The NPR Politics Podcast - Takeaways From Democrats’ Election Wins Up And Down The Ballot

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Democrats had a good day on Tuesday, winning up and down the ballot across the country. We discuss what lessons the down-ballot victories offer, as well as what the Democratic and Republican parties can learn from this week’s election results.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, political reporter Stephen Fowler, senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell & Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org. Hi, this is Madeline from Sarasota, Florida. I'm currently at Thursday Night Bowling League, where we are down one game of our three games. This podcast was recorded at 12.40 p.m. on Friday, November 7th, 2025. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but hopefully we'll win this game, and then we'll go to dinner afterwards. Enjoy the show.

Strike. Dinner afterwards. You need the bacon cheeseburger at the bowling alley. And two pictures of course light, right? That was such a miles-coded timestamp. Rex Sports, Sarasota, Florida. Like, these are my things. Hey, there's three of us in here. You know what that means? We just need one more for a fourth. We've got a team. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Bowling podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And we are going to talk politics today. But first, we just got to say, happy birthday, Stephen. Oh, thank you. To who. It's a Stephen.

I am 32 years young. Happy to be here. No place I'd rather be on my birthday. All right. Well, today on the show, because we have you both here, we are going forward. full election nerd. Earlier this week, we talked about the main headlines, the Virginias, the New jerseys, the California redistrictings. But today, we are going down ballot. Stephen, you were watching a lot of these races that not everyone was talking about on Wednesday morning. Get us up to speed. So down the ballot across the country, across the ideological spectrum, Democrats did well in these races too. In Georgia, there were special elections for the Public Service Commission, which is the five-person state utility regulator.

These elections have been canceled for a few years because of lawsuits over how those districts were crafted and who got to vote for them. So long story short, there were two statewide elections on otherwise municipal, sleepy, like mayor here, county here elections, and a lot of people showed up, and most of them were Democrats. In fact, Miles, for Georgia being such a purple state, this one wasn't even close. Two Democrats got 62 percent of the vote in flipping counties in South Georgia and urban and suburban areas. And that was really one of the other big eyebrow raising things because it hits at a lot of big things that were watching as far as what voters are thinking and feeling.

I also was looking at places like Orlando where they had the city council elections where the last Republican held district was flipped. There were county legislatures and state legislatures where Democrats had big. gains. In Mississippi, court-ordered redrawn districts led to a supermajority being broken in New Jersey. Democrats gained a supermajority in the lower chamber there. So there were combinations of races and places and margins and points in time to refer to that we have never heard from before. I think it really speaks to the power of the out party in off-year elections when a president is under 50 percent and his approval rating is just not very good, not very popular. And this really encapsulated just how wide a sweep these elections were. It was really our first big

electoral test of Trump's political power and just how much of a drag he's been on the Republican Party. And another thing I want to mention as a perfect example of that, Domenico, is in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania voters there opted to retain three state Supreme Court judges that were first elected as Democrats. Down the ballot, you have several swing counties that everybody likes to talk about in big presidential election years that had Republicans ousted and Democrats win big, these sort of row offices in some of these counties, and even all the way down to local municipalities where you just had at every single level people vote for Democrats against Republicans. What I don't understand, though, is if we're seeing this massive, what looked like a very

large blue wave as you're talking about, Stephen, at every level on the ballot, but when you look at polling, Domenico, the Democratic Party is still very unpopular. Democratic leadership is still very unpopular. How do you square those two things? Well, you only got a couple choices in this country, right? So your choice is the party that I'm kind of meh about, but agree mostly with, or Trump. And if that's the case, and those people who are kind of meh about the party they wound up voting for, they really, really, really dislike Donald Trump. And I think that that's been the entire story here. And some of those meh voters may have stayed home. And the fact is, these are lower turnout elections and more activist voters go out to the polls. And I think you're seeing a little bit

of nuance in polling, too, where, yeah, Democrats might feel like they're not that thrilled with Democratic leaders. But when you ask them about their enthusiasm in voting in these elections, they're more enthusiastic than Republicans are about voting against the party that they don't like. And a lot of these people that are driving the unpopularity with the Democratic Party are these super voters that will vote in every single election up and down the ballot all year long. And these are people that are using their vote as a way to express displeasure with the way the party is doing things and with Trump. And so I don't think it's inconsistent to have an unpopular Democratic Party and wildly large turnout for people voting for

