As Trump awaits an early verdict with Tuesday’s elections, next year’s midterms are already on his mind
By Jeff Zeleny, CNN
(CNN) — Even as Tuesday’s elections hang in the balance, President Donald Trump has bluntly suggested that he is already looking ahead to the 2026 midterm races with a sense of dread.
“We’ve had success like nobody, but for some reason, you lose the midterms,” Trump said late last month at the White House, waxing aloud about the political backlash that most presidents face during midterm elections. “I don’t know why. It doesn’t make sense.”
A year after winning back the White House, the first big electoral test of Trump’s second term is taking shape in marquee elections on Tuesday, when Virginia and New Jersey will elect governors, California will vote on a pivotal ballot measure to redraw its congressional maps, and New York City will pick its next mayor.
It’s a chance for some voters to deliver a verdict on the actions of the new Trump administration. While hardly a perfect indicator, the results could offer clues about the political climate heading into next year’s elections, when voters will determine control of Congress for the rest of Trump’s presidency.
“We have to win the midterms,” Trump said as he addressed Senate Republicans during a lunch in the Rose Garden. “Otherwise, all of the things that we’ve done, so many of them, are going to be taken away by the radical left lunatics. I mean, we’re going to end up with a communist mayor in New York. Can you believe it?”
As Trump has repeatedly made clear, the race for New York City mayor has been on his mind far more than any of the other races being decided Tuesday. He frequently disparages the positions of Zohran Mamdani, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, who is well on his way to becoming the newest foil for Republicans as Democrats seek to rebuild their party.
The president has followed the other contests to varying degrees, aides say, asking for more updates in the closing days and directing some campaign funds to help voter turnout efforts. He fully endorsed Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in New Jersey, but stopped short of doing the same in Virginia, where Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, the GOP candidate, is seen as less competitive.
“People like me there,” Trump said of New Jersey, a state where he owns golf courses and spends considerable time in the summers. “It’s typically not Republican, but turning Republican very quickly.”
That assessment will be tested in the contest between Ciattarelli and Rep. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat.
Trump made significant gains in New Jersey last fall — losing by 6 points to Kamala Harris, compared with a resounding 16-point defeat to Joe Biden in 2020 — but Democrats still hold considerable structural advantages, including a voter registration edge on Republicans of more than 800,000.
In Virginia, a government shutdown entering a second month hangs particularly heavy over the election, with hundreds of thousands of federal workers, active-duty military and government contractors living in the state. Trump also made gains in Virginia in 2024, but still fell short to Harris by 6 points.
Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, has held a consistent lead over Earle-Sears, which is among the reasons that Trump’s aides say he has not become more involved. He called into a tele-rally on Thursday night in hopes of boosting turnout for the Republican ticket. He is scheduled to give a final push Monday night from the Oval Office when he holds a telephone pep rally in Virginia and New Jersey to fire up GOP voters.
In the final days of the campaign, Trump spent the weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida — far away from both states. Former President Barack Obama visited Virginia and New Jersey to rally the Democratic base and highlight the stakes of the election.
“Let’s face it, our country and our politics are in a pretty dark place right now,” Obama said Saturday night in Newark. “Every day this White House offers up a fresh batch of lawlessness and carelessness and mean-spiritedness and just plain old craziness.”
The Trump effect
If Democrats win their races in Virginia and New Jersey, the outcome could offer a window into some of the headwinds facing Trump and Republicans going into next year’s elections. Yet if Republicans win — or deliver a split verdict — it may suggest that Democrats have misjudged how much of a liability Trump could pose to his party.
“If you get a flat tire on the way home today, she’s going to blame President Trump,” Ciattarelli tells supporters of Sherrill at most every campaign stop, hoping to make light of Democratic finger-pointing at Trump. “There’s nothing she won’t blame on the president.”
Democrats are seeking to ride an early wave of voter discontent, hoping to deal a political setback to Trump a year after his historic return to power. In his first term, Democrats won the races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey in 2017 before going on to take control of the House the following year in a sweeping victory.
The White House is working hard to avoid a replay of that scenario.
That’s the driving force behind a redistricting arms race playing out across the country. After Texas drew new congressional lines that could add up to five Republican seats in the House, California responded with the ballot initiative to redraw districts to favor Democrats.
North Carolina and Missouri have already followed the president’s call to squeeze more Republican seats by redrawing congressional districts, while efforts are underway to follow suit in other GOP-led states such as Indiana and Kansas, where political and procedural obstacles remain. Democrats in Virginia gave approval Friday to a proposed constitutional amendment to do the same, while some party leaders in Illinois are exploring possible changes to the state’s map.
It’s an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering effort — akin to changing the rules in the middle of the game — that started with an order from the Oval Office. Trump still fumes about the investigations and impeachment proceedings that played out during the second half of his first term after Democrats won control of the House.
“The president is obsessively focused on the midterms,” a senior Trump adviser told CNN, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions. “He remembers what happened the first time he was in office.”
‘Everything’s about Trump’
Trump’s name, of course, is not actually on Tuesday’s ballot. If it was, Republican strategists say they would feel far more bullish about rebuilding a Trump coalition that could provide a stronger path to victory.
He figures prominently into the strategies of both sides.
Democrats are counting on a disdain for the president and an objection to his policies to help energize and unify their base. Republicans are working overtime to motivate those who love Trump, paying extra attention to voters with shaky attendance records in off-year elections.
“We have to send a message to Washington,” said Neil Wintfeld, a Virginia Democratic voter who dropped by a Spanberger rally in Alexandria during the closing days of the race. “President Trump generates a lot of negative enthusiasm and motivates people to react to the destruction he is visiting upon our institutions.”
Sharon Cox, a Republican who voted for Trump in each of his three presidential bids, said she was tired of politicians of all stripes invoking the president’s name in elections.
“Everything’s about Trump, it seems,” Cox said after casting an early ballot in Hampton, Virginia. “I know everybody’s not going to like Trump. I know everybody’s not going to like somebody on the Democratic side, but the hate has to go before our country can move forward.”
While the lessons of these elections can be overstated, there is little question the results of Virginia and New Jersey will be analyzed — at least in part — through a Trump-colored lens, given how he is already laser-focused on the 2026 midterm elections.
“If you have a great presidency, it only makes sense that you win the midterms,” Trump said in his Rose Garden remarks, expressing his bafflement that only twice in nearly a century has the president’s party not lost House seats in a midterm election. “There might be some dark, deep psychological reason where they want to vote the opposite way. I don’t know what it is.”
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