US Democrats still face big questions, despite election wins

A year after Democrats were out of power and without a leader, the party is at a crossroads.

After months of pessimistic contemplation, three election races this week gave them a much-needed boost of momentum.

In New York, there was the unexpected victory of a 34-year-old democratic socialist as mayor of the nation’s largest city, while in Virginia a former CIA agent won to become the state’s first female governor.

In New Jersey, a former Navy helicopter pilot, who made opposition to Donald Trump a focal point of her campaign, won a decisive victory over a Republican candidate supported by the president.

These three candidates — New York State Assemblyman Zahran Mamdani, Virginia law-and-order moderate Abigail Spanberger, and New Jersey Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill — ran in different races.

Their victories have sparked debate about how Democrats chart a path forward, and whether the centrists or the party’s left wing will prevail as they head into the crucial 2026 midterm elections — and beyond.

But without a standard-bearer until the presidential race and the 2028 election, Democrats are grappling with how to get across a clear message, rebuild their brand, and rework their strategy to win back voters.

Some believe this will happen by improving their focus on the affordability crisis, while others believe it is a matter of pushing harder against Trump.

“This was a rejection of President Trump and the Republicans, not an affirmation of ours,” Rahm Emanuel, the former US ambassador to Japan and mayor of Chicago, told the BBC.

“The first lesson for Democrats is that we didn’t trip over our shoelaces. We stayed focused on what people needed to hear from us — that we were concerned about that, and we didn’t get into any culture war arguments that we couldn’t win.”

Democrats were adrift.

The party not only lost the White House last year, but also both chambers of Congress, every state facing contests, and even some support among key demographics including the working class, racial minorities and young voters.

The party lost 4.5 million registered voters to Republicans from 2020 to 2024. According to the New York Times.

Although Trump’s popularity remains underwater, hovering in the low 40s, Democrats’ approval ratings fell this summer to their lowest levels in 35 years.

A A July Wall Street Journal poll found 63% of voters had an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party, the highest percentage since 1990.

But an off-year election could signal that the tide is beginning to turn as Democrats begin to articulate their message of addressing the economic pain. Party officials, activists and strategists say the common thread in the races in New York, New Jersey and Virginia was a disciplined focus on cutting costs, despite the ideological differences between the candidates.

Mamdani ran a left-wing, populist campaign focused on rent freezes, free buses, and universal child care, which were funded by new taxes on the wealthy.

Sherrill worked to cut utility costs while Spanberger emphasized rising costs in Virginia where government cuts passed by the Trump administration have upended the lives of many federal employees in the state.

“Voters want elected officials to spend all their time and energy trying to come up with policy solutions to the affordability crisis,” said Simon Bazelon, author of a 2024 post-mortem on why Democrats lost, released last week.

The expansive 58-page report, backed by the political action committee WelcomePac, which backs center-left candidates, provides a scathing analysis of the party’s leftward shift on economic and cultural issues since the days of Barack Obama’s presidency.

After polling more than 500,000 voters, Bazelon said the prevailing theme is that Democrats focus too much on democracy, abortion, identity and cultural issues rather than the cost of living, border security and public safety.

Bazelon said the Biden administration was slow to recognize inflation, telling voters the economy was better than they thought despite daily difficulties. The “pedo economy” marches declined steadily. The talking points surrounding the economic data rang hollow. Prices went up, and people took notice.

“Stop trying to tell them that what they believe is wrong,” Bazelon added, “and recognize instead that in a democracy, if we don’t take public opinion seriously, we will lose to people who don’t take democracy seriously.”

In the wake of Tuesday’s Democratic sweep, Republicans – and even Trump – appeared to admit they were falling behind in the battle over economic messaging. Trump summoned Republican senators to the White House early Wednesday morning to discuss ending the impasse over the government shutdown, now the longest in US history.

“The president is very interested in what’s happening, and he recognizes, like everyone else, that it takes time to achieve an economic turnaround, but all the fundamentals are there, and I think you’ll see him very focused on prices and the cost of living,” James Blair, Trump’s former deputy White House chief of staff for 2024, told Politico on Wednesday.

Like his predecessors, Trump faces severe political headwinds in next year’s midterm elections, which typically serve as a referendum on the ruling party. Although Trump won the election in part because he promised to lower prices, inflation continues to confound the White House.

