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.”
Sens. Susan Collins and Patty Murray have long prided themselves on working together to advance government funding bills. That collegiality is now showing signs of decay.
The Maine Republican and Washington Democrat have been openly feuding about the path forward on spending measures this summer. It comes after their successful collaboration on bipartisan legislation during Murray’s two-year reign as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which continued when Collins took the gavel last year.
Democrats attribute the clash to Collins’ pursuit of President Donald Trump’s demands for a record military budget that eclipses domestic spending, as she fights to retain her Senate seat in November. Republicans say Murray is playing midterm politics by trying to prevent Collins from landing a deal before Election Day, when Democrats hope to regain House and Senate majorities — and the upper hand in year-end funding talks.
“It’s not personal, but it is very frustrating,” Collins said last week, while insisting she and Murray are still on good terms.
All Murray would say about the state of their relationship was, “We’re talking.”
While that impasse doesn’t necessarily heighten the odds of a government shutdown this fall, it could delay any meaningful Senate appropriations action until after the elections. The outcome of congressional races — including Collins’ toss-up contest against Democrat Graham Platner — could change the power balance in government funding negotiations.
“It certainly looks to me like the Democrats don’t want to give Susan Collins a victory,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said in an interview. “I really think it’s intensely political. She is a very reasonable legislator. If you can’t make a deal with Susan Collins, you don’t want to make a deal.”
Part of Collins’ campaign-trail pitch to Mainers is that she gets results in Washington, and her inability to advance the dozen annual appropriations bills through her committee undercuts that narrative.
Collins isn’t refuting the idea that Democrats might want to deprive her of legislative success as she competes against Platner in one of the closest and most-watched races in the country.
“That’s certainly a viable theory, which is pretty pathetic,” she said in an interview.
This month Collins publicly accused Murray of sending government funding offers that have “made it clear that Democrats are abandoning the appropriations process.” Murray, meanwhile, suggested Collins was at fault for the stalemate by divulging she hadn’t responded to Murray’s latest offer in more than two weeks.
It’s a major tone shift for the two lawmakers, who have earned a reputation for trying to stay out of the partisan fray since they became their party’s top leaders on the Appropriations Committee in 2023. They’ve consistently resisted broadcasting behind-the-scenes friction during tough negotiations and succeeded in reaching cross-party compromises to advance funding bills each year — even after the record government shutdown last fall.
But they’re now at loggerheads over funding totals for the military and domestic programs, along with votes on hot-button Trump policies. Senate Republicans are seeking a military funding boost more than four times larger than any increase in domestic spending, as Trump calls for a record $1.5 trillion defense budget.
“We do not have an agreement,” Murray said, because Republicans “are set on increasing defense in an increasingly huge way that we’ve never had to deal with before.”
GOP senators also want to avoid any amendment votes that could sink approval of appropriations bills, including some related to the Justice Department’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” administration officials have promised not to pursue.
The result is that Collins has yet to hold a committee markup on a single government funding bill with just three months left before federal dollars expire. And some Republican appropriators acknowledge it’s possible the panel won’t vote on any of the spending measures this year given the deadlock.
“Obviously Susan is up this year. And Democrats, at every level and every opportunity, are playing politics with it,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in an interview. “The appropriations process used to be fairly bipartisan. … Murray and the Democrats have turned it into a partisan game.”
Some Democrats openly sympathize with Collins’ predicament in trying to represent politically moderate Maine while holding one of the most influential positions on Capitol Hill during Trump’s second term and unified Republican control of Congress.
“The chair of the committee is being squeezed in every direction,” Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a senior Democratic appropriator, said in an interview.
Many Senate Republicans don’t “give a damn” about funding domestic efforts like public education and biomedical research, Baldwin continued. “I believe that the chairwoman does care about those issues. But you know, she’s in an unenviable position.”
Since Trump was reelected, Collins has worked to negotiate funding bills that spend far more on domestic programs than the president sought. The result has been essentially flat funding for nondefense programs and a 17 percent increase in military spending, which includes the billions of dollars Republicans enacted along party lines last year.
“Chair Collins is very devoted to, or interested in, following through to help the president get more money for the Department of War and munitions, et cetera,” said West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a top Republican appropriator. “And I think Senator Murray is on the opposite page.”
“Rather than legislate and work these things out,” Capito added, “I think it’s been decided on the other side to just be obstinate and not participate and not negotiate.”
Trump is calling this year for boosting Pentagon spending by more than 40 percent while slashing domestic programs by 10 percent. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a senior Democratic appropriator who has served in Congress for more than 40 years, calls it “a massive change” in the way government funding has been divvied up for decades — by negotiating matching dollar-for-dollar increases in both military and nondefense funding.
“We’re so far apart. We haven’t faced anything like that in recent memory,” Durbin said in an interview. “And to accept the premise of it — what’s left for nondefense is terrible.”
Collins could proceed with markups this summer without an agreement with Democrats, as the House Republican majority has done for years. But Republican senators would need to be willing to vote on controversial amendments Democrats might offer — including proposals that defy Trump.
Senate Republican appropriators faced that issue last summer, when the panel unexpectedly adopted an amendment barring the Trump administration from repurposing cash intended for relocating the FBI headquarters. That outcome prompted several GOP senators to withdraw support for the funding bill.
“The challenge is that, if you have every Democrat voting against reporting the bill out — and then they also are offering poison pills — it’s hard to move those bills,” Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), chair of the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the FBI, said in an interview.
During the two years Murray chaired the full committee, Moran recalled, “We had members who wanted to offer what would probably be considered poison pills by Democrats. And Senator Collins talked Republicans out of doing so, to move the process.”
The two sides could easily reach an agreement on amendments and policy stipulations, some Democrats contend, if only Collins and Murray could bridge the divide between the president’s military funding demands and their own domestic priorities.
“Senator Collins is carrying out the administration’s wishes,” Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, another senior Democratic appropriator, said in an interview. “And Senator Murray is noting that a reckless increase in defense spending is not in the best interest of Americans.”
“So they’re both advocating for their viewpoint,” Merkley added. “That’s what we do in a democracy.”
Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.
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.
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.
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