Democratic candidates who will change both the partisan makeup of these offices and the direction of the party. This is also one way where the political realignment in the country has advantaged Democrats because while Democrats have been at a disadvantage in presidential elections in some respects because they haven't done as well with blue-collar voters, they have done much better with white college-educated voters than they ever have before. And those voters vote at the highest levels participation rate-wise traditionally throughout history. And so if more of those voters who tend to vote more in elections are now voting more for your party, then you're more likely in off your elections when you have lower turnout and those lower propensity groups stay home

that those higher propensity voters go out to the polls and that's advantageing Democrats right now. Yeah, 100%. That makes a lot of sense to me. Ever since 2024, I think I've been excited to see, I guess, what the elections would look like after that because Trump's victory was so buoyed by, you know, quote unquote, low propensity voters that in these other elections, I was really interested to see that. How much does that translate to 2026? I mean, that is going to be a high profile midterm election. Does that hue closer to the presidential election rules or does that Hugh closer to this like the party that does well with the high educated super voters are also advantaged in the midterms. They are also advantaged in the midterms. There was going to be

a higher turnout likely in the midterms than there were in this off off year election, but it's still some significant percentage off from what the presidential election turnout is. And that we've seen advantaged Democrats, for example, in 2022 when people thought that there'd be a red wave and really Democrats were able to use that type of voter who turns out more to mitigate their losses. And I think if you wheel out the metaphorical whiteboard here to look at the combination of voters, in 2022, like you mentioned, there were a lot of primary challengers that Donald Trump endorsed that took what could have been winnable races and made it much more difficult from them to win, even though Republicans were the party out of power. But this is probably in many ways more comparable to 2018 when you have Donald Trump in the White House, Republicans in Congress. Congress and this surge of people trying to express their vote against the administration's policies.

All right. So we're talking about a pretty diverse range of offices as well as a bunch of different states from the Georgia Public Service Commission, city council seats in Orlando, Florida, Supreme Court seats in Pennsylvania. What are the common themes here? Well, clearly affordability has been, you know, the common theme throughout this entire, you know, election. And I think it's really refocused and re-centered, how each party is likely to talk about affordability or need to talk about affordability as they try to sort of reimagine what each party needs to be and do ahead of the 2026 midterms. And I think you can get another glimpse of that coming up in just a few weeks in Tennessee. There is a special congressional election in the first week of December.

And this is one of the ads from one of the candidates that was just released. I didn't risk my life for this country just to watch career politics. politicians wreck it. Matt Van Apps, nine combat tours, true American hero. Now I'm on a new mission to bring down prices, create good paying jobs, and lower health care costs for working families. That's the Republican in the race, Miles, sounding an awful lot like a Democrat. Yeah. Well, Stephen, you are based in Georgia. So I'm curious, like, that is a state that Democrats were not feeling great about post-2024, but you mentioned, these down-ballot wins that weren't these, the first time they've won a statewide race like this that wasn't a federal election in like over, what, 10, 15 years or something? Since 2006.

Yeah. So looking ahead to next year, there are a couple high-profile statewide races. Are Democrats feeling like those are potentially winnable in a way maybe they weren't pre this week? They are feeling a lot better about things. But at the same time, because Georgia's been a purple state for so long, was just this shock from Democrats and Republicans at such a lopsided margin at the same time, too, there are so many people running for an open governor's race on both sides of the aisle that there really is this microcosm in Georgia of what is happening with the Democratic Party, what is happening with the Republican Party, what is happening with the Senate race, because John Ossoff is the most vulnerable Senate on the ballot, that really there are so many things to watch for in 2026 that, you know, selfishly I'm watching in Georgia because I'm there, but just in places all

around the country that really it's kind of a new ballgame when thinking about the state of American politics. You know, Miles, you mentioned wins. And it reminds me that there is a maelstrom that's happening in the country. And it's about affordability. It's about cost of living. It's part of that ad, obviously, that we heard there. And when the president is a Republican, that's going to advantage Democrats.

Just like when the president was a Democrat, it advantaged Republicans. And this has all been stemming from the president. pandemic, still not able to really bring prices down to any kind of pre-pandemic level or close to it. Things feel like they're just more out of reach for a lot of people. And when you're in charge, you get more of the credit and more of the blame than you deserve. Okay, well, we can leave it there for now. Stephen, on your birthday, thank you so much and go do something fun, you know? Like talk more about politics. Or get a cake or something. Or a cookie or a cupcake or something. All right. All right. Let's take a quick break. More in just a moment.

NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy, working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org. And we're back, and senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith is here with us. Hi, Tam. Hello, hello. So earlier we went through some of these results, but I want to look forward and talk a little bit more about what this means for elections and midterms and then beyond. And I want to start with U-Tam and look specifically for Republicans because President Trump was not happy with how the results went on Tuesday. He said as much on social media. He was not on the ballot, but how much did

his presence impact or lack thereof on the ballot impact what happened? Yeah, I mean, by his telling, him not being on the ballot was a big problem. But guess what? Donald Trump was not on the ballot this week. He won't be on the ballot in 2026. And frankly, he won't be on the ballot in 2028 either. He is done, but he does cast a pretty big shadow. His popularity is underwater, but he's also this incredible force. He's someone who can turn out voters that other Republican politicians simply can't. It's actually kind of like former President Obama, who was a superstar, but then his party had a lot of trouble in the midterms and off-year elections and they lost a lot of governorships and all of this because when he wasn't on the ballot, people just didn't show up.

So I think for Republicans, there is now this question of what do you do while President Trump is casting this large shadow, but also isn't there to boost turnout? We're somewhat in this era of, you know, the celebrity politician or the celebrity president, but also this era of anger. I mean, six of the last seven midterm elections have had presidents with approval ratings under 50%. I mean, that's really unique for our history. And what that's meant is that the party out of power has had a huge advantage in these midterms. Well, and it's really tough, right, Tam, for people who are running for these offices, there's not much, because they're kind of between a rock and a hard place a little bit politically because Trump is very, very unpopular. But isn't it kind of a death sentence a little bit to try to go against him? It is a death sentence that will be delivered by President Trump himself. He is demanding ultimate fealty, ultimate loyalty. ultimate loyalty, and anyone who strays from him even a little bit can run into the buzzsaw.

And as a result of that, you know, normally a president will give members of his own party some space. We'll say, yep, you can run against me as long as you can win. Trump hasn't given that permission yet. I think that's a big point, right? I mean, when you talk to Republican strategists, they talk about the fact that, you know, whether it was George W. Bush or Newt Gingrich. which, for example, when they became political lightning rods, they were fine with letting, you know, a Susan Collins run the race that she needed to run in Maine or, you know, a Mitt Romney needing to run a race because they wanted to have somebody who voted with them 85% of the time rather than zero percent of the time. Well, digging a little bit into the demographics of Tuesday, one of the points you made, Domenico, after the fact, was the fact that it seems like a lot of the gains Republicans made in 2024 with Hispanic voters specifically, kind of. kind of dried up. I know it was notable in New Jersey, especially. What can Republicans do going

forward to try to get those voters back into the fold? It's so funny because for the years that I've been talking to Republican strategists about how to win over Republican voters, since the Bush era, you know, they talk about all of these things like abortion rights and that the group is actually more conservative than they're maybe given credit for or that the polls tend to show. None of that is why Latinos crossed over to vote for Donald Trump. Affordability, cost of living were everything that we heard on the campaign trail and what we saw in polling. And that was 100% what we've seen again this time around. And the Latinos who did show up at the polls, and I give that qualifier because there's a likelihood that there's a lot that did not show up. And those who did show up at the polls, though, went two to one for Democrats. The exit polls found. Trump and his party actually have a very similar problem to what President Biden had back when he was in office, which was the president was trying to say, actually, the fundamentals are good, the economy's okay. Yes, inflation has slowed down. We've got this. And now President Trump is delivering a very similar message. The problem is you can't sit in the White House and tell people the economy is good if they open up their power bill or they go to the grocery store and they, are experiencing sticker shock. I mean, that makes sense to me, but there's also the, like, the elephant in the room a little bit is tariffs.

President Trump at any point could just decide not that that is not going to be such a big priority for him. But that is clearly, or it seems to be to me, why voters are blaming him on some of his cost of living stuff. Look, we've been talking for a long time since Trump got into office about his seeming lack of focus on bringing prices down. He, in fact, when he'd be asked about it, would say, how often can you talk about the price of apples? You know, yeah, they're up, but how often can you talk about this? My advisors told me, you know, the economy was the most important thing. But I didn't really believe that. I think that the most motivating factor was immigration.

