Nov.03

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

Tomorrow Is Election Day

Tomorrow is Election Day and Donald Trump is on the ballot in many states. He is not a candidate in any specific race, but many races will hinge on how the voters feel about him more than how they feel about the names printed on the ballot. The results could also presage what will happen a year from today when voters in every state will get to chime in.

One big question is whether Trump voters are Republicans. Trump won in 2024 because a substantial number of young Black and Latino men who normally don't vote showed up to vote for Trump for a variety of reasons (prices are too high, he's tough, they don't like Black women, etc.). Will they show up in droves to vote for other Republicans or just revert to being nonvoters, as usual? The New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections may be the best barometers of this. If the two Democratic candidates win in landslides, the answer will be a clear "no": The marginal Trump voters are not actually Republicans, they just like his personal style. If the Democrats lose or just squeak by, maybe there is a realignment going on.

A second question is whether Trump can drive turnout—for Democrats. Many Democrats hate Trump with the blazing heat of 1,000 suns. Will Democratic turnout go through the roof for other Democrats, to make a point? We will have a better idea Wednesday.

Quite a few states have noteworthy elections tomorrow. Let's take a look (in alphabetical order by state):

• California: As all of our loyal readers know, Californians will vote tomorrow on a constitutional amendment, Proposition 50, to override the congressional map drawn by an independent commission and replace it with one that will likely flip five Republican House seats. That will roughly cancel out what Texas already did. The most recent poll, from the Public Policy Institute of California, shows Prop. 50 with a modest lead, 56% to 43%. The most likely reason the gap isn't bigger is that some Democrats really don't like gerrymandering, even when it helps the blue team, so they are voting "No."
  
  One unusual development that may be a dry run for 2026 is that Trump is sending election monitors to California to intimidate watch the voters. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is not taking that lying down. It's his state, after all, not Trump's. He will send his own monitors to monitor the monitors. Newsom's monitors will carefully watch the federal ones and flag any for arrest if they violate California's election laws. This scenario could play out in many states in 2026, so we will see how it goes this time. The federal monitors may be disappointed, though, because many Californians—and most residents of Los Angeles—vote by mail, so there may not be that many voters at the polls tomorrow.
  
  
• Minnesota: The state Senate was originally 35DFL, 34R this session, but the death of one Republican senator and the resignation of one DFL senator has left the upper chamber 34DFL, 33R. There are special elections tomorrow for both vacant seats, representing SD-29 and SD-47. If the DFLer wins either one, the DFL will retain control of the chamber. If the Republicans can win both of them, they will flip the chamber. The 29th is red and the 47th is blue—still, you never know. The state House is tied at 67 each so even if the DFL can retain the Senate, the House will block everything. But if one House Republican resigns or dies next year, the Democrats will have the trifecta and the dam will burst, sending a flood of legislation to the desk of Gov. Tim Walz (DFL-MN).
  
  
• New Jersey: This one ought to be a no-brainer. New Jersey is a blue state, but Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) barely eked out a win in 2021. The Democratic candidate is Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), a former Navy helicopter pilot and former federal prosecutor; she's up against former assemblyman and perpetual candidate Jack Ciattarelli, who is joined at the hip to Donald Trump. One advantage of that is that Trump is pouring millions of dollars in the race to help Ciattarelli. A Quinnipiac University poll released late last week has Sherrill at 51%, Ciattarelli at 43% and 6% undecided. That is surprisingly close for such a blue state when Democrats are so energized.
  
  
• New York: The election for mayor of New York City is the biggie here. A young and inexperienced socialist Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, is running against highly experienced sleazeball Andrew Cuomo and long-time vigilante Curtis Sliwa. Many New Yorkers are asking: "With 8 million people in the city, why can't we do better than this?" But this is what it is. Whoever wins, millions of people will be very unhappy.
  
  The New York Daily News lists five keys to deciding who will win this three-way race:
  
  
  1. Will conservatives reject Sliwa as hopeless and vote for Cuomo?
  2. Will Mamdani catch on with the older voters who have so far resisted him?
  3. Will Mike Bloomberg's big last-minute $5 million cash infusion help Cuomo?
  4. What will turnout be like and who will it help?
  5. Will Sliwa be a spoiler by taking enough votes from Cuomo to elect Mamdani?
  
