Virginia, New Jersey & New York

It’s election day in the United States (Tuesday there, of course): not for any national offices, being an odd numbered year, but in a wide range of places at state and local level. Results have been coming in for the last couple of hours; I’ll just focus on the three big ones, taking them in chronological order.

Virginia

The state of Virginia elects its governor every four years – a new one each time, since governors cannot serve consecutive terms. For almost fifty years, every such election but one has been won by the party opposed to the sitting president of the time (the exception was 2013, when Democrat Terry McAuliffe was elected despite Barack Obama being in the White House). Last time around, that gave a narrow victory to Republican Glenn Youngkin.

So this year, with an unpopular Republican president and with Virginia generally trending Democrat (Kamala Harris carried it last year by almost six points), you’d have bet on a big win for the Democrat nominee, former congresswoman Abigail Spanberger. And you’d have been right. With 87% of precincts reporting, Spanberger has won with 56.6% of the vote, as against 43.2% for her Republican opponent, current lieutenant-governor Winsome Earle-Sears. (I’m using Associated Press’s figures throughout.) She will become the first female governor in Virginia’s long history.

Spanberger’s running mate, state senator Ghazala Hashmi, has been equally untroubled in the race for lieutenant-governor, currently winning with 54.6%. The third statewide office, however, was closer; Democrat Jay Jones has prevailed, currently on 52.0%, having survived a scandal over the emergence last month of violent text messages that he sent in 2022.

New Jersey

Polls closed an hour later in New Jersey, at midday eastern Australian time. It was won by the Democrats last year by a similar margin to Virginia, but the trend was in the other direction; having once been a fairly safe Democrat state, it is now regarded as marginal. The last election for governor, in 2021, saw Democrat Phil Murphy elected for his second and final term with just 51.2% against Republican Jack Ciattarelli.

This year, with Ciattarelli running again, you might have expected another close race. The opinion polls gave a clear advantage to the Democrat nominee, congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, but they were rather closer than in Virginia. Not so on the votes, though: Sherrill has scored a big win, with 56.4% on 83% counted, compared to Ciattarelli’s 43.0%.

For the Democrats, this is the big result of the three; the Republicans had just about stopped trying in Virginia, and New York was all about the party’s internal woes. But after eight years of Democrat incumbency, this is a state where the Republicans really should have been able to get close. Although Democrat-controlled legislatures have been the norm, the Republicans have held the governorship about as often as not in recent decades, most recently with Chris Christie from 2010 to 2018. The fact that the Democrats have scored what can fairly be called a landslide is very bad news for Donald Trump.

New York

Just the city, not the state, but even so New York is only a little smaller than Virginia and New Jersey. And this year it’s probably the one that’s attracted the most interest, with Democrat nominee Zohran Mamdani, a self-styled “democratic socialist”, the strong favorite to succeed Democrat-turned-independent Eric Adams as mayor.

Mamdani is up against two opponents: former governor Andrew Cuomo, whom he beat in the Democrat primary but who is now running as an independent, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, who lost to Adams by almost forty points in 2021. Readers might recall that the primary featured preferential voting, and might expect that Sliwa and Cuomo (who has been endorsed by Trump) would be exchanging preferences.

But no, preferential voting, for reasons unknown, only applies in the primaries; this election is first-past-the-post. And on that basis Mamdani has won it in a canter, currently sitting on 50.3% (with 88% counted, despite only closing an hour ago; counting is much faster in a city than a state) to Cuomo’s 41.6% and Sliwa’s 7.2%. The much-heralded tightening in the race failed to materialise; the drop in Sliwa’s vote that the polls were picking up was real, but Cuomo was unable to capitalise on it.

I’m no socialist; I think Mamdani’s economic policies, if implemented, would be disastrous. (There’s some evidence that he will be flexible enough to learn from experience in that regard.) But anyone who thinks that economic policy is the main game in today’s America is living in cloud-cuckoo land. The priority is the preservation of democracy itself: everything else is just gravy.

And for that, the Democrats need as broad a coalition as possible. It needs to include people in the camp of former vice-president Dick Cheney, whose appalling record was mitigated a little by his endorsement of Harris last year, and it needs to include leftists like Mamdani. Most of all, it needs genuine public enthusiasm, which Mamdani’s campaign seems to have captured. Now he needs to repay some of that trust.

Updates to come later in the day as figures are finalised.

UPDATE 5.15pm (Melbourne time): Still counting, but only small numbers of votes still to come and nothing much has changed. Spanberger by 15 points with 97% in; Sherrill by 13 points with 95% in; Mamdani by nine points over Cuomo with 91% in, still holding above 50% with Sliwa languishing in single figures.

Early in the night the Democrats were getting a bigger margin in New Jersey than in Virginia, but that’s shifted around because Virginia is less homogeneous; the strongest Democrat areas come in late in the count.

The other contest that got a lot of attention was the referendum in California to authorise retaliatory gerrymandering by the Democrats. As expected it’s carried comfortably: a yes vote of 64.4% with 67% counted.