Congress

The real political shift in New York wasn’t Mamdani — it was everywhere else

Published

7 months ago

November 28, 2025

ALBANY, New York — Zohran Mamdani’s decisive win in New York City — along with key victories in New Jersey and Virginia — suggested Democrats are headed into the midterms from a position of strength. But they didn’t capture how deep that strength ran.

Across suburbs, rural counties and small towns in New York, Democrats posted electoral gains that rival — and in many cases surpass — the party’s 2017 “Blue Wave.” In a state with enough competitive House races to decide control of the chamber, the outcome amounts to a wakeup call for already-wary Republicans.

New York Democrats once viewed the 2017 elections as among their best ever. The Blue Wave that year was driven by purple suburbs making a hard shift left. This year in New York, that tilt was felt even more widely — with Democrats in every corner of the state pointing to economic uncertainty exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s policies as voters’ top concern.

“It was about peoples’ anxiety,” said Leslie Berliant, who ousted a Republican incumbent to win a seat in the Otsego County Legislature. “It definitely was a feeling that we don’t feel protected by what’s happening in the federal government, and we need to make sure we have people in place at the local level who care about our needs. Democrats ran on that, and I think it worked.”

Much of the early narrative from this fall’s elections has cast Democrats’ gains as occurring mostly in places where they often win. An examination of every race on the ballot in New York shows the shift was far more widespread, with Democrats having their best-ever performances in numerous deep red towns and rural areas.

There’s still plenty of time for conditions to change before the 2026 midterms. But a year out, this year’s contests offered very little solace for Republicans as they prep for seven battleground congressional races in New York and a gubernatorial election in which they hope to build on the rightward momentum of the 2022 and 2024 elections.

A Blue Light News review of results in 268 county, town and village executive branch races found an average 10 point increase in the Democratic margin.

Democrats made gains in at least 18 different county legislative bodies in November, flipping over 50 seats across the Empire State. They gained five seats in Oswego County, which Trump won by 27 points in 2024. They picked up five in Ulster by making inroads in towns that have been Republican for generations, winning their largest majority in county history. And they flipped five in Onondaga and gained their first majority there since the 1970s.

Shown above, New Paltz in Ulster County. Democrats picked up five seats in Ulster by making inroads in towns that have been Republican for generations, winning their largest majority in county history

For Republicans, the outcome painted a bleak picture: GOP candidates flipped one county legislative seat in the entire state.

Democrats who won these local contests shared similar stories about what they saw on the ground. Trump voters didn’t necessarily throw their MAGA hats into bonfires. But economic anxiety persists in every corner of the state. And Republican voters feeling the pinch — whether over federal cuts, tariffs, or inflation — are now at least willing to hear a pitch from Democrats.

In the town of Erwin, just north of the Pennsylvania border, Democrat Debbie Shannon ousted Republican Steuben County Legislator James Kuhl, the son of a former congressman.

“I knocked on everyone’s door, and the economy is the big hot button issue,” Shannon said. “Especially for Republicans who said Trump ran on ‘I’m going to lower the price of eggs,’ and that isn’t happening. I think they’re breaking with the administration.”

This November was only the second time since 1989 that Democrats won mayoral races in each of the state’s five largest cities. Sharon Owens was the first Democrat elected Syracuse’s mayor in 12 years, Sean Ryan received the most votes in a contested Buffalo race since 1981, and Mamdani received more votes than any Democratic nominee in New York City since at least 1965.

Democratic performance in places that were once untouchable Republican strongholds is perhaps more notable when looking ahead to next year. Consider, for example, the Rochester suburbs: Penfield elected a Democratic supervisor for the first time in four decades, Greece for the first time in 120 years, and Perinton for the first time since the Civil War.

Voters cast their ballots at the Susan B. Anthony Museum & House in Rochester in 2024.

Democrats also flipped mayoral or supervisor offices in places like Tonawanda, Oneonta, Monroe, Rensselaer, Johnson City and Riverhead.

All told, there were 118 municipal executive races outside of New York City this year that were contested in either 2021 or 2023. The number of ballots cast for Democrats grew from 1.3 million to 1.6 million, a 22 percent increase. The number for Republicans grew 1 percent to 1.6 million.

That means that while the typical upstate or Long Island Democrat lost by 10 points in the last go-around, they received 50 percent of the vote this year.

Even in places where Republicans had good nights, there’s little evidence of a broader rightward shift. Republicans made gains in Saratoga Springs, but not as many as Democrats made in the larger, neighboring town of Clifton Park. Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman won big in his reelection campaign. But Democrats improved on their performance in 17 of the other 21 executive offices on the ballot on Long Island. And in the other major suburban county, Westchester’s Ken Jenkins had the best performance by a Democratic county executive candidate in two decades.

The Democratic gains were thus much broader than those in 2017. The following year, New York Democrats flipped three congressional seats, and the number of people voting for Andrew Cuomo in the gubernatorial contest grew 76 percent in 2018 compared with 2014.

