No one wants to cross the commander in chief.
Presidents therefore get used to hearing only what they want to hear. And Oval Office bubbles have rarely been as impermeable as the one around Donald Trump, with his Cabinet of yes-men and yes-women and the hero worship of conservative media.
This is a president who blasts suspected cartel speedboats out of the oceans in what critics say are extrajudicial killings. He sends troops into American cities. He ripped down the historic White House East Wing — just because he could.
Trump’s projection of omnipotence is reaching new heights as the misery of the government shutdown deepens. Tearing his eyes from global peacemaking and summitry with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, he insisted in a “60 Minutes” interview that pain for millions would only end when Democrats cave. This followed his apparently unironic Halloween Party on a theme of the Great Gatsby, the parable of how of corrupting wealth and materialism wrecked lives in the Jazz Age.
Only judges who’ve reined in some of his most audacious power grabs have managed to slow Trump. But as he claims the greatest nine months of any administration, while polling suggests Americans feel otherwise, he seems primed for a fall — a possibility America’s inexorable election calendar is often only too happy to oblige.
Gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday — and to a lesser extent, a New York mayor’s race and a redistricting initiative in California — offer voters the first chance to make a material comment on Trump’s second term.
There are plenty of reasons not to read too much into these races, since voters outraged by the incumbent president — in this case, Democrats — have more of an incentive to show up. And no one knows what the political environment, the economy, the international situation, or Trump’s personal standing will look like ahead of far more important midterm elections next year.
Even a Democratic sweep on Tuesday won’t erase the party’s shame from 2024. Nor will it change Trump’s behavior or deter him from governing only for his base.
But these first major nationally watched elections since Trump reclaimed the White House are significant because they are shaped by the fury of the most disruptive year in modern presidential history. They’re also a staging ground for wounded Democrats as they cobble together a counterattack to take on Trump and to ease the disdain of indifferent voters.
Big Democratic wins based on discontent with Trump’s presidency might fall on deaf ears in the West Wing. But they’d surely send a warning to Republicans that would mold the early days of the midterm campaign and might even influence the endgame of the government shutdown.
Still, Trump is a master at upending expectations. He’s conjured surprising strength when polls suggested otherwise in the past. If he can defy portents of a good Democratic night on Tuesday amid a sour national mood, he will write yet another chapter in his extraordinary tale of political resilience.
If the Trump wall does start to crumble, it may first be seen in New Jersey.
That’s because Virginia has always had a unique political microclimate. The Democratic candidate there, Abigail Spanberger — while critical of Trump — anchored her campaign on affordability concerns that unite suburban liberals in the Washington suburbs and more fickle voters in exurban swing counties.
But her friend and former House colleague New Jersey Democratic nominee Mikie Sherrill put Trump closer to the center of her race, branding her GOP opponent Jack Ciattarelli as a Trump clone.
“He’ll do whatever Trump tells him to do, and I will fight anybody to work for you,” Sherill, a former Navy helicopter pilot and mother of four, said of her opponent in their first debate clash in September. She has never let Ciattarelli forget that he gave Trump an “A” grade during their second debate last month.
The New Jersey GOP nominee has a balancing act not dissimilar to the one successfully conducted by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin when he won his race four years ago. This involves maximizing turnout from Trump’s base in a year when the dominant Republican of his generation is not on the ballot, but also attracting crossover voters who may bristle at the president’s behavior.
Ciattarelli based his mark for Trump on specific issues. “He’s right about securing the border; inflation is much lower than under Biden; he halted offshore wind; he’s pushing back on New York’s congestion pricing; and he quadrupled the SALT (state and local taxes) deduction,” the Republican nominee said in the second New Jersey debate.
But Ciattarelli has a tougher task than Youngkin, who was running against the party of an incumbent president, Joe Biden, at a time when an anti-Democratic backlash was growing. And the cultural issues that helped propel Youngkin to Richmond appear to have lacked the same resonance for Republicans this fall.
New Jersey is not a sure thing in gubernatorial races. It has sometimes produced Republican governors, including Christine Todd Whitman and Chris Christie. And if Ciattarelli becomes the first Garden State Republican to win the New Jersey governorship in the Trump era, you can be sure the president will claim credit.
