Party soul-searching, the Latino vote, and a South Jersey strategy: Takeaways from Tuesday's election

A Navy pilot in New Jersey. A democratic socialist in New York City. Three Pennsylvania jurists who never wanted to hit the campaign trail in the first place.

The Democrats who scored big wins in Tuesday's elections came from across the political spectrum and succeeded in disparate campaign environments.

The results were momentous for a party hungry for wins in President Donald Trump's second term. But they are also likely to revive longstanding debates on how the party should present itself to the American people going into the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential race.

Should Democrats embrace a bold vision and tack left? Are left-of-center candidates with bipartisan appeal still the way to win statewide races? Or could the party simply embrace the reality of being a big-tent party?

Here are five takeaways from Tuesday's elections, including the state of play for both parties' soul-searching exercises.

Democrats gained momentum, but received no clear signs about the future of the party

The energy is clearly there.

Turnout soared on Tuesday, despite being an off-year election, and Democrats won by surprisingly large margins up and down the ballot.

Even Montgomery County, where there were no competitive elections for county offices, saw its highest-ever off-year turnout at 50.7% of registered voters, and Democrats flipped every contested school board race.

At the top of the ticket, New Jersey's Mikie Sherrill and Virginia's Abigail Spanberger, both U.S. representatives with national security backgrounds, ran up the scores in their gubernatorial races while portraying themselves as pragmatists.

Zohran Mamdani, meanwhile, handily defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayor's race by promising radical change and progressive policy solutions.

So where does that leave Democrats as they try to find a recipe for success in next year's congressional races?

For Philadelphia's progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner, who won a third term Tuesday, the answer is clear.

"There's a new politics," Krasner said Wednesday. "It's pretty clear that the American people, Philadelphians, are tired of insiders who promise them things they don't do. They're tired of political dynasties."

Democratic strategist Brendan McPhillips, who has worked for progressive candidates as well as Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris' campaigns in Pennsylvania, said the party should embrace the ideological diversity of its constituencies.

"People have tried to ask this question of who represents the soul of the party, and I just think it's a bad question," he said. "The party is a huge tent, and last night proves you can run for Democratic office in New York City and New Jersey and Bucks County and Erie, Pa., and each of those races can look entirely different."

Democrats made gains with Latino voters

One of the more worrying signs for Democrats in the Trump era has been the president's increasing popularity among Latino voters.

They flipped that narrative Tuesday.

After 10 months of aggressive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids under Trump that are seen by many in the Latino community as indiscriminate and cruel, Democrats appear to have undone some of Trump's gains in what has long been a blue constituency.

In New Jersey, the two counties where Sherrill made the biggest gains compared with Harris in the 2024 presidential election were Passaic and Hudson, both of which are more than 40% Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census.

Sherrill won Hudson by 50 percentage points, which represents a 22-point swing from Harris. And she won Passaic by 15 percentage points after Trump surprisingly carried the county with a 3-point margin in 2024.

In Philadelphia, Krasner won eight wards that the more conservative Patrick Dugan — Krasner's opponent in both the general election and the Democratic primary — had won in their first round in May.

All were in or near the Lower Northeast, and the biggest swing came in the heavily Latino 7th Ward, which includes parts of Fairhill and Kensington. Krasner's share of the vote there grew from 46% in the primary to 86% in the general.

It's really hard to unseat Pennsylvania judges

Only one Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice since 1968 has failed to win a retention election, in which voters face a yes-or-no decision on whether to give incumbents new 10-year terms, rather than a choice between candidates.

Tuesday's results will be discouraging for anyone hoping to increase that number soon.

Hoping to break liberals' 5-2 majority on the state's highest court, Republicans spent big in an attempt to oust three justices who were originally elected as Democrats. Democratic groups then poured in their own money to defend the incumbents.

In the end, Justices Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht all won by more than 25 percentage points.

Ciattarelli's South Jersey strategy failed

In his third attempt to become governor, Republican Jack Ciattarelli bet big on South Jersey, the more conservative but less populous part of the Garden State.

It didn't work.

In his 2021 campaign against Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, Ciattarelli carried Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Salem Counties with a combined 56.8% of the vote. Trump then went on to sweep all five counties last year.

But on Tuesday, Ciattarelli performed 8 percentage points worse in the region, giving Sherrill a narrow lead in South Jersey, where she won three of the five counties south of Camden.

Republicans now face their own soul-searching question: How to win without Trump?

In 2024, Trump's coattails helped Republicans win control of Congress and other elected offices across the country — including in two Pennsylvania swing districts.

With the president in his second and final term, how will the GOP win without him on the ballot?

For Jim Worthington, the Trump megadonor and owner of the Newtown Athletic Club in Bucks County, Tuesday's results show that the GOP needs to do more work on the ground if it wants to succeed without the man who has dominated Republican politics since 2015.

Elections, he said, are "not about the policies as much they're just turnout. Red team, blue team."

The blue team won Tuesday, he said, because the red team didn't do enough of the legwork needed to get its voters to cast mail ballots and to drive in-person turnout on Election Day. Worthington said the results left him concerned about Republican Treasurer Stacy Garrity's chances of unseating Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro next year.

"If we don't get a robust vote-by-mail, paid-for program, it's going to be very difficult, very difficult, if not impossible for Stacy Garrity to win," Worthington said. "During this whole 2025 year when we could have been building this toward 2026, we lost a year because we didn't do it."

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(Staff writer Anna Orso contributed to this article.)