WASHINGTON (AP) — After voters swung toward Republican Donald Trump during last fall’s presidential election, states like Virginia and New Jersey swung back towards Democratic candidates at nearly the same velocity as 2024’s shift, an Associated Press analysis of election data from this week found.
From populous suburbs to big cities to military-heavy counties, this year’s electorate moved decisively towards the Democratic Party. Some of these areas
had the largest shifts towards Trump last year, particularly in New York and New Jersey, but on Tuesday, the returns more closely resembled 2020 margins.
This came alongside relatively high turnout, at least compared to recent off-year elections, suggesting that one pattern of the last decade in American politics — Republicans doing well when Trump is on the ballot, and Democrats doing better when he is not — continues to hold.
The AP’s analysis is based off county- and precinct-level data. In all cases, 2025 margins are as of 10:45 a.m. on Nov. 7. Additional votes will be counted as election officials tabulate late-arriving mail and provisional ballots. Here are some of the findings.
Virginia and New Jersey, the two states that elect governors in the year following a presidential election, both have a tradition of moving against the party in the White House.
Starting in 1976, every time a party has won back control of the presidency, Virginia voters have chosen a governor from the opposing party the following year. And in New Jersey, voters elected a governor from the opposite party of the sitting president in every election from 1989 to 2017.
Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill continued this trend with double-digit victories.
Spanberger’s victory was especially notable for its scale. In the last 12 Virginia gubernatorial elections, the average margin of victory was 8.6 percentage points.
Spanberger’s 14.4-point win — coming a year after Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris won the state by just 5.8 percentage points — was bolstered by big margins in Northern Virginia, home to Washington, D.C., suburbs heavily affected by federal government cuts and the ongoing government shutdown. It also greatly exceeded former President Joe Biden’s 10.1-point victory in 2020.
These shifts helped Spanberger win 15 counties and independent cities that her predecessor, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, had won four years earlier. Six of those jurisdictions — Spotsylvania, Lynchburg, Nelson, Waynesboro, Prince Edward and Surry — also supported Trump in 2024.
Spanberger also benefited from a spending advantage of around $27 million and Trump’s reluctance to endorse her Republican opponent.
In succeeding term-limited Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, Sherrill not only restarted New Jersey’s history of voting for the party not in power but also broke a 60-year streak. No party has held the New Jersey governorship for more than three consecutive terms since the 1960s, when a two-term Democratic governor succeeded another two-term Democratic governor.
Recent voting patterns in New Jersey suggested the governor’s race could have been much tighter. And in addition to receiving Trump’s endorsement, Republican Jack Ciattarelli kept pace with Sherrill in terms of spending.
He also got close the election prior. Ciattarelli came within 3 points of ousting Murphy in 2021. And between Ciattarelli’s 2021 and 2025 campaigns, Trump made massive inroads in New Jersey: He flipped five counties that Biden won in 2020 and cut the Republican margin in the state down to just 5.9 percentage points.
Sherrill’s 13.5-point win indicated a return to pre-2024 levels. While she fell short of Biden’s 15.9-point win, she returned all five of the counties Trump flipped to the Democratic column. She also improved on Harris’ margin in Bergen County, the state’s largest, by more than 8 points.
Some of Tuesday’s elections were notable outliers in terms of the number of people they brought to the polls, while others were more in line with past races.
In New York City, state assemblymember Zohran Mamdani juiced turnout in his successful primary campaign and built on that in the general election. More than two million New Yorkers voted for mayor this year, a level of voter enthusiasm the city hasn’t seen in a mayoral election since 1969, when John Lindsay won a second term.
The governor races were more of a mixed bag. New Jersey had the highest turnout rate in a governor election since 2009, when Republican Chris Christie beat incumbent Democrat Gov. Jon Corzine. As of Friday morning, this year’s turnout was just under 50%.
Virginia’s turnout rate was just shy of 2021 levels as of Friday morning. It is not yet clear if turnout in 2025 will meet or exceed 2021 as ballots continue to be counted.
Before the general election, Mamdani drew skepticism from political pundits for perceived weakness with some voters of color in New York City. While he did well in June’s primary among neighborhoods with large Asian and Muslim populations, he generally fell short of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
The general election was a different story. Whether it was because of outreach, the benefit of running on the Democratic ballot line, or his mega-viral campaign videos, Mamdani won nearly every single majority Black and majority Hispanic neighborhood.
In general, Mamdani did well in areas and among demographics that moved toward Trump over the last two presidential elections.
Forty-seven New York City neighborhoods shifted at least 25 points towards Trump in 2024. Mamdani won 37 of them.
And a year after Trump eroded Democrats’ advantage among young voters nationally, Mamdani won about three-quarters of voters under the age of 30, according to the AP Voter Poll.
There was only one race on the ballot in California, but it had major implications for control of the U.S. House in next year’s midterm elections. In passing Proposition 50, which temporarily substitutes a Democratic-drawn congressional map for the map created by an independent redistricting commission, California voters could flip as many as five Republican-held U.S. House seats next year.
California became the first state to adopt a new map that would add Democratic seats. Four other states — Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio — have also enacted new maps since Trump began encouraging states to redistrict over the summer. Those four states all changed their district lines to create winnable Republican seats.
Two groups that have been particularly affected by the ongoing government shutdown are military families and federal workers. Many in these groups have been furloughed or are working without pay as the shutdown stretches into a sixth week.
Democrats sought to capitalize on this in both gubernatorial campaigns.
In Virginia, home to one of the largest concentrations of federal workers as well as major military bases, federal workers in particular supported Spanberger.
Households with a current or former member of the military were evenly split between the two candidates in Virginia and favored Ciattarelli in New Jersey.