Well, I mean, now you're talking about a presidency where he's put in place tariffs in all of these trade wars. Poll after poll after poll has found that people think that tariffs are going to be worse for their pocketbook. And he's actively, you know, taken steps to make things more expensive in this country. You have a Treasury Secretary and Scott Besson, who went out there and said that the ability to buy cheap goods is not the American dream. Easy for a billionaire to say, right, when things are more expensive. Yeah. And President Trump is getting a little defensive about it. Last night, he was at the White House for a foreign policy related event.

But he started talking about affordability. He was like, I don't want to talk about affordability. I don't want to hear about the affordability because right now we're much less. If you look at energy, we're getting close to $2 a gallon gasoline. And he seemed to say that the real issue isn't the economy, but is just messaging. The affordability is much better with the Republicans. The only problem is the Republicans don't talk about it. And Republicans should start talking about it and use their heads because we have great numbers.

We have greatest. And they're going to only get better. Which is also very familiar to what we heard from the Biden administration. The point he's trying to make there is he thinks that eventually his tariffs will onshore a bunch of jobs to America and then the economy will be great. But that is like maybe not something that could even possibly begin to happen by 2026 when people are making decisions. One past president used to say, I feel your pain. You don't feel someone's pain by putting your head in the sand and saying, you know, this is just a problem that other Republicans have. because they're not messaging about it and gas prices are down and the stock market's doing great.

That's not what the message of this election was. All right. Well, I want to talk for a second about the Democrats and what they can take away going into midterms. I think a lot of people have been focusing on candidate choice because I think at first glance, there's not a lot of similarities between the Democrat that won in New York cities or on Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist and Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat who won in Virginia, who is a former CIA agent. You know, what do you think Democrats are going to take away in terms of the people they should be running in races in 2026? I disagree. I think there are a lot of similarities between them in the message that they were putting out there.

Yeah, sure, Abigail Spamberger wasn't talking about very specific things to New York City like making buses run faster because maybe Virginia's buses run fine. I don't know. But point is they both talked about affordability as the issue. They weren't talking about this kind of esoteric democracy's dying message. and they have, again, the advantage of not being the people in power in the White House when people are upset about the cost of living. I guess my takeaway from the way Democrats are talking this week is that winning is one hell of a drug because they were like out in the wilderness, sad and depressed. And then all of a sudden they win a bunch of elections up and down the ballot. And they're like, hey, we have a map out of the wilderness. And it is affordability and cost of living.

And it's just a dramatic transformation, as the chairman of the DNC said, Democrats are back. Now, this does not solve all of the problems that Democrats have. Democrats are also very unpopular. In particular, the party itself, very unpopular in large part because of the sort of lost trust that happened with Joe Biden running for president, having that terrible debate performance. Kamala Harris being sort of thrown in. there is just a dramatic concern among Democratic voters about the Democratic Party. But this is a very similar time to 2005, 2006. In 2004, Democrats lost the presidency to George W. Bush, who was an unpopular president.

They couldn't believe how did we lose? How did we lose? And they didn't have a leader. And there wasn't a lot of clarity. And that's exactly where they were, are now. there isn't a clear leader of the party because they haven't had a primary yet. Well, Barack Obama emerged from that primary in that cycle. And Democrats won back the House in 2006. How did they do it? I talked to a former chief of staff to Nancy Pelosi who became Speaker of the House as a result of that election. And he said they were very focused. They had a message that they decided on and they stuck with it. And Democrats all over the country ran on basically the same message. And, and And he sees the possibility they could do the same thing now. It wasn't a hard message in 2006. There was a civil war going on in Iraq.

A lot of people were very upset with the direction that that war was taking. President Bush's approval ratings had spiraled way down. And so it was really easy and was advantageous to Democrats not to have a leader for someone to point to and say, oh, that's exactly the kind of person that we are all aligned with because they could run their own races individually in all of these places and say, look at how bad Bush has made things with Iraq in very specific districts. There were a lot of ethics issues that Democrats were able to run on, which is why when John Boehner came into office, he wound up focusing very heavily on ethics issues, the Republican who became Speaker later. It's very similar, I think, to 2026, where you have a disparate set of Democratic candidates who are going to be running on two things, Trump and affordability. And it's very easy to do when the Republican Party doesn't have one person to point back to. and stereotyped the entire party as, although they'll try to say that they're all Zoran Mamdani's. But Zoran Mamdani was fine for New York City, but not for everywhere else in the country. All right. Let's take one more break. And then it's time for Can't Let It Go.

