The biggest lesson of this month’s sweeping Democratic election victories is that President Donald Trump is continuing to cast an outsize shadow over every other election during his presidential term.
The biggest lesson of this month’ssweeping Democratic election victoriesis that President Donald Trump is continuing to cast an outsize shadow over every other election during his presidential term.
Over the past several decades, the general trend has been that attitudes toward presidents from both parties have exerted growing influence over other elections. But even against that broader trend, Trump stands out.
In this month’s elections, as in 2018 and 2020, voters who disapproved of Trump’s job performance voted for the other party’s candidates at an even higher rate than for any other recent president. The power and persistence of that pattern — in both the midterm and presidential year elections during Trump’s first term — suggests that the single most important variable in most midterm contests next year will be whether more voters in that race approve or disapprove of his record in the White House.
“I think he’s at the center of the stage and the spotlight,” said Sean Clegg, a senior adviser to California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “Trump is the story.”
Even many Republicans agree. “Donald Trump has so thoroughly dominated American politics for the last decade, and he has been so demanding of complete loyalty from anyone running as a Republican, that views of the Republican Party and Republican candidates are synonymous with views about Donald Trump,” said veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres.
That has benefited Republicans in red stateswhere he’s helped the GOP consolidate almost unprecedented control. But the results in Virginia and New Jersey offered a pointed reminder that Trump’s indelible stamp on the GOP may once again become a burden next year on more politically contested terrain.
The correlation between attitudes toward the president and the outcomes of other elections has grown much more powerful over roughly the past half century. Through the 1980s and 1990s, it was fairly common for voters to separate their views of the president from how they voted in House, Senate and gubernatorial elections.
Exit poll results from that era quantified those divided loyalties. In the 1978 midterm election, for instance, Republicans in races for the House of Representatives won only 60% of voters who disapproved of Jimmy Carter’s performance as president — meaning 37% of voters unhappy with Carter still voted for other Democrats.
Over the next several decades, the share of voters who disapproved of the president and voted for House candidates from the other party rose to about 70% in most elections during the 1980s, and again to a little over 80% from Bill Clinton in the 1990s to Barack Obama after 2008.
During this long transition, a similar shift took place among voters who approved of the president. From the 1970s through the 1990s, House candidates still won competitive shares (around 25% to 40%) of voters who approved of a president from the other party. But that number plummeted after 2000: Under George W. Bush and Obama, only 12 to 15% of voters who approved of the president supported House candidates of the other party.
Those parallel changes created a political environment in which only the rarest candidate could survive despite partisan ties to a locally unpopular president, or succeed against a rival from a well-liked president’s party. “You can surf somewhat above or below the tide” of attitudes about the president, said GOP consultant Matt Gorman, “but the differential is a lot smaller than it was 20 years ago.”
As with many things, Trump intensified these trends. Widespread disapproval of his performance during his first two years powered the blue wave that swept Democrats to control of the House in 2018: 90% of voters who disapproved of Trump supported Democratic House candidates that year, the exit polls found.
Though Senate candidates have much more of an independent identity for voters than House members, the relationship was just as powerful in races for the upper chamber under Trump. Across the 2018 and 2020 elections combined, every Republican Senate candidate lost at least 89% of voters who disapproved of Trump, with only one exception — Susan Collins of Maine was theonlyRepublican Senate candidate to hold their Democratic opponent to less than 89% support among voters who disapproved of Trump, or to carry more than 8% of those disapprovers, according to the exit polls in states and races where such polls were conducted. (Collins won fully 23% of voters who said they disapproved of Trump, en route to her surprisingly easy 2020 reelection on the same day he lost her state decisively.)
Even in governors’ races — which were long thought to be more insulated from national currents than Congressional contests — Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin, in his 2018 defeat, was the only GOP candidate during Trump’s term who carried even 10% of voters who disapproved of the president, according to exit polls.
The strength of these trends made the Trump shadow almost impossible to escape for other Republicans during his presidency. In states where his approval rating fell below 50%, Republicans lost Senate races they once thought they could win in Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania in 2018 and Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota and Michigan in 2020, as well as the Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin governor races in 2018. During Trump’s presidency, Collins was the only GOP Senate candidate who won election in a state where exit polls recorded that a majority of voters disapproved of his performance.
