After a dominating Democratic performance in the 2025 elections, some Republicans have grudgingly acknowledged reality. “Last night was a disaster,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told Fox News. “It was an electoral blowout.” The GOP senator added that his party would be wise to see the results as “a warning sign.”
It was a warning sign, however, that some other Republicans preferred to overlook. In fact, many leading GOP partisans settled on the same talking point: There’s little to be learned, some Republicans said, from Democrats winning elections in blue states.
“I watched very closely,” Donald Trump told Fox News the day after the elections. “These are three pretty Democrat [sic] states.” House Speaker Mike Johnson pushed a similar line during a Capitol Hill press conference a few hours earlier, telling reporters, “What happened last night is blue states and blue cities voted blue.”
Predictably, JD Vance joined the chorus. The New Republic noted:
Vice President JD Vance has finally reacted to the significant Democratic victories in Tuesday’s election, downplaying the wins while also mimicking the rhetoric of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani in his diagnosis of the GOP’s election night failures. ‘I think it’s idiotic to overreact to a couple of elections in blue states,’ Vance wrote in a post on X rather condescendingly.
These reactions aren’t altogether surprising. Every time Democrats have a great election cycle, Republicans scramble to downplay the results and reject the idea of changing the GOP’s direction. (See 2006, 2008, 2018, 2020, et al.)
But that doesn’t make the analyses accurate.
Vance’s reference to “a couple of elections,” for example, likely referred to Democratic victories in Virginia’s and New Jersey’s gubernatorial elections. What the Ohio Republican neglected to mention was the scope of the Democratic wins — Govs.-elect Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill cruised to double-digit wins, outpacing the polls and the party’s recent performances in the same states — coupled with downballot successes, including flipping state legislative seats.
Just as significant, though, were the party’s successes in contests outside blue states. In Mississippi, a state Trump won easily three times, Democrats were able to break the GOP’s supermajority in the state Senate. In Pennsylvania, a state Trump won twice, Republicans invested heavily to make gains on the state Supreme Court, but voters kept the Democratic majority intact. Even in Georgia, where Democrats haven’t won a nonfederal statewide race in almost two decades, Democratic candidates successfully — and easily — defeated two Republican members of the state’s utility board. GOP leaders can stick their heads in the sand, and given the circumstances, Democratic officials probably hope they will. But to see this week’s results as little more than “a couple of elections in blue states” is to miss the importance of what actually happened.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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