Congress
The real political shift in New York wasn’t Mamdani — it was everywhere else
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
A top pollster for President Donald Trump is pushing back on recent public polling showing Republican Mike Rogers trailing progressive Abdul El-Sayed in the marquee Michigan Senate race.
Tony Fabrizio, who is conducting polling for Rogers, says the polls released this month are over-sampling Democratic-leaning voters, specifically college-educated and Black voters, according to an internal memo obtained by Blue Light News. A Susquehanna poll released this month showed El-Sayed leading by seven points and a TIPP poll showed him leading by four points.
El-Sayed’s lead in those polls is a “fake narrative,” Fabrizio wrote. His polling for AARP — conducted alongside Democratic firm Impact Research — showed the race essentially tied.
The warning follows huge polling misses in the Democratic primaries in the Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida, which he wrote were “some of the most egregious examples of public polling failures in recent memory.” It’s also a sign that Republicans are wary of the string of bad polling numbers for Rogers in the race, which is crucial for determining control of the chamber.
Jim Lee, CEO of Susquehanna Polling and Research, told Blue Light News that the firm did not oversample any demographics. “I think their head is in the sand,” Lee said, noting in part what he said was a gap in enthusiasm between Democratic and Republican voters this cycle.
TIPP didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Fabrizio, in the memo, argued on the Susquehanna poll: “50% of the sample in this survey is college-educated – making them massively overrepresented to what they should be. We took a look at 2022 and 2024 Exit Polls and VoteCast data and, as shown below, there is no indication that the Michigan electorate will be anywhere near 50% college-educated. In fact, it is unlikely they will be even 40% college-educated.”
He also noted “a huge gap” between college-educated and non-college educated voters.
“This was the driving issue of the public polling misses for President Trump in 2016 and 2024, especially in the Upper Midwest states of Michigan and Wisconsin,” Fabrizio added. “By increasing college-educated voters by 10+ points, and thus decreasing non-college educated voters by the same, we can pretty much guarantee this poll is significantly overestimating El-Sayed’s vote share.”
President Donald Trump and hemp industry lobbyists are hoping to win a final vote on Capitol Hill next week to skirt a ban on intoxicating products — with shutdown politics as leverage.
Nine months ago, Congress cleared a bill to close a loophole created in 2018 that allowed the sale of some hemp-derived products containing types of THC colloquially known as “diet weed.” That ban is supposed to take effect in mid-November, or roughly 11 weeks, to limit overall THC levels in hemp products that can get people high — including gummies, canned drinks, pills and vapes.
But Trump and industry leaders successfully lobbied Senate leaders to add language to a government funding patch earlier this month to delay the ban until mid-December, with the administration promising instead to finalize regulations cracking down on how the products are made and sold.
Now House Republican leaders are aiming to clear that bill for Trump’s signature early next week, according to three people granted anonymity to disclose private discussions. And many GOP lawmakers are not pleased at the prospect of being rolled.
Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) told reporters last week that he expected House lawmakers would “iron out” some “sticking points” with the Senate-passed funding bill, “particularly the hemp issue,” rather than pass the legislation without changes — which appears to be GOP leadership’s current plan.
Sen. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) was more blunt: “it is morally reprehensible to threaten a shutdown over a loophole Congress agreed to close to less than a year ago,” he said in a statement Thursday.
Yet despite fierce pushback from lawmakers warning that the intoxicating products are harming Americans, hemp industry leaders are preparing for a victory, betting members of Congress ultimately care more about swiftly passing legislation to avert a Sept. 30 government shutdown before the midterms.
“Any effort to try to shut down the government — over a one-month delay on a hemp issue — I don’t think is going to fly well with most members of Congress,” Jonathan Miller, a top lawyer for the U.S. Hemp Roundtable advocacy group, said in an interview this week.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about its plans for imposing new rules on hemp products in the coming months. But the Trump administration is expected to need more time than mid-December to finalize regulations, so hemp industry representatives are discussing a “regulatory bridge” that would impose temporary rules while continuing to avoid a full ban, according to Miller.
That could include restricting purchase to adults age 21 and older, blocking imports from China, mandating certain manufacturing practices, cracking down on copycat products that look like popular candy or potato chips and requiring transparency in product labeling.
While lawmakers have been back home over their summer break, hemp industry leaders have fanned out across the country to make their case for this plan. “The hemp industry does not have an August recess,” Christopher Lackner, head of the Hemp Beverage Alliance, said in an interview this month of the group’s work to facilitate passage of the Senate-passed funding bill.
Trump administration officials have also been telling reluctant lawmakers they will use the one-month delay to work on regulations. “The White House has committed to me that they’re committed to regulate the industry,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said in an interview this month.
Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.), who fought in the Senate to retain the ban as originally intended, said White House officials have said “they don’t want another extension, and I agree with that.”
In a statement, Ricketts said that “manufactured high-THC products like gummies and drinks are putting our kids in the hospital” and need to be taken “off our shelves.”
Some supporters of the ban say the White House and industry are just employing delay tactics to get to December, when lawmakers will face another pressure campaign to delay the ban while they are motivated to avert a shutdown before leaving town for the holidays.
“What they’re really after is to try to jam this on some must-pass, end-of-the-year funding,” Budd told reporters earlier this month. “That’s really what this is about.”
Budd fought to block the delay in the Senate as part of the government funding measure, but his amendment to that end was shot down 61-32 before the chamberpassed the legislation, sending it on for House action.
Trump personally called Budd after the senator filed the amendment and talked about creating federal regulations for hemp products, according to a Senate aide granted anonymity to describe the private discussion.
Days later, Budd demanded a vote on the amendment anyway and continues to slam the hemp industry.
“It is clear that businesses that sell unregulated, intoxicating products will stop at nothing to protect their bottom line, even at the expense of children’s health and safety,” he said in a statement this week.
Besides lawmakers fighting to ban intoxicating hemp products, others are pushing alongside the White House and industry for federal regulations.
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-W.Va.) has crafted legislation that would direct the Food and Drug Administration to create federal rules for intoxicating hemp products and wants to see mandates for third-party testing, as well as new THC limits per serving.
Griffith told reporters Thursday the “deadline push” in the Senate-passed government funding measure “is not long enough” to finalize necessary regulations.
Since state limits for THC vary widely throughout the country and the federal government has taken years to step in since the hemp loophole was created in 2018, Griffith argued it makes more sense to regulate the intoxicating products than to enact a federal ban.
“That horse is out of the barn,” he said. “What we need to do is corral it.”
Kelsey Brugger, Amanda Friedman and Rachel Shin contributed to this report.
President Donald Trump’s $400-million super PAC is taking its first steps into the general election: hosting a public event in battleground Michigan, headlined by Vice President JD Vance.
Battleground Republicans have been clamoring for Trump’s MAGA Inc. to spend in competitive races. The Michigan event is an early indicator of how the massive group might seek to use its funds to help the party keep control of Washington.
Vance will be joined in Sterling, Michigan, on Monday by GOP Senate nominee Mike Rogers, 10th District nominee Mike Bouchard Jr. and gubernatorial nominee John James, along with several other Michigan Republicans, according to an event advisory from MAGA Inc.
The GOP sees Michigan’s open seat as its best Senate pickup target this fall as Rogers faces former public health leader and progressive Abdul El-Sayed, who emerged from a grueling primary earlier this month.
“MAGA Inc. will be hosting events throughout the nation to ensure that Republicans retain control of Congress in order to finish cleaning up the mess the Biden-Harris-Pelosi-Schumer Democrats left,” said Alex Pfeiffer, spokesperson for MAGA Inc. “We’re not going back to their record inflation, open borders, and surging crime.”
MAGA Inc. is sitting on more funds than any other super PAC, and Republican donors and battleground candidates have been hoping it will unleash that money to help the party keep control of the House and Senate.
So far, the group has only spent only a few million dollars out of its massive fundraising haul, and its funds have largely gone to competitive Republican primaries. Most recently, it spent $827,000 on phone calls and text messages to boost Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) in the state’s special primary.
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