Off-year election results are never a cause for panic, but they are a relevant data point. There is no denying that Tuesday’s election results were uniformly bad for the Republican Party. Democrats won governor’s mansions in two Democratic states, New Jersey and Virginia, a self-identified socialist won the New York City mayor’s race, another Democratic stronghold, and Democrats won a state-level office in Georgia for the first time in 20 years.
For all of President Donald Trump’s other successes, voters believe Trump has not delivered on his promise to lower the cost of living. This was the top issue for voters according to exit polls in every race. Trump’s successful deregulation efforts aside, his unilateral tariff regime has raised more than $100 billion in revenue, and those funds did not magically materialize in the Treasury Department’s coffers. They came from higher prices paid by consumers and manufacturers that have, as all taxes do, slowed economic growth and made goods and services more unaffordable.
Although the night was unfavorable for Republicans, the results were not overwhelmingly positive for Democrats. While voters in New Jersey and Virginia expressed overall unfavorable views of the Republican Party, the Democratic Party actually fared worse, even as voters pulled the lever for Democratic candidates.
Neither Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) nor Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) offered any real positive message for voters. Spanberger, in particular, ran against Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency job cuts as well as the Republican Party’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which she argued would harm the state’s rural hospitals. These are federal issues over which Spanberger has no control. Meanwhile, the same exit polls that showed Spanberger cruising to victory also found that a strong 55% of voters approved of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s performance in office. Her victory is therefore hardly a rejection of sound Republican governance in what has become a Democratic state.
The Georgia Public Service Commission election results should serve as a clarifying datapoint for Republicans. The Georgia Public Service Commission is responsible for, among other things, overseeing the state’s electric and natural gas service industries. The defeat of the Republican candidate there can only be interpreted as voter frustration with the continued rise in energy prices. If there is an overriding message from Tuesday’s elections, it is that voters want prices to come down and are willing to punish the incumbent party that fails to deliver results.
This is especially relevant as the Trump administration defends its tariff regime in front of the Supreme Court today. Whatever long-term benefits Trump believes his tariffs may have on the United States economy, they have not reduced prices since being implemented seven months ago. Tuesday’s election results should motivate the Trump administration to revisit the strategy. Perhaps the best result for Trump might be a defeat in the Supreme Court on the legality of his tariff policies, thus giving him an easy off-ramp to change course and focus on lowering prices, rather than reshaping the entire global economy without input from Congress.
There was one winning candidate who offered a positive agenda for the Democratic Party on Tuesday, Democratic Socialists of America’s Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani ran a campaign promising that rent control, free healthcare and bus transportation, government-run grocery stores, and higher taxes would deliver economic nirvana for New York City.
Mamdani’s socialist experiment, like all socialist experiments, will fail, giving Republicans their own fodder to run against in the 2026 midterm elections. But Mamdani’s radicalism, and the Democratic Party’s embrace of it, will not be enough to save Republican control of the House and Senate. The Trump administration will have to deliver on lowering costs for consumers, with the best place to start being to accept the Supreme Court’s judgment on the illegality of Trump’s tariff regime, and pivot to an all-out affordability agenda.