  The first and fifth items on that list seem to us to be the same, but maybe we are missing something.
  
  The five most recent polls have Mamdani ahead of Cuomo by +7, +16, +16, +10, and +26, respectively, with Sliwa a distant third in the mid teens.
  
  
• Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania Supreme Court currently has five Democratic appointees and two Republican appointees. However, three of the Democratic appointees—Christine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht—are facing retention elections. These are straight up-or-down votes on whether to fire the justices or keep them for 10 more years (although Donohue, now 72, will hit the mandatory retirement age in 2027). If all three justices are fired, the Court will be tied 2-2. Then Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) would make new appointments. However, they would have to be approved by a supermajority of the Republican-controlled state Senate. That's not going to happen, and so the Court would be hamstrung until 2027 when regular elections for the seats would happen. This could give the Republicans a path to controlling the Court before the 2028 elections. Republicans know this and have put real money into defeating the three justices. Needless to say, it is likely they will all sink or they will all swim, since the question voters are answering isn't really "Is this person doing a good job?" but "Does this person have the right letter next to his or her name?"
  
  
• Texas: Here we find the only federal election this year. When Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-TX) died on March 5, 2025, he left behind a vacant seat. Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) just loves vacant seats—when the previous rear end occupying the seat was blue. Consequently, he delayed the special election as long as he could. TX-18 is in downtown Houston and is D+21, so one of the seven Democrats who filed will win, but probably only after a runoff, since no candidate is likely to hit 50%. The leading candidates are state Rep. Jolanda Jones (D) and County Attorney for Harris County Christian Menefee (D). Both are Black.
  
  
• Virginia: Lots of action here. The gubernatorial race between former CIA agent and former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) and Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R-VA) is getting all the attention. In fact, Barack Obama campaigned for Spanberger and also for Mikie Sherrill on Saturday. If both moderate women, each with a military or national security background, can win landslide victories, that certainly sends a message to the Democrats about the kind of candidates they should recruit next year. Recent polling has Spanberger up by 10 points or 11 points. National Republicans have abandoned Earle-Sears, so the only question is how big Spanberger's margin will be and whether she will have coattails.
  
  Coattails may be needed to save the Democratic AG candidate, state Rep. Jay Jones. Text messages he sent indicated that he jokingly said he wanted to kill the Republican speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates. Needless to say, this has become a scandal and Jones may need all the help he can get to win his election. One thing that could help him is that early voting started before the scandal broke so there could be many votes for him banked before it hit the news. Current polling has it as a tossup.
  
  In Virginia, the candidates for the top two jobs do not run as a ticket. They are elected independently. State Sen. Ghazala Hashmi (D) is facing John Reid (R). Reid has his own scandal to deal with. His hobby is posting porn to social media sites. We haven't seen (or looked for) the images, but Reid is gay so we presume he has posted gay porn. If there is anything Virginians like less than straight porn it is probably gay porn. He's going to need a lot of coattails to pull this one off and Earle-Sears is not going to provide them.
  
  Also important is that the entire House of Delegates is up. Right now, the Democrats control the House 51-49 and the Senate (which is not up this year) 21-19. If the Democrats can hold the House and Spanberger wins, as expected, the Democrats will hold the trifecta. If they get it, they have a large backlog of legislation that they will ram through quickly. Relevant here is that many federal employees live in Virginia, and they are hopping mad at being furloughed without pay. Who they blame could be critical in the state House races, as well as the others. Early voting has hit record levels in Virginia. Are these federal employees with nothing else to do? We don't know.

Besides Prop. 50 in California, there are numerous other local issues on the ballot around the country (bond issues, school board elections, etc.). We'll have a rundown of some of the biggies tomorrow. Still, the big story Wednesday could be: (1) Mamdani slaughters Cuomo but the moderate women barely make it or (2) Mamdani does worse than expected but the two moderate women crush their opponents. Or maybe neither of these. (V)