Democrats say Trump’s economy will be a major focus during the 2026 midterm elections, when the party hopes to take back at least one chamber of Congress. The Republican-led Congress has helped Trump advance his policy agenda and has largely ignored his expansion of executive power, which includes circumventing Congress’s fiscal authority to cut federal programs.

Trump’s global tariffs, which fell largely on American importers, contributed to inflation, according to experts. Meanwhile, health care premiums are rising as millions of Americans are cut off from food stamps during the government shutdown.

“It’s not one economic hit, it’s a snowball of economic hits that people are feeling all at once,” said Libby Schneider, deputy executive director of the Democratic National Committee.

“It’s a really important lesson that we’ve learned after 2024, and other candidates have learned as well, which is to really localize the economy, and unfortunately, Trump and the Republicans have given us countless opportunities to do that.”

But the localization of the economy has its limits. Although it is a big tent party, embracing both left and center models will not necessarily work in 2028, when Democrats must choose a standard bearer and a platform that forces them to choose one ideological path over another.

That path will be determined by who passes next year’s primaries and looking ahead to 2028, Republican strategist Matt Gorman said.

He pointed out that the party’s money and energy were focused on the left, and Republicans hoped that the candidate running in the general elections would come from this wing. He urged his party to respond by making affordability its message, and by courting voters whom Trump has been able to reach, even without him on the ballot.

That means going beyond the general conversation about affordability and supporting a bold economic message at the national level with details about addressing inequality, said left-wing Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, who campaigned alongside candidates in New Jersey, Virginia and New York.

“Emotions won’t be enough,” he said, adding that Democrats must set cornerstones around Medicare for All, a tax on billionaires and universal child care. “Local candidates can adopt what they see fit for their communities.”

Republicans have already exploited Mamdani’s victory to try to create an image of the Democratic Party as having been taken over by Soviet-style communism. Following the election, Trump said in a speech at the American Business Forum in Florida on Wednesday that the difference between the two parties is the choice between “communism and common sense.”

“We’re going to have a fight within our party about how to prosecute the case against Trump and how to take on right-wing populists,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist Third Way think tank. “The battle will come down, mostly but not entirely, to do you fight right-wing populism with left-wing populism?”

He credits Democrats with taking a more disciplined course in taking on Trump, pointing to the shutdown fight during which they held firm in focusing on health care and rejecting pressure from climate change groups to tie more demands to the fight.

“They are starting to learn how to fight Trump,” Bennett said.

However, Bennett and others in the party say there is a lot to learn from left-wing figures like Mamdani, a skilled activist who focused on the lives of his constituents.

The 34-year-old mayor-elect, along with Spanberger, 46, and Sherrill, 53, represent a younger body of Democrats at a time when generational division has upended the party. Although Joe Biden’s age has been a major point of contention in the 2024 campaign, four House Democrats have also died in office over the past year.

After Trump’s victory last year, 39-year-old Saikat Chakrabarti heard his state’s representative, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, say on a New York Times podcast shortly after the election that there was no need for change.

“I thought that was unacceptable,” Chakrabarti, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff, said of her decision to challenge Pelosi in San Francisco, though she has since announced her retirement.

“Part of my motivation for running is to try to recruit people to run across the country to create a Democratic Party that actually represents the working class, stands strong against corruption and big money in politics and has a real vision for how to build an economy that will restore the American dream.”

Many Democrats welcome the idea of ​​fielding new candidates, but they say it is not the only solution to winning back voters. The majority of Democrats interviewed for this article agreed that regaining voters’ trust after a tumultuous 2024 campaign was the first step to winning at the national level.

But what is less clear is whether the party needs to show more remorse about how it reached this low point.

The Democratic National Committee’s analysis of the disastrous election reportedly does not address the question of whether Biden should have listened to public concern about his health and withdrawn much earlier.

“I think people don’t trust us,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits new Democrats to run for office. “They don’t trust that we will deliver on our promises.”

The group launched a $50 million plan to rebuild confidence in Democrats in parts of the country where they have lost popularity with voters.

“The long-term task is to try to repair the party brand by giving it a new face.”

The big question is whether this face is looking to the left or to the left of center.