Warning signs for the GOP, lessons for Democrats: How Tuesday’s results will shape the 2026 midterms

By Eric Bradner, Arit John, CNN

(CNN) — Democrats’ dominance in Tuesday’s elections reset expectations ahead of next year’s midterm battle for House and Senate control, reinvigorating a party that has been in the political wilderness and leaving Republicans lamenting that the gains President Donald Trump made a year ago with key portions of the electorate all but evaporated.

“Last night, if that wasn’t a message to all Republicans, then we’ve got our head jammed in the ground,” said West Virginia GOP Sen. Jim Justice.

The list of Democratic winners spanned the party’s ideological spectrum — from Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist elected mayor of New York City, to Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, the moderates with strong national security credentials elected governors of Virginia and New Jersey, respectively.

Their wins could rally Democrats in competitive House, Senate and governor’s races next year around a message all three made central to their campaigns, in different forms: pledges to reduce the cost of living.

But the playing field won’t be easy for Democrats. Strategists in both parties agree that control of the House will be in play, but the net effect of redistricting moves around the country — particularly if the Supreme Court decides to weaken the Voting Rights Act — could leave fewer competitive seats for Democrats. And the 2026 Senate map includes only a handful of GOP-held seats that appear to be in play and multiple seats Democrats will have to defend.

Still, Tuesday’s results may embolden Democrats to continue their strategy in the ongoing government shutdown, while igniting new debates over what kinds of candidates can win, and where.

Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster, said the elections should be viewed within the broader context of a year in which the party’s voters have packed town halls and rallies, won key races like the Wisconsin Supreme Court contest in the spring and a slew of special elections, and scored candidate recruitment victories for next year’s midterms.

“Take the whole year into account and it tells a pretty similar story, which is that Democrats are motivated and Republicans are less motivated,” Omero said.

Trump, she said, “lost popularity and he’s lost altitude on all of his top issues, like the economy and immigration.”

“Where does that leave his supporters in a midterm or off-year election?” Omero said. “What are they coming out for, if he’s less popular and his policies are less popular and his agenda’s less popular?”

In addition to the wins in governor’s races and mayoral elections, and a critical victory in a statewide vote to green-light a redistricting effort to add five more seats that favor Democrats in California, the party also scored a long list of lower-profile victories on Tuesday.

They broke the GOP’s supermajority in the Mississippi state Senate. They flipped two seats on Georgia’s Public Service Commission. They defeated a voter identification ballot initiative in Maine. Their incumbent Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices prevailed in retention votes.

The results showed that many of the gains Trump had made in 2024 have evaporated. In New Jersey, Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli couldn’t match Trump’s support levels with Latino and Black voters. In Virginia, Spanberger notched the most impressive Democratic performance in recent years — besting the margins of the party’s last two presidential nominees and carrying a scandal-plagued nominee for attorney general, Jay Jones, to victory on her coattails.

For the GOP, the fallout could come in a number of forms — including altering the party’s push for redistricting to add winnable congressional seats in deep-red states, and changing how Republicans in competitive midterm races approach Trump.

“The picture is pretty clear,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “It is not a muddled message.”

Ayres pointed to several lessons Republicans should take from Tuesday’s results. In Virginia and New Jersey, two states Trump lost in all three of his presidential runs, Republican gubernatorial candidates tied themselves to the president, a “losing strategy from the start,” he said.

Republicans might also be inclined to rethink their strategy on redistricting, he said.

“Given the Democratic margins yesterday, about the last thing you want to do if you want to hold on to the House is weaken Republican incumbent House members, and that’s exactly what will happen if you’re trying to carve out more Republican districts,” he said.

Trump world deflects blame

For his part, Trump and his top allies publicly downplayed the election results, with the president noting on social media that he wasn’t on the ballot. He partially blamed the ongoing federal government shutdown, telling Republican lawmakers in a closed-door session Wednesday morning that they are getting “killed” politically by the impasse, a source told CNN.

Vice President JD Vance said that “it’s idiotic to overreact to a couple of elections in blue states.” But he also warned that the GOP needs “to do better at turning out voters than we have in the past.”

“I said it in 2022, and I’ve said it repeatedly since: our coalition is ‘lower propensity’ and that means we have to do better at turning out voters than we have in the past,” Vance said Wednesday morning on X.

Vance also urged Republicans to focus on affordability. He said the Trump administration “inherited a disaster from Joe Biden and Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz called the election results a “great lesson for the Republican Party,” blaming the losing Virginia gubernatorial nominee, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, for failing to excite Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

“Your candidate needs to be able to turn out ALL FACTIONS of our party, and they do that by being MAGA all the way,” he wrote on X.

Though Tuesday’s GOP losses were wide-ranging, Republicans focused on elevating one Democratic winner: Mamdani, the 34-year-old Muslim and democratic socialist mayor-elect of New York City.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise called Mamdani “the new leader of the Democrat Party.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is “apparently a socialist now,” since Jeffries endorsed Mamdani.

Democratic ideological rifts remain

Mamdani’s victory over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York City emboldened the left wing of the Democratic Party. Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, a group created to oust “corporate Democrats” and elect progressives, said Mamdani’s win marks a “turning point” for their movement and shows the importance of competitive races.

One long-simmering debate Tuesday’s results didn’t settle is the ideological battle within the Democratic Party over the way forward, with a host of competitive House and Senate primaries just months away and the 2028 presidential primary already looming large.

“Democratic primaries can and should be the battleground for the control of our party’s direction,” Andrabi said.

However, in New Jersey and Virginia, the winning Democratic candidates are moderates with strong national security credentials. Spanberger, the Virginia governor-elect, criticized Mamdani in an interview with CNN just days before the election, suggesting his proposals aimed at reducing the cost of living will ultimately disappoint his supporters.

“We don’t need to settle,” said Omero, the Democratic pollster. “We’re able to have more moderate candidates in some places and more progressive candidates in some places. That feels like an important lesson.”

One area where Democrats appeared broadly on the same page Wednesday is the ongoing government shutdown — fueled in part by Democrats’ demand that Republicans make concessions on health care funding in order to pass a measure that would fund the government.

Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy wrote on X that it is “not a coincidence these big wins came at the exact moment when Democrats are using our power to stand for something and be strong. A huge risk to not learn that lesson.”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

CNN’s Sarah Ferris and Alejandra Jaramillo contributed to this report.