US President Donald Trump. Photo / Getty Images
In Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, voters elected a Democratic district attorney for the first time since the 1800s, part of a Democratic sweep of every county office, including controller and recorder of deeds.
In Georgia, Democrats ousted two Republicans on the Public Service Commission, the party’s first capture of a non-federal statewide office in Georgia since 2006.
In Connecticut, Democrats took control of 28 towns from the GOP.
In New Jersey, Democrats won their biggest majority in the General Assembly since the Watergate era.
Much of the attention last Wednesday NZT focused on the Democrats’ big United States election wins in the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s races, as well as in the New York mayor’s contest.
But the party also won hundreds of lower-profile state and local contests - often swamping Republican incumbents with overwhelming turnout.
It suggests that voters’ desire to send a message opposing US President Donald Trump was deep and wide.
“Voters are not just mad - they’re really mad, and they are willing to do something about it,” said Dan McCormick, a Pennsylvania Democratic strategist who is now serving as campaign manager for congressional candidate Bob Harvie.
“Voters got their first opportunity to push back on the chaos that is happening within the Trump Administration.”
Republican strategist Christopher Nicholas estimated that of the 480-plus contested races in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, Republicans won 11.
Still, he noted that just a year ago it was the GOP that was celebrating unexpected wins, and he said politics is always cyclical.
“We have a pendulum in politics, and it is undefeated,” Nicholas said.
“Last year you could say was a referendum on Joe Biden’s America. And [last Wednesday] you could say was a referendum on Trump 2’s first year.”
Voters seemed intent on showing their displeasure with Trump even if that meant voting against a random Republican city council member.
In a recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, 41% of Americans said they approved of Trump’s performance while 59% disapproved - the President’s worst showing since January 2021, a week after the attack by a pro-Trump mob on the US Capitol.
In Connecticut, numerous towns, from Plymouth to Westport, had their mayor or first selectman positions switch from Republican to Democrat, or else saw the council majority flip to the Democrats.
“It was historic, not just a periodic pendulum swing,” Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) said in an interview.
“It reflects a deep dissatisfaction with the rising costs of electricity, rents, mortgages, food - everything, including healthcare.”
The surge was exemplified by Bucks County, a suburban stretch outside Philadelphia that is widely considered a crucial swing county in a hotly contested state.
Trump defeated former Vice-President Kamala Harris there by a few hundred votes.
Wednesday was a different story.
In the race for Bucks County district attorney, Democrat Joe Khan ousted incumbent Republican Jennifer Schorn by 54% to 46%, becoming the first Democrat since the 19th century to win the office.
In a closely watched sheriff’s race, Democrat Danny Ceisler knocked off Republican Fred Harran, unseating an incumbent who played up his partnership with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency spearheading the Trump Administration’s controversial mass deportation effort.
They were part of a sweep that put Democrats in charge of every one of the county’s nine elected executive offices for the first time since the 1800s.
And it wasn’t just the county races; in Bensalem Township, a Republican stronghold within Bucks County, Democrats flipped three of the five seats on the township council to seize the majority.
Accustomed to scraping for every vote in the area, Democrats suddenly found themselves winning races by 10 percentage points.
“To see this type of a surge, especially leading up to the Midterms, we are feeling pretty confident,” McCormick said.
“This was the first time Bucks County voters had the opportunity push back against Trump, and they made their voices heard quite loudly.”
Republicans, while acknowledging their losses, downplayed them as typical results in Democratic-leaning areas and argued they said little about the mood of the country.
“There’s no surprises,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) told reporters last Thursday.
“What happened last night was blue states and blue cities voted blue. We all saw that coming. And no one should read too much into last night’s election results.”
However, other Republicans said their party needs to get the message that Americans are deeply concerned about the cost of living.
Trump ran on a promise to end inflation, but the headlines of his second term have focused on his firing of federal workers, his construction of a ballroom, the US Government shutdown and similar hot-button issues.