All of that is promising to Democrats like Gov. Kathy Hochul who are on the ballot in 2026. The Republican path to a statewide victory involves running up the numbers in red parts of the state, doing well in suburban towns and minimizing the Democratic margin in New York City. All three of those need to happen in 2026 for a GOP win to be plausible in statewide contests — and this November, none of them did.

But there were also hints of an anti-establishment trend mixed in with the leftward shift — and certainly more than a glimmer of that in New York City. That trend makes forecasting Hochul’s fate a little less clear come next June or November.

Not everybody who won said they did so by running on a Democratic platform. Candidates in the rural North Country, for example, attempted to outdo each other in criticizing Hochul’s handling of a prison strike earlier this year.

Voters are looking “for leadership that kind of ignores traditional party stances,” said Lebanon Supervisor-elect Adam Carvell, who noted he wasn’t focused on purely partisan issues before receiving 63 percent of the vote as a Democrat in a town where Trump received 60 percent last year. The electorate, he said, wasn’t just bothered by the White House’s actions, but policies supported by the sitting Democratic governor, such as an electric vehicle mandate.

“The municipal electrical vehicle mandate that was coming down, it’s a Hochul thing,” said Carvell. “The boots-on-the-ground take on that here is that’s unworkable … The idea of introducing very expensive, hard to maintain [electric snow plows] scared a lot of people.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul speaks at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the National Urban League's new headquarters in Harlem on Nov. 12, 2025, where she was joined by New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

Yet even the candidates who eschewed strict partisanship repeatedly highlighted the federal government and its role in the economy as the top concern on voters’ minds.

Don Dabiew, who won a seat in Franklin County’s Legislature, pointed to a hit to Canadian tourism.

“Almost all the small towns around are seeing an impact of that because people aren’t coming across anymore,” Dabew said. “There’s some people that are upset with our country as a whole, and they don’t want to support us anymore.”

In Canandaigua, mayor-elect Thomas Lyon highlighted federal cuts.

“DOGE was eliminating jobs left and right,” he said. “The national veterans’ suicide hotline is located here in Canandaigua at our VA, and you had people losing their jobs, not being able to provide support to our veterans.”

Even in local elections where partisanship wasn’t rampant, Democrats said the current frustrations about the country as a whole are opening doors that hadn’t been open before.

“We listened and said, ‘We’re not talking about federal politics here; we’re talking about right here, right now, our town,’” said Lisa Moore, who won the South Bristol supervisor’s race.

“A lot of people were just so sick and tired of the divisiveness at the federal level, and the sort of miserableness, that they were happy to not demonize Democrats, as Democrats have been demonized in our town in the past.”

Congress

Johnson-backed plan to combine Pentagon and election bills advances to floor

Published

4 hours ago

June 30, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The House Rules Committee advanced a procedural measure aimed at breaking an intra-Republican deadlock Monday night. But GOP leaders are still facing a major battle Tuesday to regain control of the House floor.

The panel approved on party lines a measure to set up Republicans’ $1.1 trillion defense policy bill, a government funding bill and other GOP bills for floor debate. It would then combine the Pentagon bill, once passed, with the contentious elections overhaul known as the SAVE America Act and send it to the Senate as one piece of legislation.

That maneuver, telegraphed by Speaker Mike Johnson earlier Monday, is aimed at appeasing House GOP hard-liners who have blockaded the floor, demanding the Senate pass the elections bill that has languished there for months.

However, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, the Republican leading the blockade, said in an interview Monday before the Rules Committee acted that Johnson’s plan is not sufficient — raising the possibility she and allies could vote down the measure on the floor. Other House GOP hard-liners say there are other outstanding issues to battle over Tuesday.

Rep. James McGovern of Massachusetts, the top Rules Democrat, called the merger move “a big waste of time.” The panel voted down a motion by McGovern to remove the provision to combine the two bills in a party-line vote.

The Senate is set to debate its own version of the defense bill next month, and it is likely that the elections overhaul will be removed in negotiations between the two chambers — as McGovern acknowledged Monday and House GOP leaders privately concede.

“The Senate will just strip the SAVE Act out,” he said at the meeting. “There is a zero percent chance SAVE ends up in the [Pentagon bill] because of this rule today.”

The defense bill faces a tight vote if Republicans can pass the procedural measure. Most Democrats are expected to oppose the measure over its massive price tag, which they contend is wasteful.

The panel is set up debate on 312 amendments to the bill. The slate includes GOP measures to codify a Trump executive order to block transgender people from serving in the military, prohibit coverage of gender-affirming care, block aid to arm Ukraine and strip Democratic-backed protections for collective bargaining for Pentagon civilian workers.

The committee also voted down Democratic proposals to slash $150 billion from the bill’s topline and limit the war against Iran.

Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.

