Forget the midterms. The fight to bring Trumpism down runs through 2025’s elections.
Yasmine Taeb lives in the great expanse of suburban counties that spreads out to the south and west of Washington, DC, to form NoVA, the most populous region of Virginia. NoVA (short for “Northern Virginia”) is where counties and cities are named for the dukes and earls of colonial times—Prince William, Fairfax, Culpepper. It’s where the plantations of founding fathers and presidents are now tourist sites and where Civil War battlefields remind us of the bloody fight to address the original sin of the founders’ “American experiment.” But NoVA’s contemporary political reality is shaped less by its heritage than by the fact that it is home to one of the largest concentrations of federal government employees in the United States. And it’s these people that Taeb, a veteran progressive activist and the first Muslim woman elected to the Democratic National Committee, has her eye on when it comes to this November’s off-year elections. “Given the Trump effect, I think you’re going to see a very large turnout,” she says. “Trump and Musk eliminating agencies, making irresponsible decisions impacting thousands of workers in Northern Virginia—that’s going to have an impact. It’s palpable.”
In an era when even elections in other countries double as referendums on President Trump and his cultish followers in the Republican Party, “the Trump effect” is destined to have consequences this fall—all over the country, but especially in NoVA, where the chaos in neighboring Washington, DC, is a local crisis.
Along with New Jersey, Virginia occupies an unusual position on the American electoral schedule. Both states elect their governors and legislators in the first year after new presidents are chosen. Historically, that allowed the people of Virginia and New Jersey—along with the residents of many of the nation’s major cities and voters in smaller communities across the United States—to elect officials on their own timelines, which were at least somewhat independent of national political patterns. But in an era marked by the 24/7 intrigues of a never-ending national political calendar, voters in states with odd-year elections no longer have such an escape. In 2025, they will be asked to deliver a real-time assessment of the country’s direction. Never has that assessment seemed more freighted with consequence than now, when President Trump has packed his administration with extremists who are bent on dismantling basic services; sent shock waves through the economy with his trade wars; stomped on civil liberties; and generally upended governance in ways that threaten the very future of American democracy.
Trump’s approval ratings have tanked, and protests over his administration’s attacks on science, healthcare, immigrants, judges, and anyone else who gets in his way take place nearly every day. While the turn against Trump and Trumpism is glaringly evident, it is equally evident that this president is a master of self-deception. And while Trump has a history of denying election results, Republicans won’t be able to spin their way out of serious electoral setbacks if they come in 2025. In Virginia, where Republicans won every statewide race in 2021, control of the House of Delegates is up for grabs. If Democrats win there as part of a broader sweep of New Jersey and the rest of the country’s odd-year election map, it will send a devastating message to the administration. “There’s no doubt about the energy that you see out there,” says Ken Martin, the chair of the Democratic National Committee. “We saw similar energy [in the 2017 odd-year elections, which Democrats swept] after Trump was elected the first time. And that energy was translated into huge victories in 2018.” The elections of 2017 and 2018 produced successive blue waves that saw Democrats extend their grip on statehouses and take control of the US House, effectively checking and balancing Trump in the final two years of his first term. Now comes an even greater test—one that allows voters in places like NoVA, where Elon Musk’s wild assault on federal agencies, programs, unions, and workers has become a huge issue, to emerge as critical players on the national stage.
Virginia Democrats know what’s at stake. For the first time since 2013, they united behind a single gubernatorial candidate, former US representative Abigail Spanberger, before the state’s spring primary. And for the first time in decades, the party has fielded candidates in all 100 races for the state House of Delegates. One of the reasons for this is a concerted organizing effort by Dr. Fergie Reid Jr., a retired physician and the son of Dr. William Ferguson Reid, the pioneering civil rights activist who in 1967 unseated a segregationist to become Virginia’s first Black delegate since Reconstruction. The senior Reid turned 100 in March and urged Virginia Democrats to honor his longevity by filling ballot lines in every legislative contest. But it was more than nostalgia that helped them achieve a full slate. As Reid Jr. told the Virginia Mercury, “Virginia is the first opportunity for really any state in the United States to answer back to what’s going on in Washington right now. It’s going to send a big, loud message to the rest of the country and to the world that not everybody in America is with Trump.”
That cry of dissent is likely to resound most loudly from NoVA, where, Taeb says, voters are agitated. “A lot of people are determined to send that message, a powerful message about what Trump’s doing,” she says. “If they hear not just an anti-Trump message but a proactive progressive message, this is a huge opportunity for Democrats to come out in full force.” Even voters who are frustrated with the Democratic Party, Taeb says, can be mobilized if Democratic candidates offer them an opportunity to reject complacency and unapologetically challenge Trump’s lurch to the extreme right.
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Virginia pollsters and political analysts tend to agree, suggesting that surging Democratic enthusiasm—which has been spotted all over the country in recent months—is likely to boost Spanberger, who stepped down as a centrist member of the US House to mount the high-stakes gubernatorial bid. Spanberger has succeeded in uniting a party that has a long history of contentious primaries. Though she’s hardly a progressive populist in the tradition of the great Virginia rabble-rousers of the past—such as former lieutenant governor Henry Howell, who in the 1960s and ’70s built a multiracial working-class coalition around an anti-corporate promise to “keep the big boys honest”—Spanberger has sharply criticized the current administration’s assault on federal employment and its disregard for women’s rights and civil liberties. Progressives like Taeb are disheartened that, even as she has attracted the endorsements of major unions, Spanberger has not come out against the state’s 78-year-old “right to work” law. But they’re enthusiastic about her denunciation of “Republican lawmakers [who] are willfully threatening Virginians’ access to care by putting Medicaid funding in the crosshairs.” And about Spanberger’s determination to make abortion rights a central issue in a race with the anti-choice GOP nominee, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears. Noting that “more than 20 states have further restricted reproductive care” since the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, Spanberger tells voters, “Virginia is the last bastion of reproductive freedom in the South—and Virginians want it to stay that way.” With so much at stake, Spanberger told an April Democratic gathering in north-central Virginia’s Albemarle County, “the rest of the country, and in some ways the world, will pay attention to what it is that we do here in Virginia in 2025. We are a bellwether state, and I don’t want to just win. I want to crush it.”
“Crushing it” in Virginia means retaking the governorship and the posts of lieutenant governor and attorney general, as well as running up margins in legislative chambers that are now narrowly controlled by Democrats. In New Jersey, it means retaining the governorship that Democrat Phil Murphy has held for two terms (though he was only narrowly reelected in 2021), building up legislative majorities, and winning dozens of downballot races. Even as a crowd of credible Garden State contenders battled one another for the party’s gubernatorial nod, they all read from the same anti-Trump playbook—while debating concrete responses to education, healthcare, and transportation issues. For New Jersey Democrats, delivering a strong showing in 2025 is especially significant because, just last year, as President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign was stumbling, Trump and the Republicans made a play for the state, where his Bedminster country club serves as something of a northeastern headquarters for the MAGA movement.
New Jersey and Virginia are the most important electoral dominoes in 2025. If they fall to the Democrats, and if other contests this November follow suit, that could significantly boost Democratic recruitment, fundraising, and organizing prospects in the 2026 midterm races for control of Congress. “If there’s an unmistakable blue wave this year, it’s got the potential to change a lot of things going forward,” says Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI), a former cochair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a House Appropriations Committee member who has played an important role in recruiting and supporting 2026 Democratic House candidates. More immediately, Pocan and other progressives, such as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), are holding out hope that a critical group of embattled congressional Republicans could be spooked enough by the 2025 elections to break with Trump on key issues for the remainder of the 119th Congress.
Pocan believes the 2025 and 2026 election cycles offer Democrats an opportunity to break with the narrow “battleground state” thinking of party strategists who focus on a handful of tightly contested states and districts. The collapse in Trump’s approval ratings, and the numbers seen in “generic ballot” surveys that show Democrats with widening margins against Republicans in hypothetical House races, creates an opening for such a politics, the Wisconsinite says.
Martin, the DNC chair, is on board with the idea of broadening the party’s map in 2025—a year in which, he notes, 100,000 state and local races will be decided, many of them in regions that have experienced “years of neglect” by Democratic leaders who abandoned former DNC chair Howard Dean’s old “50-state strategy” and wrote off too much of the country as unwinnable. The goal, he says, is a juggernaut that begins with “marquee race” wins in Virginia and New Jersey and then goes wide and deep across America.
To do that, Martin says, Democrats will move resources into not only Virginia and New Jersey but also high-stakes mayoral races, from New York, Boston, and Detroit to Minneapolis, St. Paul, Seattle, and dozens of other major city and regional contests—many of them in red states—nationwide.
With the political media obsessively searching for every indicator of Trump’s strength or vulnerability, a Democratic sweep of these contests could produce precisely the sort of “Trump Rebuked” headlines that point to a shift in voting patterns—and that could scare at least some of Trump’s GOP enablers to question whether they want to go down with the ship in 2026. That’s the Democratic dream.
But Martin warns his fellow partisans to guard against the overconfidence bordering on hubris that led to so much disappointment in 2024. Trump is down politically right now, and “special government employee” Elon Musk has become a serious drag on GOP prospects. But the approval ratings for Democrats in DC are about as dire as Trump’s. Republicans also retain the power of the president’s bully pulpit, and they’ve got a right-wing media apparatus that is increasingly influential as the traditional media infrastructure collapses (particularly in states like New Jersey) and as the administration attacks PBS and NPR. They can also rely on massive fundraising boosts from corporate cronies and the considerable fortunes of Trump’s billionaire-class allies like Musk.
