Powered by Voters of Color, Youth, a Blue Wave Sweeps 2025 Elections

After slightly more than 10 months in office, President Donald Trump did Democrats the favor they couldn’t seem to do for themselves

  On Nov. 4, 2025, Black voters broke the Mississippi GOP’s supermajority. image credit: Pexels.com/ Mikhail Nilov:

The president wasn’t even on the ticket in the 2025 off-year elections this week, but his face was unquestionably on voters’ minds as they went to the polls in several blue and swingy states and removed every Republican they could from the U.S. political equation.

 

Only a handful of states were holding elections, but the weight of victories are too numerous to easily count in one story. First off the bat, Virginia Democrats flipped both the governor’s and the lieutenant governor’s seat from red to blue, likely driven by massive unemployment among Virginia federal workers who were laid off by DOGE and Elon Musk and his young cohort’s efforts at the start of Trump’s term. Many federal workers in Washington, D.C., commute to homes in Virginia, and Virginia’s unemployment spiked to pandemic levels after the president started swinging his chainsaw. According to state-level data, the year-over-year unemployment rate was up 38% in Arlington, 35% in Alexandria and 28% in Fairfax.  

On top of flipping the state’s top two statewide elected offices, Democrats added roughly 13 new seats in the Virginia House. 

New Jersey Democrats managed to retain their governor’s seat and to hold the legislature in a state that saw Republican Gov. Chris Christie hold sway for ages. This created trifectas in both New Jersey and in Virginia.  

Over in Pennsylvania, Democrats effectively won the state Supreme Court, in addition to Dems flipping the office of Erie County Executive in what local papers called a “historic” victory based on razor-thin victories of elections past. This one was not razor thin at all, and Pennsylvania Dems also tossed every Republican from Bucks school board and several school boards in many suburban districts, which often favor Republicans. 

The Pain Just Kept Coming  And then there’s the race for New York Mayor as Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani (and son of “Mississippi Masala” director Mira Nair) beat out his rivals and sent a million Republicans scratching their heads.  

New York City's CEOs and other billionaire business leaders spent more than $40 million trying to stop Mamdani from winning the mayor’s office, but a surge in young voters and older anti-Trump voters stormed to the polls and fired Mamdani into the mayor’s office as if launched from a cannon. 

Now convicted, but Trump-pardoned, former Republican U.S. Rep. George Santos is threatening to leave New York, which critics are claiming already counts as Mamdani “making the city a better place.” 

In another Democratic victory, a vote restricting measure involving tight ID requirements dropped and died in neighboring Maine, possibly because it had Republicans backing it. And down in swingy Georgia, Democrats managed to win two statewide offices they haven’t held in years. And, yes, they gleefully tossed two Republican incumbents out of their seats in the process.  

And here in Mississippi, Black voters responded to two newly court-ordered “un-gerrymandered” legislative seats by flipping some offices there and breaking the Mississippi GOP’s supermajority. 

On top of all these victories — and many more — the half-brother of Vice President JD Vance lost his election for Cincinnati mayor, despite JD doing all he could to endorse him. Democrat Aftab Pureval won reelection with more than 78% of the vote, while Vance’s relative Cory Bowman nabbed only 22%, according to unofficial results from the Hamilton County Board of Elections. 

What do all these victories mean for Trump and the Republican Party? For start, critics are saying this was about as “repudiation” and repudiation gets. Politicos suggest voters are unhappy with rising grocery purchase prices that Trump promised time and again he would bring down if he were elected president. 

What Happened 

Pres. Trump rode in to the White House promising to reduce energy prices alone by 50% and to “end inflation and make America affordable again.” 

That’s not what we’re seeing, though, and polling reflects that, with Americans increasingly dissatisfied with Trump-era supermarket costs and 75% reporting “soaring prices,” even while Trump claimed inflation to be officially “over” in October. 

A big data point on Election Night that has many Republicans cringing in fear is what seems to be a renewed hatred of Trump by Black and brown voters. Trump’s support among African Americans was already low, but it thoroughly collapsed by August with Trump’s net approval dropping to -64. 

But the Latino vote, which helped run Trump into office last November, has similarly collapsed. One analyst noted his town of Union City, NJ, is 81.6 percent Latino and swung toward Trump for the last two consecutive elections. Trump’s vote share in 2016 was 19%. It jumped to 28% in 2020 and then again to 41% in the last election in 2024.  

You read earlier how New Jersey swung heavily for Democrats this week, handing Democrats the governor’s office. That anti-Republican stance now extends to Union City Latinos as well, with only 15.1% of Latinos voting for Republican Jack Ciattarelli for governor. That’s a sharp drop from Trump’s 41% approval from Latinos just a handful of months ago. 

Union City is in Hudson County, which swung +22 toward Democrats, arguably the biggest shift in the entire state, with Democrat Mikie Sherrill winning Hudson County by +50. 

Worse yet, brown people’s rejection of Trump will only get worse because Trump’s deportation reign of terror that has so angered them is already bought and paid for with the budget bill Trump was so quick to push through the House and Senate this past summer. He’s already invested untold millions into the Department of Homeland Security to pay for those $50,000 sign up bonuses for ICE agents, so the ICE-based horror train has already left the station and it’s going to be chugging along, filling the news and social media with footage of thugs grabbing young mothers and zip-tying Black and brown kids for years to come. 

In the next few months, you can expect to see a round of Republican retirements as some members realize their swingy district is no longer swingy and will likely go blue next time.  

Recent data indicates more than 300,000 Black women were drummed out of the U.S. labor force since Trump hit the scene in January 2025. For Black women it might be a nice change of pace to see Republicans be the ones to lose their jobs this time.