And we're back. And it's time for Can't Let It Go. The part of the show where we talk about things we cannot let go of, politics, or otherwise. Tam, why don't you start us off? Yeah. So what I can't let go of this week is that former Vice President Dick Cheney died. He was 84 years old. But the thing that I can't stop thinking about is just how his story is, in a way, the story of American politics and presidential power and the Trump era. Cheney was actually chief of staff to President Gerald Ford long, long, long ago. And when he was chief of staff, he really bristled at all of these reforms that were going into place that were. meant to limit presidential power. So then he comes in as vice president to President George W. Bush. And by then, his unitary executive theory is very well refined. And he believes that presidents should have more power, that they should sort of claw back power. And they did. And then President

Trump comes into office and puts it on steroids. And the remarkable thing is Cheney was, you know, very Republican, very, very Republican. But at the end of his life, he ended up endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris in her run for president, which is just like, whoa. And his concern was what Donald Trump would do with all this power. He really believed in a strong American foreign policy, interventionist foreign policy. And, you know, we've seen presidents take steps back since the Iraq War, which is something that he was instrumental on pushing George W. Bush to go and do. So a very mixed legacy from Dick Cheney. Miles, what can't you let go of?

You know, it's interesting. I almost never on Can't Let It Go talk about politics, but yours is about politics and I'm going to do a politics. I feel like it's an election week. I feel like there's a do it. This makes my can't let it go even better. Oh, okay. You're really, really building up the suspense here, Domenico. So my can't let it go is about a ballot measure that failed in Maine, which I don't know if you guys even saw this. This was to change the voting rules in Maine. And this would have gotten rid of a couple days of early voting in Maine.

It notably would have added a strict photo ID requirement for Maine voters. So it failed pretty resoundingly. And what's interesting is one of the rules that it was proposing was to roll back this automatic program that Maine has for voters who are over 65. to be able to have a mail ballot mailed to them automatically, each election cycle. I wonder how much that impacted why this thing failed, because Maine is the oldest state in the entire country. That was going to be a hard sell always. You probably could have gotten everyone on board with photo ID. That is generally bipartisan.

People are pretty in favor of it. But I just wonder about whether the fact that they tried to repeal this one specific aspect of voting policy in that one specific state, whether that was the reason this thing failed. It's not just an old state. It is a rural state, a very rural state. And so it makes sense that people might want mail ballots. Well, it also makes me think, you know, I hear a lot from experts who always say, once you offer voting options to people, it's really hard to roll them back. And that was the other thing that I was like, it is always going to be a hard sell once people have a more convenient way to vote to try to like roll that thing back. Anyway, Domenico, what can't you let go of?

Well, you know, get your eye rolls ready. Ready. And I will just say that the average age. in Maine since you said is the oldest might be six seven oh no don't don't don't this is your can't let it go it's just nerds oh my god you nerds you nerds yeah six seven you know why i want to talk about six seven because it's annoying number one and number two it got named word of the year by whatever it's not even a word it's not a word exactly it is brain rot nonsense that means absolutely nothing. But the thing that I really can't let go of about all of this is how

much older people are talking about it like me. And I am so hopeful. I think we've gotten You're going to kill it, right? Yes. This is right now. It's the conspiracy to kill 67. And I am so here for it. I want to be super cringe, ick, whatever my daughter thinks of all the things that I say, let's do it. Because I will tell you right now, every time I have brought my son and my to an amusement park. These kids are screaming six, seven, for no reason at all. It means absolutely nothing. I've looked into all of the depth of all of this.

And it, like, it is mind-blowing. And I love that Stephen Colbert on CBS is talking about it and did an entire monologue. And his hope was to kill it. And he said, because you know what? The median age of CBS viewers is, six-seven. Oh, uh-huh. And does the whole... Six-seven.

Six-seven. It's so annoying. It is the biggest. example of the latest of our brain rot and I'm here for it. I'll say it as often as possible if people will stop saying it soon. Listening kids, that's all for today. Our executive producer is Mathony Maturi. Our producers are Casey Morel and Brea Suggs. Our editor is Rachel Bay. Special thanks to Christian Deb Kalimer and Kelsey Snell. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenica Montanaro, senior political editor and Corse Popper.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Support for NPR and the following message comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. RWJF is a national philanthropy working toward a future where health is no longer a privilege but a right. Learn more at RWJF.org.