This analysis by Daniel Nichanian at Bolts is well worth reading. The off-year elections don’t always mean a lot but this year is different:
At the start of Donald Trump’s first presidency, in 2017, large Democratic victories in New Jersey and Virginia, paired with overperformances in special elections, foreshadowed the blue wave of the 2018 midterms. Eight years later, Trump’s return to power has been followed by similar Republican setbacks, including Democrats’ sweep of all 13 statewide elections that took place this November, plus myriad gains for local offices.
Now, with this year’s contests nearly all completed after Tuesday, which saw Democrats stage an upset and flip a state House seat in Georgia, the extent to which the GOP struggled in legislative races has also come into view.
Democrats, buoyed by Trump’s unpopularity and a fired-up base, flipped 21 percent of all the GOP-held seats that were on the ballot throughout 2025.
According to Bolts’ analysis, Democrats gained 25 state Senate and House seats that were held by the GOP, out of the 118 that were resolved this year in regular or special elections.
The swing is even stronger than in 2017, when Democrats flipped 20 percent of all GOP-held legislative seats up for election, per Bolts’ review of data compiled at the time by elections websites Ballotpedia and The Downballot.
Among their 2025 gains, Democrats have secured their largest majority in the Virginia House since the 1980s, expanded their control of the New Jersey Assembly, and broken Republican supermajorities in the state senates of Iowa and Mississippi. They also flipped a state Senate seat in a deeply Republican region of Pennsylvania, and staged Tuesday’s upset in a Georgia district that Trump had carried by double-digits last year.
Meanwhile, Republicans failed to flip any legislative seats this year, losing ground even in New Jersey, where they had high hopes, and failing to gain several districts in New York State that Trump carried last year. (The GOP did manage to flip a handful of seats in 2017.)
Read on for more. This isn’t a fluke.
I’m not in the prediction business so I have no idea what will happen. But the signs are all very positive that people are seeing Trump and his henchmen’s destruction of our country and they are coming out in large numbers to curb their power.
Even Trump seems resigned:
FWIW, he also seems completely addled: