The dust is settling, and the wave looks no smaller.
For the past seventy-two years, both parties have largely been able to rely on one bright spot in midterms: picking up a governorship. Since 1954, all but one midterm cycle — 17 of 18 — have seen both parties flip at least one governorship. Democrats’ 2006 sweep remained the sole exception — until Tuesday.
Democrats appear to have flipped six governorships and held all 18 of their own, exceeding even the wildest hopes of party officials a few months ago. The results are a huge victory for the Democratic Governors Association, which came into the cycle with the once-ambitious task of winning an overall majority. And they epitomize the promising, though potentially challenging, position Democrats now find themselves in as America’s newly dominant political party.
“From the DGA perspective, we did not get here overnight,” said Sam Newton, communications director for the group. “It took a lot of hard work and focus on these races for governor and state-level races, which often have less attention, less money, and worked really hard every single year to flip states, protect the tough ones, and make gains.”
It’s been a long road for the group. After suffering repeated defeats during the Obama midterm cycles, Democratic governors hit rock bottom in early 2017, when newly elected West Virginia governor (and now senator) Jim Justice switched parties. That created a split of 34 Republicans, 15 Democrats, and one Independent, a wider gap than any seen in nearly 100 years.
Nearly a decade later, the landscape is radically different: three out of every four Americans will live under a Democratic governor next year.
It’s a feather in the cap of the group’s leadership, including its chairman, likely 2028 presidential candidate Andy Beshear. Until Tuesday night, there was a real question as to what the legacy of Beshear’s time atop the group would be. That includes the grumbling in recent weeks about its spending choices in states like Florida and Texas, the latter of which some predicted would be a major campaign problem for Beshear among Latino voters. On the other side of Gina Hinojosa’s seven-point victory, that idea seems laughable. Indeed, I asked one Democratic operative about the issue still having traction next year and got a simple response back: “Lol.”
Expect some policy implications of the victories to be felt quickly. Already, D.C. officials are lobbying incoming Democratic governors to withdraw their state’s National Guard troops from Washington, D.C. If they did, it would reduce the number of troops sent in from outside D.C. by nearly a third.
Politically, we are now in an era of Democratic dominance on basically every measure. In one night, the party won a wide majority of governorships, state trifectas, senators, House members, and House delegations (the last of which is an arcane but relevant measure for Democrats’ comeback in the states). It’s a position so unfamiliar that many don’t quite seem to be appreciating the new political reality.
As I mentioned on Tuesday, this new reality opens up all sorts of questions for Democrats about what it means to be America’s new political authority — questions that are especially relevant for the crop of new governors. During a call with a number of progressive groups this week, I asked how Democrats should navigate the issue. Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the Chief Strategy Officer at the liberal group Way to Win, told me the victors should focus on “concrete simple things that can make a difference in people’s lives right away.”
“The states and localities are going to be the place where people can actually feel the real material difference in their lives,” she said, noting the likely deadlock in D.C. “It has to actually be something that people can wrap their arms around.”
Some on the left caution against going too small.
“There has not been an election in which Democrats have gotten as clear a mandate as this one,” said Ravi Mangla, the press secretary for the Working Families Party. He pointed to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's popularity. “We are seeing models around the country of what effective governance looks like and how to leverage trifectas and Democratic majorities to win policies that people actually feel in their pockets.”
There may well be tension on this front in the months and years ahead, particularly in D.C. But the states could prove to be a different story. The long drought Democrats found themselves in before Tuesday — decades in some states — may, ironically, prove to be an asset. The years in the wilderness left them with so much low-hanging fruit, from healthcare to education to abortion policy, that, at least for the time being, there may not be much division about where to go. If so, a party adjusting to dominance may find something equally unfamiliar: unity.
That’s all for this wild week. We’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming next week.
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