This week marked the first special elections of 2025 with legislative races in Virginia. These first results in the wake of the November 2024 election can help provide some clarity to the current political moment.
Democrats won two key races and will hold their majorities in the Virginia State Senate and House of Delegates. Virginia House Delegate Kannan Srinivasan, who in 2023 was the first Indian American immigrant elected to serve in the House of Delegates, won in Senate District 32 while JJ Singh, the son of Indian immigrants, prevailed in House District 26, both in Eastern Loudoun County. (Meanwhile, MAGA influencers spent time stirring up anti-Indian American racism as they waged internal fights.)
This upcoming November, all 100 seats in the House of Delegates will be on the ballot as will the race for Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General. But these statewide races can also carry national significance, as Virginia’s off-year statewide races have often been viewed as a bellwether of national politics. For example, the 2017 Virginia elections showed Democrats a path back after Trump’s 2016 election when Ralph Northam defeated Ed Gillespie. Shortly before that 2017 election, Steve Bannon predicted GOP nominee Gillespie would win because he adopted a viciously anti-immigrant agenda pushed by Trump and Corey Stewart. At the time, Republicans also controlled the US House and Senate.
In the lead-up to these latest Virginia contests, the national political media bought into their own narrative that Democrats were in serious trouble. On December 8, 2024, the New York Times headlined its article: “Did Trump Drain Democrats’ Energy? These Races Will Be the First Test,” with Reid Epstein writing these Virginia special elections “may serve as barometers of partisan enthusiasm in the Trump 2.0 era.”
Then this week, CNN blared: “Virginia special elections are early test of Democratic enthusiasm after Trump victory”. And Politico: “The tea leaves to read in Virginia’s special elections,” with the subhead “Democrats should win two legislative special elections in Virginia on Tuesday. But an upset loss could be disastrous.”
Well, that narrative should have been shattered on Jan. 7. Democrats passed that “first test” big time and do, in fact, have enthusiasm. As David Nir and Jeff Singer noted at The Downballot, “Both Democrats ran about 1 point ahead of Kamala Harris,” while Luther Cifers, a Republican who won in a third race outside Richmond, “underperformed Donald Trump by 9 points.” So, it was actually the Republicans who didn’t meet expectations.
On the same day as the Virginia special elections, NYT columnist Tom Edsall pondered, “A key question emerging from the 2024 elections is whether the Democratic Party is significantly — or even permanently — wounded. Can it return to fighting trim in 2026 and 2028?” But Srinivasan and Singh wins in Virginia last night suggest something much different. One that Mike Podhorzer elaborated on in his Weekend Reading newsletter. Doing a deep dive into the 2024 election results, looking at real numbers, not exit polls. It’s well worth a read. His main conclusions:
“… America didn’t swing rightward, but couchward:
- The popular vote result was almost entirely a collapse in support for Harris and Democrats, not an increase in support for Trump and MAGA. Trump was no more popular this year than four years ago, while Harris significantly underperformed Biden 2020.
- Most of Harris’s losses were due to anti-MAGA surge voters staying home. She lost the most ground in deep-Blue urban areas, where the dangers of a second Trump administration seemed most remote. About 19 million Americans who cast ballots for Biden in 2020 did not vote in 2024.
- Anti-MAGA surge voters stayed home because they were less alarmed by a second Trump Administration than they were four years ago. A key to Biden’s victory was high turnout from less-engaged voters who believed they had something to lose under Trump. In 2024, however, about 15 million fewer votes were cast “against” Trump than in 2020.”
What do these election results and analysis mean for the politics of immigration?
It’s not that Trump won more people over to his side with his racist, xenophobic campaign that is now also attacking U.S. citizens, particularly those of color, by announcing his intention to “eliminate birthright citizenship,” the protection enshrined in the 14th Amendment that guarantees citizenship to children born on U.S. soil regardless. Instead, Democrats just didn’t provide enough of an alternative while dealing with worldwide anti-incumbent sentiment.
What’s disturbing is that so many people didn’t think Trump will be as bad this time around. As we have repeatedly noted, the second administration is likely to be much worse. We have seen ample reporting on families with undocumented members who voted for Trump because they believed he would only deport supposed “criminals.” The fact is that these family members will not be exempt from “bloody” mass deportation because Trump and Stephen Miller think all undocumented immigrants are criminals, even if they have no criminal record. Their campaign repeatedly sought to avoid critical questions about their agenda, but what is glaringly clear that not enough was done to expose the horrific consequences of their mass deportation agenda on the American people.
Learning the wrong lessons from the elections results in bad political choices. Acquiescing to Trump and Congressional Republicans’ mass deportation agenda because you have fallen for the political spin of a nativist mandate is the wrong lesson. Running to cosign a nativist agenda isn’t going to win any new political friends and risks the opportunity to define a contrasting alternative story for the American people. A different lesson could be providing a story that rebuts the lie that our immigrant neighbors are to blame for all of our problems and proposes solutions, not scapegoats.