“I think we need to heed what the voters are telling us - they want us to focus on pocketbook issues, which is part and parcel of how Trump got elected in the first place,” Nicholas said.
“Perhaps we have run enough ads on the trans issue for a while.”
Local elections attract far less attention than races for governor or senator.
Yet these offices are critically important, and they often prepare local politicians to rise to higher office.
Democrats in recent years have struggled to capture them, leaving the party without a robust farm-team system.
Wednesday’s sweep is hardly a guarantee that Democrats will do well in next year’s congressional elections. But decisive victories can create momentum, sparking a surge in a party’s donations, enthusiasm and recruitment.
Democratic leaders acknowledge they have a long way to go in crafting a message and identity that will appeal to voters independent of their opposition to Trump.
That identity may not emerge until Democrats settle on a presidential nominee in 2028.
For now, party leaders are enjoying the unexpected scope of the wins.
In New Jersey, Democrats seem poised to capture at least a 56-24 majority in the General Assembly, giving them a two-thirds supermajority for the first time since 2019, and their biggest edge in the Assembly since the Watergate era.
That was driven by a surging Democratic turnout. Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University in Lawrence, said Democrats dominated mail-in voting, then in-person early voting, and then Election Day voting.
“Republicans just could not keep up,” Rasmussen said. “A wave came their way and they couldn’t get out of the way.”
That startling turnout was prompted by a startling presidency, he said.
“We have not had somebody knocking down part of the White House before. We haven’t had people in the street rounding up people before,” Rasmussen said.
“I think all those gains that Trump made in the electorate last year are seemingly gone, at least for the moment. Trump giveth and Trump taketh away.”
Some of Democrats’ gains came in unlikely parts of the country. In Georgia, Democrats unexpectedly knocked off two incumbents on the state’s Public Service Commission, which regulates major utilities.
That marked the first time Democrats had won statewide office beyond the US Senate in Georgia since 2006.
While the positions are relatively low-profile, they are tied directly to the volatile issue of affordability, since the commission helps determine Georgians’ energy bills.
And the Democratic victors, Alicia Johnson and Peter Hubbard, both won their seats by decisive margins of roughly 63-37.
Zachary Peskowitz, a political science professor at Emory University, said the results do not mean much for the Midterms, including the closely watched re-election campaign of Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff.
Many of Georgia’s Democratic-leaning municipalities held elections on Wednesday, Peskowitz said, driving up the party’s turnout in a way that will not hold true for 2026.
“The surprising aspect was that the Democrats won with overwhelming margins,” Peskowitz said.
“But I would caution against saying this is reflective of a big Democratic shift that will continue in Georgia in 2026 and beyond.”
Other states also saw Democratic gains.
In Mississippi, Democrats took two seats in the state senate, breaking a Republican supermajority, although that may have reflected a court-ordered redistricting rather than a Democratic surge.
Republicans also suffered losses on school boards across the country.
In Colorado, progressives swept out conservative majorities in at least three school districts, according to the industry publication Chalkbeat.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats won each of the four contested races on the Central Bucks School District, leaving them with all nine seats on the panel.
That marked a sharp reversal from several years ago, when Mums for Liberty and other conservative groups took over numerous school districts.
At the time, the country was engulfed in a debate over how to teach about sexual orientation and racial discrimination.
Many Democrats contend that the powerful anti-Trump sentiment evident in the results will carry over to the Midterms, especially since the President’s record suggests he will not moderate his behaviour in response to political trends.
Blumenthal warned against taking anything for granted, in part because of Trump’s sweeping efforts to affect the vote through redistricting, intervening in state election systems, and similar heavy-handed measures.
“As an elected official, I always tell supporters complacency is the enemy,” Blumenthal said.
“The President has the biggest megaphone of anyone in the country. He has a platform that eclipses everybody else’s, and he has shown that he has no scruples about misinformation and myths.”
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