The flip side was that Trump was a huge asset for GOP candidates in most states where a majority of voters approved of his performance. Even in the brutal national climate of 2018, Republicans ousted four Democratic Senators in states where Trump’s approval rating topped 50% — Florida, Indiana, North Dakota and Missouri. (Veteran Democratic incumbents survived that year in West Virginia, Montana and Ohio, where Trump also enjoyed majority approval, but Republicans captured all those seats in 2024.)
In 2020, Democrats poured unprecedented sums into Senate challenges in such Republican-leaning states as Montana, South Carolina, Kentucky, Texas and Iowa. But Trump’s strong support in those states provided a seawall; all of those Democratic challengers lost and only one of them reached even double-digit support among voters who approved of Trump’s performance, the exit polls found.
Even in an era when assessments of the president have increasingly colored other races, Trump’s impact has been unusually pronounced. In the 2014 midterm under Obama, onlyoneRepublican Senate candidate won more than 89% of the voters who disapproved of the president’s performance — the minimum level thatvirtually everyDemocratic Senate candidate carried among voters who disapproved of Trump while he was in the White House; in 2022, no Republican Senate candidate won more than 88% of people who disapproved of President Joe Biden.
Even more dramatically, Democrats in 2024 won Senate races in Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin — although a solid majority of voters in each state disapproved of Biden’s performance — because they carried 15% to 19% of those disapprovers. That was far more than any GOP Senate candidate except Collins carried among voters who disapproved of Trump in 2018 or 2020.
Some of that difference may be explained by a technical factor: Self-identified Democrats made up an unusually large share of Biden disapprovers, and they logically might be expected to vote for other Democratic candidates in greater numbers. The correlation is so high for Trump also because such a high percentage of voters who disapprove of him do so strongly — and those strong disapprovers have always voted against candidates from the president’s party in much larger numbers than those who disapprove only “somewhat.”
“It’s not just that Trump is unpopular, but the intensity of the opposition is very strong,” said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz.
Whatever the causes, the results of this month’s elections suggested that Trump’s impact on other contests remains uniquely intense.Significant majorities of votersin each of the major contests said they disapproved of his performance as president and overwhelming majorities of those disapprovers backed the Democrats: 93% of voters who disapproved of Trump voted for Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, and 92% of them supported Democrat Abigail Spanberger in Virginia,according to the Voter Pollconducted by SRSS for a consortium of media organizations including CNN.
Maybe most telling, 89% of voters — there’s that number again — who disapproved of Trump supported Jay Jones, the Democratic Attorney General candidate in Virginia who had been battered bya scandal over text messagesin which he had mused about shooting political rivals. The Republican candidates drew a comparable level of support among the much smaller share of voters who approved of Trump.
What made those results especially striking is that they came even as the exit polls showed that about half of voters in New Jersey and Virginia expressed an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. All year, many analysts and strategists had questioned whether the doubts about Democrats evident in polls might offset the growing disenchantment with Trump. This month’s election provided an unequivocal answer:As in previous off-year elections, views of the president in the White House shaped the vote far more than assessments of the party out of it.
“It’s pretty clear that the vote was largely a referendum on Trump and his policies,” said Abramowitz, “and the verdict was overwhelmingly negative.”
The unusually high rate of voters who disapprove of Trump and oppose other Republicans presents GOP candidates with a crucial choice.
They can try to distance themselves in some ways from Trump in the hope of shaving their deficits among the voters opposed to the president. Or they can try to change the electorate by unreservedly embracing Trump in the hope of turning out more of the irregular voters who have flocked to the polls when he’s on the ballot.
Jack Ciattarelli and Winsome Earle-Sears, the Republican gubernatorial nominees this year in New Jersey and Virginia, emphatically chose the second path.Each refused to criticize Trump, even when he took actions that unquestionably hurt their states (such as the DOGE cuts to the federal workforcein Virginiaor revoking federal funds for amajor transit tunnelconnecting New Jersey with New York). Each behaved as if they worried less about losing than about alienating Trump and erasing their future viability in the GOP ecosystem.
