The Democrat Wave in 2025, and the Return of the Yellow Dog Democrat

[mystery-ak]

The Democrat Wave in 2025, and the Return of the Yellow Dog Democrat
Adam Turner


Well, that was a depressing election day, wasn’t it?

The big three (plus two) 2025 elections have all been tabulated, and the Democrats won bigly.   

New Jersey Governor

In New Jersey, the Democrats won a yuge race for governor.  Democrat Rep. Mikie Sherrill (NJ-11), despite being a terrible candidate according to normal candidate metrics, beat Republican Jack Ciattarelli 56.3 percent to 43.2 percent. 

My prediction was totally off here, as I assumed that the Republican nominee would win a narrow majority or plurality.   In this race, Democrats broke a historical trend going back to 1961, despite the unpopularity of the sitting Democrat New Jersey governor and his poor management of taxes and energy policies.

So, why did this unprecedented event happen?  There appear to be three distinct possibilities:

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis claimed that “Jack Ciattarelli would have won four years ago and he would have won tonight if you just take all the Republicans who’ve left New Jersey since I’ve been Governor and (they) moved to Florida.”
   
    I reached out to one of my little birds in New Jersey, a prominent conservative pollster, and he argued that Ciattarelli had no “message” and that he could not “define what change is.  Just being for change is not enough.  It allows your opponent to define what the change is.” (But keep in mind when a campaign loses, it is frequently blamed on the lack of a "message.") 

    Political guru Ryan Girdusky blamed yuge Democrat turnout. “In the end, Ciattarelli received 122,000 more votes than he got in 2021… more votes than (Gov. Phil) Murphy (D) received when he won re-election (that year).  But it wasn’t enough because Sherrill received about 450k more votes than Murphy and only 400k less than Kamala received.”

It is also possible that the results were some combination of the three.  Feel free to pick your poison.

more
https://redstate.com/adam-turner/2025/11/07/the-democrat-wave-in-2025-and-the-return-of-the-yellow-dog-democrat-n2195922

[Free Vulcan]

So, what else can we learn from this ignominious night?

1. Since Donald Trump appeared, the Democrats have done better in off-year elections, as their base is more likely to turn out to vote.  This hasn’t changed, and the GOP needs to deal with it.

2. In a prior column, when I explained why I went with the RCP average, I pointed out that one reason was that polling accuracy changes from election cycle to election cycle.   This happened again in 2025.  In 2024, Atlas and Trafalgar were fantastic.  In 2025, they struck out.  The better polls this cycle were the college polls that had performed so poorly in 2024.
 
3. The Democrats are still running solely on TDS.  That was the entirety of their campaign.  And in states that lean Democrat, that is enough for them to win. 

4. As a result, this election confirms that we are seeing the resurrection of the Yellow Dog Democrat.  Post-Civil War, in the South, the Yellow Dog Democrats were “(t)hose faithful Democrats (who) swore that they would 'vote for a yellow dog' before they’d vote for a Republican.”  Today, in solid Democrat jurisdictions, a Yellow Dog can be elected if they scream about Trump being the devil loud enough - as we just saw Sherrill, Spanberger, Hashmi, and Jones do.  The traditional candidate strengths probably don’t matter anymore in those areas, even if they are horrendous candidates. See Jones, Jay.  Yellow Dog Democrats also empowered Mamdani in New York City (see above). 

Mostly agree with 1 and definitely 3. 2 is relevant only as it proves polls are generally worthless.

4 gets the conclusion completely wrong. It's not the revival of the yellow dog Rat. They win when turnout is low and the TDS Rats dominate, but it doesn't extend to the general trend until proven right.

[LMAO]

I read articles like this, and I have to shake my head. No wonder many here are still in denial.

It was not just Democrats. Independent voters, democrat  and Democrat leaning voters, young people came out in higher numbers than they did in 2024 for Democrats, Hispanics went in big numbers  for Democrats this time, and  Democrats even made inroads in rural areas

And yet somehow, they’re still many on our side who believe that if MAGA just came out enforced, they could overcome all that..,lol

And they did run on issues. They ran on the economy and the cost of living.


This was not a sweep. This was a domination. The Virginia governor race was called  practically right after the polls closed


I get that there has to be some bucking up of the team. But once in a while, venture  outside the bubble.


Together, the results point to a growing generational realignment: voters under 30 — who turned out in unusually high numbers — overwhelmingly backed Democratic candidates.
The renewed energy among young voters comes after they briefly warmed to Trump during the 2024 election. According to AP VoteCast, voters aged 18 to 29 backed Kamala Harris over Trump by just 51 percent to 47 percent in 2024, a far smaller margin than Joe Biden’s 61–36 victory among the same age group in 2020.


https://www.newsweek.com/how-gen-z-hurt-republicans-elections-10995250

[Hoodat]

One Party put their spending priorities into law in 2022.  What alternative has the GOP given us to those spending priorities while controlling both Houses of Congress and the White House?