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In today's issue:

▪ Dems sweep in key VA, NJ elections

▪ Trump tariff policy at Supreme Court

▪ Preparations begin to honor Dick Cheney

▪ Rubio to brief on boat strikes

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Democrats pulled off a romp of their Republican opponents in winning all key races on Tuesday night in the first major election of President Trump's second term.

The victories come one year before the 2026 midterms and are already giving the Democratic Party a shot in the arm following its crushing losses to Trump and the GOP last year.

Democrats won up and down the ballot in Virginia, clinched a second gubernatorial race in New Jersey with a massive double-digit margin, saw their redistricting ballot measure sail to victory in California and ousted two Republicans in Georgia in statewide races.

Progressives also won a big victory with democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani easily clinching the New York City mayoral race, defeating Andrew Cuomo for a second time. The former New York governor ran as an independent after Mamdani defeated him in the Democratic primary earlier this year.

The White House poked at Mamdani in a post on social platform X on Tuesday night, posting a styled poster declaring "Trump is your president."

Tuesday's results are objectively a reason for hope for Democrats, though how much can be extrapolated for elections a year from now is debatable. The major elections only took place in a few places, and the turnout was much lower than it will be next year.

Still, Democrats swept the board and largely outperformed polls, building back key parts of the coalition they had lost in 2024.

Democrats scored a quick and unsurprising victory in Virginia as former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D) defeated GOP Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears to win the gubernatorial race. Spanberger is set to become the commonwealth’s first female governor.

Spanberger had consistently led in polling throughout the campaign, but she finished better than polling suggested. She was ahead by a whopping 15 points with 95 percent of the vote counted.

Virginia state Sen. Ghazala Hashmi (D) also comfortably won the lieutenant governor’s race over Republican John Reid.

But perhaps the biggest surprise of the night came in the state’s attorney general race, as Democrat Jay Jones ousted incumbent Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (R), giving Democrats a clean sweep of the statewide races.

Jones’s campaign had been rocked over the past month by the revelation that he sent texts in 2022 wishing for political violence against a GOP political opponent and his family. Jones apologized for the texts, but Republicans in Virginia and throughout the country hammered him for weeks. Democrats rebuffed calls to push for him to drop out.

Jones won by the narrowest margin of any of the Democrats, but he’s still on track to win by a comfortable 6.5 points, an upset for Republicans whose hopes started to rise after polls showed Miyares taking a lead in the race after the Democrats' texts were revealed.

Meanwhile, Republicans had an objectively disappointing night in New Jersey.

The GOP had optimism their gubernatorial nominee, Jack Ciattarelli, could be poised to pull off an upset win against Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D). Ciattarelli outperformed polls four years ago to come just 3 points away from upsetting New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy's (D) reelection bid.

After Trump lost the state by only 6 points in the presidential race last year, Republicans were bullish they could get an upset with a well-known and decently likeable candidate in Ciattarelli, who focused on local issues.

Ciattarelli did run as a much closer ally of Trump than he did in 2021, a possible vulnerability given the president’s unpopularity in the state, but polls widely indicated it would be a close race.

Instead, Sherrill clinched a major double-digit victory. She made significant inroads throughout the state, seemingly flipping key bellwether regions like Gloucester and Atlantic counties that voted for Ciattarelli in 2021.

If Ciattarelli had outperformed the polls to the extent he did four years ago, he would have won. But it was the Democrat who outperformed this time, fending off GOP attempts to build on their recent gains.

Democrats also coasted to easy victories in the retention elections for three members of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, ensuring a liberal majority is preserved.

▪ The Hill: What Sherrill’s win could mean for the midterms.

▪ The Hill: Takeaways from Dems’ sweep in Virginia.

While the result was among the least surprising, some of the biggest enthusiasm on the left centered around Mamdani's win in New York.

Mamdani completed his rise from a little-known state Assembly member to mayor-elect of the country’s largest city and is set to make history as New York City’s first Muslim mayor. That path began when he pulled off a stunning upset of Cuomo in the Democratic primary in June.

The victory has energized progressives who rallied around his platform focused on affordability in a city full of residents facing an extraordinarily high cost of living. Still, critics have questioned how much of a mandate Mamdani can claim, particularly given his ambitious agenda.

As of the latest vote count, Mamdani is just ahead of a majority of the vote, while Cuomo trails by about 9 points. Republican Curtis Sliwa took 7 percent of the vote. In one of the most heavily Democratic cities in the country, almost half of all voters didn’t vote for the Democratic nominee.

That means Mamdani will have work to do to win over many who seemingly remain skeptical of his agenda.

Mamdani and Trump traded jabs often throughout the campaign, with the president calling Mamdani a "communist" and threatening to cut off financial support to the city if he's elected.

The New York Post leaned into the attacks on Mamdani following his win, running a front page dubbing the city "The Red Apple," a reference to the color often associated with communism.

Mamdani referenced Trump a few times in his victory speech, directly addressing him.

"So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us," he said.

▪ The Hill: Reasons why Mamdani defeated Cuomo.

▪ The Hill: Mamdani’s triumph ratchets up battle within Democratic Party.

▪ The Hill: Dems win key special elections in Georgia.

TRUMP DISMISSES RESULTS: President Trump dismissed the election results on Tuesday night as key race alerts poured in, with the president posting a comment he attributed to "pollsters" arguing that the GOP underperformed because his name was not on the ballot and due to the ongoing government shutdown.

"'TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT,' according to Pollsters," Trump posted on Truth Social.

Trump later reiterated his calls for Republicans to pass a wide range of measures to end the shutdown and revise the rules around elections over his unsubstantiated allegations that the current rules benefit Democrats........

© The Hill