By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) -Voters in New Jersey and Virginia will choose their next governors on Tuesday in a pair of races that will serve as an early gauge of the American electorate’s response to President Donald Trump’s norm-shattering nine months in office.
Meanwhile, in New York City’s mayoral race, Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist, faces 67-year-old former Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent. The campaign has laid bare the Democratic Party’s generational and ideological divides as it seeks to rehabilitate its damaged brand.
And in California, voters will decide whether to give Democratic lawmakers the power to redraw the state’s congressional map, expanding a national battle over redistricting that could determine which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives after next year’s midterm elections.
Polls close first in Virginia at 7 p.m. ET (0000 GMT), followed by New Jersey, New York and California throughout the evening.
Democrats in particular will be watching Tuesday’s results carefully, with the party locked out of power in Washington and struggling to find consensus on the best path out of the political wilderness.
Underscoring the stakes for Democrats, former President Barack Obama – still the party’s most popular figure – headlined 11th-hour rallies over the weekend in New Jersey and Virginia, exhorting voters to elect Democrats to counter what he branded the Republican Trump’s “lawlessness.”
“The state of the Democratic Party is poor,” said Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “They need as much encouragement as they can get.”
Voter enthusiasm appears high.
More than 3 million people voted early in Virginia, New York and New Jersey, in each case far exceeding the totals from four years ago. In New York City, there were 735,000 ballots cast, according to the city elections board, more than four times the number in 2021.
The New Jersey race has emerged as the most hotly contested campaign, with opinion polls showing Democrat Mikie Sherrill, a congresswoman and former Navy pilot, holding a narrow lead over her Republican challenger, former state lawmaker and small-business owner Jack Ciattarelli.
The campaign has shattered statewide spending records, with both national parties pouring millions of dollars into the race.
The evening’s other races appear less competitive. In Virginia, former Democratic U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger has a comfortable lead over Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, according to opinion polls.
Mamdani has also led by double digits over Cuomo, with Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, 71, a distant third in most opinion polls. California’s ballot measure, Proposition 50, which would install a new Democratic-backed congressional map that aims to flip five Republican seats in response to a similar move by Texas, is also widely expected to pass.
AFFORDABILITY, TRUMP WEIGH ON RACES
To be sure, while Tuesday’s results will offer some insight into the mood of American voters, the midterm elections are a year away, an eternity in the whipsawing Trump era.
“The contrast you hear in these elections is similar to what you may hear a year from now,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist. “Typically, the frame of these elections is one we can learn from, even if the outcomes aren’t automatically predictive.”
Then, too, the congressional races will unfold across all 50 states, in districts both Republican and Democratic.
“There’s nothing that’s going to happen in Virginia or New Jersey that’s going to tell us much about what will happen in a congressional district in Missouri or a Senate race in Maine,” said Douglas Heye, a Republican strategist.
For Democrats, Tuesday’s candidates offer a chance to assess differing playbooks.
Spanberger and Sherrill, both moderate Democrats with backgrounds in national security, have put Trump front-and-center in their campaigns, seeking to harness anger at the president’s no-holds-barred agenda. Trump has given each some recent grist during the ongoing government shutdown, freezing billions of dollars in funding for a badly needed rail tunnel between New Jersey and New York and threatening to fire federal workers, many of whom live in Virginia.
Mamdani, running an insurgent campaign, has proposed more ambitious left-wing policies, including freezing rents for nearly a million apartments, taxing the wealthy and making the city’s bus service free.
Late on Monday, Trump endorsed Cuomo, urging supporters to vote for the former governor and repeating his threat to cut federal funds to his native city if Mamdani wins.
Despite their ideological differences, all three nominees have relentlessly focused on the cost of living, an issue that has remained top of mind for voters after last year’s presidential election.
“Whether it’s in New York City, whether it’s in Virginia, whether it’s in New Jersey – frankly, throughout the country – Democratic candidates are focused on the economy, focused on affordability, focused on the issues that are really driving anxiety in this country right now,” Ken Martin, the Democratic National Committee chairman, said in an interview with Reuters.
For Republicans, Tuesday’s elections will test whether the voters who powered Trump’s victory in 2024 will still show up when he is not on the ballot himself.
In New Jersey, Ciattarelli has campaigned extensively in traditionally Democratic areas, seeking to replicate the inroads that Trump made with Black and Latino voters in 2024.
But both he and Earle-Sears, each running in Democratic-leaning states, have faced a difficult conundrum: criticizing Trump risks losing his supporters, but embracing him too closely could alienate moderate and independent voters who disapprove of his policies.
Trump remains unpopular — 57% of Americans disapprove of his job performance, a Reuters/Ipsos poll shows. But Democrats are not necessarily gaining support as a result: respondents were evenly split on whether they would favor Democrats or Republicans in 2026.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Additional reporting by Ashraf Fahim; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Howard Goller)
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