While Sherrill’s attempts to tie her opponent to an unpopular incumbent president — and the high grocery, health care and housing costs on his watch — Ciattarelli has also sought to lean into the change mantra, targeting the now-unpopular New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, to whom he lost by only 3 points in the previous gubernatorial race four years ago.
Kristoffer Shields, director of the Eagleton Center on the American Governor at Rutgers University, said that local factors, including utility rates and property taxes, were the most important drivers of the New Jersey race. But below the top-line result, the contest may produce fresh electoral intelligence.
“New Jersey has arguably moved to the right over the last couple of election cycles. It’s going to be really interesting to see if that continues in this race or if the reaction to the Trump presidency pushes it back to the left,” Shields said.
Shields also suggested that the New Jersey and Virginia elections would be a test of whether a fractured Democratic Party is “able to come together and really drive turnout for a fairly moderate Democratic candidate for governor.” This is a key question because a broad-tent political strategy that would allow more centrist candidates to prosper in moderate areas and ultra-liberals to triumph in favorable districts still requires the party’s left-wing base to turn out everywhere.
On the Republican side, the New Jersey race may also offer a hint to GOP midterm election strategists as they model their coalition. “There is a sense that Trump Republicans show up to vote for Trump, but don’t always show up to vote when other Republicans are at the top of the ticket,” said Shields.
New Jersey may begin to answer questions about Trump’s enduring appeal, the transferability of his charisma and the future direction of the GOP. After all, he’ll never top a Republican ticket again, assuming he doesn’t try to subvert the Constitution by running for a third term, so Republicans sooner or later are going to have to learn to live without him.
In 2024, Trump made moderate but still significant gains among Black and Hispanic voters that led some MAGA strategists to dream about a permanent political realignment forged from the erosion of some key Democratic constituencies. Can such aspirations outlast Trump? New Jersey may begin to provide answers.
In some Garden State cities last year, Trump more than doubled his share and raw total of Latino voters compared with the 2020 election. In Passaic County, for instance, where Latinos make up roughly 43% of the population, Trump beat Harris by nearly 3 points after losing to Biden by 16 points four years before. In the city of Passaic, where more than 70% of residents are Hispanic, Trump defeated Harris by nearly 1,100 votes, a swing from Biden’s almost 5,000-vote advantage, CNN’s Arlette Saenz reported.
No one expects the same kind of enthusiasm without Trump on the ballot. But the results in counties where the president overperformed will be examined after Tuesday night for lessons about long-term Republican hopes. A larger-than-expected falloff might also hint at the impact of his hardline immigration policies and disappointment with the economy so far in 2025.
The Democratic case in New Jersey most put most sharply by former President Barack Obama — still his party’s most talented and forensic orator — at a rally for Sherrill on Saturday, in which he lacerated his successor’s record while trying to avoid the recent Democratic failing of patronizing Trump’s voters.
“There is absolutely no evidence that Republican policies have made life better for the people in New Jersey. They have devoted enormous energy to entrenching themselves in power, punishing their enemies, enriching their friends, silencing their critics. They put on a big show of deporting people and targeting transgender folks. They never miss a chance to scapegoat minorities and blame DEI for every problem under the sun,” Obama said.
“But what they haven’t done is help you,” the former president continued. “They haven’t put forward serious proposals to lower housing costs or make groceries more affordable. They haven’t improved our schools or made health care more accessible or shortened your commute, or prepared young people for a future where AI might take their jobs.”
The Republican spin, should Tuesday night’s results disappoint, will come as no surprise. Trump’s aides will point out that New Jersey and Virginia went to Harris last year. They may fault the performance of Virginia Republican nominee Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, with whom the president did not campaign in person. And a couple of elections can’t change the trajectory of the country. In an off-year, the president isn’t going to get the kind of political punch in the mouth administered by voters to Obama in 2010 or to himself in 2018 when Democrats won back the House during his first term.
So, it will be easy for Trump to keep listening to what he wants to hear, despite an approval rating of 37% in a new CNN/SSRS poll and findings that majorities of Americans think the country is doing badly and the economy is in poor shape.
But a vanguard of the tens of millions of voters who will shape the final two years of the Trump presidency in 2026 and weigh in on his legacy in the 2028 presidential election will have spoken. And they will have sent a message that American politics never stands still, even for a president like Trump, who tries to defy the political tides.