In the end, both candidates faced all the electoral costs of associating with Trump without any of the benefits. By all indications, many of the low propensity voters who turned out for Trump stayed home for them. (Among other measures: The share of 2025 voters who said they supported Trump in the 2024 race dipped well below his actual vote in both states,according to the Voter Poll.)
Simultaneously, hostility to Trump’s agenda swelled turnout among Democratic-leaning voters “who generally have not been voting in off year elections,” notes Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, who advised a super PAC supporting Sherrill. Finally, both Ciattarelli and Earle-Sears lost badly among independents: In each state, nearly 9 in 10 independents who disapproved of Trump’s job performance voted Democratic, according to results provided by the CNN polling unit.
For their part, Spanberger and Sherrill tweaked the most common messaging from Democrats about Trump during his first term. Rather than just condemn Trump in broad terms, they concentrated on administration policies that they said would hurt their states (such as the Medicaid cuts in last summer’s GOP-backed reconciliation bill) and charged that their opponents would prioritize placating Trump over defending local interests.
That’s likely to be a ubiquitous argument from Democrats next year. When Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, one of Trump’s top Congressional allies,announced her bid for the New York governorship earlier this month, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul immediately responded witha video of her lavishly praising the president: “She’ll always put Donald Trump ahead of you,” the narrator declares.
Greenberg said such arguments proved extremely effective this year. “People are looking for some protection from this guy,” she said. “The idea that you are going to have people protect you from the worst excesses — like the way (Illinois Gov.) J.B. Pritzker is standing up to ICE in Chicago — is powerful.”
Ciattarelli and Earle-Sears tried to counter the Democratic criticism by insisting their state would be better served by a governor whose relationship with Trump was cooperative, not confrontational. But that argument flopped. “The test we had on that in New Jersey and elsewhere is dispositive: which is that nobody believes that when it comes to a choice between doing what Trump wants and doing what’s best for your state that Republicans will prioritize the state over Trump,” said longtime Democratic pollster Geoff Garin.
Ayres, the GOP pollster, said the nearly identical blowout losses in New Jersey and Virginia signaled that unwaveringly embracing Trump is a dangerous strategy for Republicans outside of reliably red terrain. “I don’t know how you expect to win running as a clone of a guy who lost your state three times,” Ayres said.
But even after this month’s losses, hardly any Republican elected officials have shown much interest in separating from Trump. GOP strategist Jesse Hunt spoke for many in the party when he said that, for better or worse, running with Trump is the only plausible option for almost all Republicans.
With Trump in the White House, Hunt said, Republicans must expect that Democratic voters will “crawl over glass” to vote against him. And he said there is now a “natural dissatisfaction” with incumbents that virtually ensures most independents will also view Trump negatively. In competitive states, Hunt said, the only way to survive those crosswinds is for Republicans to inspire the “low-propensity, Trump-specific voters who showed up in 2016, 2020, and 2024 for him, but have failed to participate in midterm elections.” And that requires conciliating Trump.
No matter what approach Republican candidates take to Trump, Garin said this month’s results show that Democrats can seriously compete next year in any state or district where discontent with the president is high. That includes, Garin said, red-trending places such as Iowa and Ohio where the Democratic image has nosedived in recent years.
“The election we had a few weeks ago, and the elections we will have in 2026, will largely be about the need to place a check (on Trump) both in terms of his policies and his efforts to amass unaccountable power,” Garin said. “It’s much less of an election about Democrats.”
Clegg similarly argued that while Democrats will need “a compelling (new) economic” agenda in 2028, for 2026 the party must work to keep the focus on Trump. In particular, he believes Democrats must link voters’ continuing frustration over affordability with concerns about Trump’s assault on bedrock democratic principles, by arguing the president is attempting to suppress dissent and manipulate elections to advance an agenda that favors the rich over average families. “There’s this false choice the pundit class offers up, that it’s either kitchen table issues or its democracy,” Clegg said. “And I think the actual answer is you need both messages and you need to connect them together.”
The one prediction that unites both parties is the belief that the outcomes in virtually all major races next year will track voters’ attitudes about Trump. The list of Republicans who win next year in places where Trump is unpopular, and Democrats who prevail in places where he is, is likely to be very short — if it has any entries at all.