattarelli (R) was narrowly favored to win.
We predicted a Ciattarelli margin of 0.8%-1.2%.
Sherrill won by 13% even, as of press time – a massive overperformance of the polls that were within the margin of error, even in the aggregates, that stunned Democrats four years ago.
Moreover, Ciattarelli severely underperformed his 2021 performance. Sherrill flipped the South Jersey counties of Gloucester, Atlantic, and Cumberland, and the north-central Morris County, a traditionally Republican county that makes up the base of Sherrill’s congressional district that she flipped in 2018 and held every two years since then.
The Democratic overperformance in New Jersey is not just surprising; it’s stunning. Our talks with people on the ground from both parties saw good momentum for Ciattarelli and a sense of nervousness for Sherrill.
Sherrill has also overperformed in all of New Jersey’s twenty-one counties, with the largest gains in the Newark-based Hudson County (D+22 shift from 2024), the heavily-Latino Passaic County (D+18), and the New Brunswick-based Middlesex County (D+17).
This essentially erases the gains made by Ciattarelli in 2021, when he came just three points away from flipping the seat red, and the significant shift the state saw in 2024, when Donald Trump came less than six points away from flipping a state that has not backed a Republican presidential nominee since 1988.
Our call in New Jersey wasn’t as bold as some think; this was more or less where the winds were blowing in our conversations and research. We assumed that a net gain of 170,000 voters for the GOP since 2021, a net loss of 50,000 voters for the Democrats, and a plethora of local Democratic endorsements for Ciattarelli was enough of a fundamental change to hand him the keys to the governor’s mansion. We also thought that Sherrill’s inability to parry the allegations of insider trading would be terrible PR for her campaign, especially as, in a more populist electorate nowadays, it seemed odd she couldn’t explain how she made $7 million since she entered Congress in 2019.
And, as we mentioned last week, registered votes aren’t guaranteed votes. It clearly didn’t pan out for Ciattarelli – not even remotely close.
New York City – A Paradigm Shift
As expected, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani (D-Astoria) is the next Mayor of New York City. He becomes the first Muslim mayor of the Big Apple, the first self-avowed Democratic Socialist mayor of NYC, and, at 34 years old, the youngest NYC mayor since 1892.
Mamdani started as a little-known, dark-horse challenger in the Democratic Primary, a contest many thought was a foregone conclusion for disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-Sutton Place). Cuomo lost the primary in a remarkable upset and within a week of his stunning loss – a signal of the old Democratic guard falling by the wayside – launched an Independent bid for mayor.
While we weren’t ambivalent about predicting Mamdani would win, we did make a bold claim: Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa (R-Upper East Side) would experience a surge in support as both the far-left socialists and the die-hard Republicans jointly – and ostensibly – saw no value in a Mayor Cuomo. We also posited that a second-place finish was also on the table for Sliwa.
Once again, a huge swing and a miss. Not only did Mamdani consolidate support in all four boroughs besides Staten Island – which went to Cuomo – Curtis Sliwa failed to even break 10%.
As of press time, Mamdani earned 1,036,051 votes, 50.4% of the city-wide vote, to Cuomo’s 854,995 votes, 41.6%, and Sliwa’s 146,137, 7.1%.
The lopsided margin means the race was much more engaged between Cuomo and Sliwa than we previously thought. However, assuming every Sliwa vote would have gone to Cuomo, the former governor would have still come up short by a couple of points. Mamdani received a majority of the vote and NYC will likely undergo some serious fundamental changes within the next few months.
Part of what made us think Sliwa had a stronger presence starts in his results in 2021. Though he lost to Eric Adams (D-Brooklyn) handily, Sliwa made gains in majority-minority districts across southwestern Brooklyn and parts of Queens – gains that would precipitate a strong Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley) showing in 2022 and what made New York such a closer state for Kamala Harris (D-CA) last year. Those trends didn’t pan out this year. In fact, 91% of precincts reporting, Sliwa appears to have not won a single neighborhood across all five boroughs.
Even more so, Sliwa appears to not have won a single precinct in the city.
Cuomo’s biggest margins came from Staten Island, the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Borough Park, Midwood, and Gravesend, the Manhattan neighborhoods of Midtown and the Upper East Side, and the Queens communities of Jamaica Estates and Kew Garden Hills.
Mamdani’s base of support came from the Brooklyn areas of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, Crown Heights, and Park Slope, to name a few.
Odds and Ends
California’s Proposition 50 has passed with flying colors, meaning a Democratic-drawn gerrymander will replace the current independently-drawn congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterms. The map gives the Democrats a significant upper-hand in three seats and might help them win another one or two – enough to counterweight the GOP-drawn Texas gerrymander. The measure passed 63.8%-36.2% with 71% of votes reported.
In Minnesota, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey (D), who received criticism for his handling of the George Floyd riots in 2020, heads to a runoff against State Senate Omar Fateh (D), a Democratic Socialist who has spoken highly of his Somali roots.
In Maine, voters rejected an amendment 63.9%-36.1% that would require photo ID’s for in-person voting and ballot drop box use, among other changes.
Democrats also held control of the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court by a 5-2 margin, avoiding a lengthy and likely bitter gridlock in Harrisburg over appointments.
Our forecast wasn’t as great as last year’s, that’s for sure. Democrats clearly had a much stronger-than-expected night, even among Democratic circles. We’ll get our ear closer to the rail in 2026.