Even as polls and results from some of the first contests of 2025 provide encouragement, Martin says he wants Democrats to run as if they are behind. “You’ve had some prominent Democrats saying we should just sit back and do nothing, and we’ll win. That’s bullshit,” he says. “The reality is that if you don’t channel that energy the right way, you could lose just as easily. We’re focused on making sure we capture that energy.”
Capturing that energy is about more than just showing up, says Antoinette Miles, a veteran labor and political activist who now serves as director of the New Jersey Working Families Party. “Trump looms large over New Jersey, and so does the question of how the Democratic Party is going to push back against him in 2025 and 2026,” she says.
Like Taeb in Virginia, Miles argues that it is vital for Democrats to offer a real alternative not just to Trump but to the often unfocused political debate that has allowed Trumpism to make inroads in states that were once cemented into the party’s “Blue Wall.”
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When I traveled to New Jersey this spring to talk with Miles and watch the competition in the Democratic gubernatorial primary race—which was still unfinished as this issue went to press—the extent to which the top contenders had embraced an aggressively anti-Trump message was striking. US Representative Mikie Sherrill rolled out ads promising to “fight the Trump-Musk madness that’s wrecking our economy.” Teachers’ union head Sean Spiller asserted that “we need a governor who is tough enough to protect New Jerseyans from bullies like Donald Trump” and outlined a plan to prevent the administration’s efforts to gut the federal Department of Education from undermining education in the state. Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop offered tangible evidence of how vigorously he opposes Trump: Standing on a rooftop near a pair of glass skyscrapers, he announced, “See that building? I blocked the Trump family from getting tax breaks to build it.” Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a Working Families Party–backed progressive, was arrested and briefly detained in mid-May by federal agents when he came to examine conditions at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in the city. Baraka used his 2025 State of the City address to warn that Trump and Musk pose an “existential threat” and a “danger to us all, no matter what we look like.” And in his campaign messaging, Baraka promised to “make the wealthy pay their fair share.”
That sort of clarity about the need for a potent anti-Trump message that also incorporates pro-working-class policies pleases Miles, who told me, “For people who want to see what happens next in our country, New Jersey really is going to tell us a lot.” And as in Virginia, it won’t just be at the gubernatorial level.
The fights for control of Virginia’s House of Delegates, with its 100 contests, and New Jersey’s General Assembly, where 80 seats are up for grabs, may be key to the Democratic Party’s 2025 strategy, but the competition isn’t limited to those two states. Legislative special elections are being held in blue states like Washington, where nine seats will be filled in November, and in red states like Mississippi, where court-ordered redistricting has set up 10 elections in November.
Heather Williams, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, sees this bigger picture. “We have elections every Tuesday,” she explains. When Trump was celebrating his first 100 days in office in late April, the DLCC rained on his parade by noting that during that period, Democrats won five contests that secured the party’s control of state legislative chambers, flipped seats in Iowa and Pennsylvania districts that Trump had won by double digits, and dramatically outperformed their 2024 numbers in contests across the country.
The year’s most notable election so far came not in a legislative contest, however, but in the race for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Wisconsin Republicans had been confident that they could swing the race—and with it, political control of the court—in their favor. The state had just voted narrowly for Trump, and their candidate in the technically nonpartisan court race was the Trump-aligned former Wisconsin attorney general Brad Schimel, who had mounted two high-profile statewide campaigns and had regularly won local elections. In contrast, the progressive candidate, who was backed by the state Democratic Party and labor, environmental, and community groups, was Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford, a former lawyer for unions and Planned Parenthood who had never run for statewide office. The Republicans decided to make the Wisconsin contest a referendum on Trump’s tenure. Trump made a high-profile endorsement of Schimel, and Musk poured at least $25 million into the project. The billionaire even flew to Wisconsin on the eve of the April 1 election to give away $1 million checks.
But Musk’s meddling backfired spectacularly. Crawford won with 55 percent of the vote, in an election that saw high turnout and a swing toward the progressive contender in each of the state’s 72 counties. Part of what made that result possible was a dynamic that Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, says is emerging in states all over the country. “Republican mega-donors are on the march,” he acknowledges. “But the Democratic grassroots donors are on fire. Democrats who are running in the states are going to have the resources—and the popular support—to fight back.”
Going into what is likely to be the most expensive and most closely watched New Jersey gubernatorial election in history, Antoinette Miles takes encouragement from Wisconsin’s voters. “When you see Trump and his circle get involved, it can backfire, as you saw in Wisconsin,” she says. “Trump and Musk bet wrong in Wisconsin, and I think they’ll find that it doesn’t make sense for Republicans to bet on New Jersey.”
The same goes for Virginia and other states across the country, Taeb says. “This is a Trump election, absolutely. People are ready to fight back. And if Democrats give them something to fight for, they’re going to turn out in huge numbers.”
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