Congress

Pentagon and elections bills could be combined in bid to unfreeze House floor

Published

7 hours ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Speaker Mike Johnson said Monday he plans to deploy an unusual procedural maneuver in a bid to unfreeze the House floor this week, seeking to send the annual Pentagon policy bill and the GOP elections bill known as the SAVE America Act to the Senate in a single package.

That is likely a recipe for a continued standoff between the two chambers over the SAVE America Act, which has stalled in the Senate for months due to internal GOP divides. Under Johnson’s plan, the annual defense policy bill, which typically passes every year with large bipartisan majorities, could become a collateral victim of the impasse.

Asked in brief interview if he had talked to Senate Majority Leader John Thune about his plans, Johnson replied, “I have to do my job in the House, and they’ve got to do their job in the Senate, so we’ll see what happens.”

Johnson is seeking to placate House conservative hard-liners, led by Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who have threatened to oppose the procedural measures that give Republicans control of the floor unless they agree to tougher tactics meant to force the Senate into passing the elections bill.

House GOP leaders discussed the plan to merge the two bills over the weekend as Luna pushed to amend the defense bill directly.

She did not say in an interview Monday whether Johnson’s gambit would suffice: “We want it baked together, not able to be stripped out,” she said.

But the Senate is free to work its own will, and members of that chamber are likely to reject any defense bill that has the partisan elections bill attached. That would set the stage for GOP leaders to strip it out when the House and Senate hash out the differences between their competing Pentagon bills later this year.

Johnson, meanwhile, is pushing a separate plan to pass a slimmed-down version of the SAVE America Act through the party-line budget reconciliation process — an option hard-liners have all but rejected.

“I don’t think that that can be done,” Luna told reporters Monday.

He’s also facing another complication: The version of the SAVE America Act he is proposing to attach to the Pentagon bill doesn’t include the latest demands for the bill from President Donald Trump — including a near-total ban on mail voting that is opposed by many Republicans.

Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.

Congress

Top Trump officials face bipartisan questions in first all-member Iran briefings

Published

8 hours ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Lawmakers of both parties questioned Secretary of State Marco Rubio and top Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff Monday in the first broad congressional briefings on President Donald Trump’s Iran deal.

While Democrats asked some of the sharpest questions, participants in an afternoon conference call with House members said, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) at one point pressed the administration officials on the fate of Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium.

According to two people granted anonymity to disclose the private remarks, Witkoff and Rubio repeated assurances the administration has privately made to select lawmakers in prior briefings — that the goal is to negotiate a final deal that would prohibit Iran from keeping its highly enriched uranium.

The memorandum of understanding Trump signed earlier this month, they said, was meant to launch those negotiations. Witkoff, the people said, added that the technical team involved in that part of the talks was traveling from Switzerland to Qatar, where talks between the U.S. and Iran are set to happen Tuesday.

Democrats, meanwhile, pushed the administration for more details on what financial benefits Iran could reap under the memorandum — including proceeds from previously sanctioned oil sales.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) went back and forth with Rubio and Witkoff over the lifting of the oil sanctions, two other people granted anonymity on the House call said. The officials eventually cut off the conversation and ended the call.

At another point, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) raised concerns about Witkoff’s business interests in the Middle East as he’s negotiating with Iran, prompting a sharp defense from Rubio, those people said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer asked Rubio and Witkoff about the oil sanctions during a separate all-senators call Monday, saying in a statement afterward that they “confirmed to me that Iran will reap billions in oil revenue while retaining dangerous leverage over the Strait of Hormuz.”

“If this is the administration’s defense behind closed doors, Secretary Rubio should make it under oath, in public, before the Foreign Relations Committee,” Schumer added, calling the briefing “delayed, deficient, and devoid of details.”

An administration official granted anonymity to speak candidly countered on Schumer’s characterization, noting that he had previously gotten a briefing of the deal as part of a group of top leaders engaged on national security matters. Schumer, the official said, had the opportunity to ask multiple follow-up questions on the Senate call.

A separate group of White House officials briefed top congressional leaders and key committee chairs in a classified briefing in the Capitol later Monday.

The administration has faced bipartisan skepticism over multiple provisions of the memorandum of understanding — particularly the lifting of oil sanctions and a $300 billion reconstruction fund that many Senate Republicans fear will help fuel Iran’s military and regional proxies.

Rubio and Witkoff sought to ease concerns about the slow reopening of the Strait of Hormuz — the critical trade route whose closure has sparked higher fuel and fertilizer costs. Both officials said more mine removal is required, and Witkoff indicated that Iran broke the terms of the Trump-signed deal by launching a drone attack on a passing ship over the weekend.

They also sought to assure lawmakers that Iran has received no money under the memorandum — especially not directly from American sources. Administration officials have previously pledged in smaller briefings that the reconstruction fund won’t include U.S. funds.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) called the Senate briefing a “productive conversation” but said “much of what I heard today is similar to what I heard last week” during a dinner at Vice President JD Vance’s residence.