WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democrats’ victories in Tuesday’s elections exposed potential vulnerabilities in U.S. President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration agenda and his attempt to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies, analysts said.
While the winners focused their campaigns on cost-of-living issues, they also embraced the core principles of DEI and integrated them into their platforms.
In Virginia, Abigail Spanberger, winner of the gubernatorial election, promised to restore a constitutional amendment on voting rights. Mikie Sherrill, winner of the election for governor of New Jersey, stated in a primary debate that she believes that LGBTQ+ education is essential for students and not a subject in which parents should choose not to participate.
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New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani was the most vocal, centering his economic platform on racial equality and economic justice. He spoke at the March on Wall Street in August, led by Reverend Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III and civil rights groups, in a direct show of support for policies aimed at helping marginalized communities.
Mamdani’s decisive victory over former governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who ran as an independent, makes him the first Muslim and the first person of South Asian descent to hold the office.
“New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, driven by immigrants, and, from tonight onwards, led by an immigrant,” said Mamdani, who was born in Uganda before his family moved to New York when he was a child, in his election night victory speech.
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‘So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get through to any one of us, you’re going to have to get through all of us.’
The White House declined to comment, but Trump on Wednesday repeatedly incorrectly labeled Mamdani a ‘communist.’ Mamdani is a democratic socialist.
“They put America last, we put America first,” Trump said in a speech in Miami. He blamed the US government shutdown for his party’s performance.
Since returning to power, Trump has attempted to overhaul DEI, denouncing it as ‘racist’ and ‘illegal’, through executive orders that purged the federal government of offices and departments created to develop and implement policies aimed at remedying discrimination and historic inequities.
Trump has also used the presidency to pressure private entities, such as companies, law firms and universities, to renege on their DEI principles.
REPUBLICANS LOSE LATINO VOTES
A shift to the left by Latino voters could also signal tension over Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda, which has been presented as an effort to go after dangerous criminals but which has also imprisoned U.S. citizens and people without criminal records. Some of these people were arrested in dramatic operations involving Black Hawk helicopters and tear gas.
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Sherrill won Tuesday in Passaic, the New Jersey county with the largest Latino population, by 15 percentage points, after Trump won the same county by three points last year. That suggests a shift in voting among Latinos, who are moving away from Republicans, said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist in New Jersey and former political director at the Republican National Committee.
“Democratic voters were extremely motivated by what they see as wrong with what Trump is doing,” DuHaime said of the role of immigration in voter sentiment. “They believe what Trump is doing is wrong and they are looking for someone who will fight him, not someone who will cooperate with him.”
Tuesday’s results represented a broad rejection of Trump’s authoritarian immigration policy as well as his attacks on DEI, said April English-Albright, legal director of the Black Voters Matter Fund, a group that fights for better voting access for marginalized and predominantly black communities.
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“He was, without a doubt, on the ballot and will remain on the ballot, in people’s hearts and minds, until he is no longer in American politics,” she said. “People will see every election as an opportunity to react.”
In both New Jersey and Virginia, more than 90% of voters who supported Democratic candidates believed Trump’s anti-immigration policies had gone too far, according to an exit poll conducted by SSRS for CNN and other media outlets.
In New York, 70% of Mamdani voters said the next mayor should not cooperate with the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
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DEMOCRATS TRY TO MAINTAIN MOMENTUM
Analysts say it remains to be seen whether these sentiments will translate into victory for Democrats in next year’s midterm elections.
“It remains unclear whether the midterm elections will be an electoral wave that brings new voices and new political perspectives, or whether there will be a rush to the center to avoid an even greater shift to the right under this administration,” said Phillip Solomon, a professor of African American studies and psychology at Yale University.
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‘Winning the election you’re expected to win doesn’t necessarily mean a watershed moment — it just means there hasn’t been a collapse.’
Polls show that the image of the Democratic Party remains unpopular, and although Trump’s approval rating has fallen, voters remain divided between the parties. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in late October found that respondents were equally likely to vote for a Republican or a Democrat for the House if the election were held that day.
Still, tensions are high in Black, Latino and Asian communities, which have been on the front lines of the fight against Trump’s diversity policies and were also among the groups with high turnout in Tuesday’s election, said former New York City mayoral candidate Maya Wiley.
Exit polls show that Sherrill and Spanberger, for example, outperformed their Republican opponents by a nearly two-to-one margin among Latinos.
‘Many of these places where these elections are taking place have had their people directly impacted by the Trump administration’s very radical and extremist agenda,’ said Wiley, president of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an entity focused on defending civil and human rights.
