Trump: the Democrats' biggest weapon

Jay Jones, the Democratic Party candidate for attorney general of Virginia, should have been the perfect target at the perfect time for Republicans.

In early October, the US was reeling from the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist, which had provoked sympathy and profound shock at escalating political violence here. It was in this highly charged environment that some of Jones’s old text messages surfaced.

In 2022, he messaged a former colleague about the Virginia house speaker Todd Gilbert, a Republican. If he had two bullets, Jones said, and the choice between shooting Gilbert, Pol Pot or Hitler, he would unload both rounds into Gilbert.

When the recipient of these messages asked Jones to stop, he replied “Lol”. He then followed up with a call, in which he said he wished Gilbert’s wife could watch her child die in her arms, so that Gilbert would rethink his political views.

“Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy,” he texted after their call, before doubling down, saying that the Gilberts were “breeding little fascists”.

Jones apologised, but it was the perfect scandal, handed on a plate to the incumbent Republican attorney general Jason Miyares. His team went in hard. Every time the attack ads played on my car radio, I winced at Jones’s cold-blooded words, and wondered how he could ever imagine winning. And yet, on Tuesday night, Jones did win. He beat Miyares and took nearly 53% of the vote.

Abigail Spanberger was the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, and she had backed Jones after the texts emerged. But Spanberger also won, beating her Republican rival by a large margin.

These victories will give a huge shot of confidence to the Democrats, as they look ahead to the 2026 midterm elections, when all seats in the House of Representatives and a third of Senate seats are up for grabs. Jones and Spanberger both unseated Republicans in Virginia; the Democrats retained the governorship in New Jersey and three state supreme court seats in Pennsylvania. In California, voters backed a redistricting plan which could give the Democrats five more seats in the midterm elections next year. And then of course there’s Mamdani’s victory in New York.

It was a clean sweep, that went sharply against the prevailing narrative of a deflated Democratic Party thrown into disarray by the Trump juggernaut. But victory brings its own questions, the most pressing of which is whether the Democrats should move harder to the left. That question is raised mainly by Mamadni’s win but also by Omar Fateh, another democratic socialist, who contested the Minneapolis mayoral race and came a close second to another Democrat.

In contrast, Spanberger and the new governor of New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill, ran broadly centrist campaigns. There is a temptation now to go headlong into an ideological dispute about the future of the party.

Tempting though that may be, it would be a mistake. Trump’s electoral success was based on his ability to cut into traditional Democrat-voting groups like Black men and Hispanics by finding messaging that transcended ideology and that spoke to people’s everyday concerns. The Democrats must do the same. They must look at the similarities between the successful campaigns, rather than the differences.

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One aspect that the winning candidates shared was their fierce opposition to Trump’s power grab. This was tailored to the constituents: the Virginia electorate includes many federal workers impacted by Trump’s slash and burn approach to public services. In New York, migrant communities are concerned about ICE raids.

With Trump’s approval ratings at record lows, candidates in the midterms need to uncover the local impact of his policies – whether that’s cattle ranchers worried about Trump’s imports of Argentinian beef or rural factories hurting because of his tariffs. The cost of living and affordability were also at the centre of the winning campaigns, showing that people’s wallets matter more than ideology.

Getting the voters out is also key. Mamdani ran an innovative social media campaign that connected with voters in ways that Democrats traditionally struggle to do. And turnout in Virginia on Tuesday was the highest ever for a non-presidential election.

These election results show deep concern among Americans about the direction the country is going in. That Jay Jones was able to overcome such a damning exposé and still win convincingly shows that if the Democrats get their core messaging right, they don’t need to do a whole lot else. Trump is doing all their work for them.