What three November races will reveal about Democrats’ post-2024 rebuild
Almost a year into Trump 2.0, the contests in California, New Jersey and Virginia will show whether statewide strategy can translate into renewed national momentum ahead of the 2026 midterms.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Good Wednesday morning. Today is Day 22 of the government shutdown, now the second-longest funding lapse in U.S. history. Before we get to the mainbar, here’s the latest on where things stand.
The House has not voted in 33 days. It’s been 29 days since Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) won a special election to succeed her late father. She has yet to be sworn into office. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a lawsuit against Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for refusing to seat Grijalva while the House is out of session. (He has said he will administer the oath of office as soon as Democrats vote to reopen the government.)
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) has held the Senate floor for over 14 hours since Tuesday evening to protest what he describes as Trump’s grave threats to democracy. Across the Capitol, House Democratic leadership and the Steering and Policy Committee will hold a hearing this morning on the impacts of the shutdown.
The Senate is expected to vote on the House-passed short-term funding extension today for the 12th time. It is expected to fail again. Thune set up a Thursday vote on a bill sponsored by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) to provide back pay to furloughed federal employees and military servicemembers. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) will introduce a Democratic alternative to the Johnson bill, which all but assures the vote will fail.
With less than a month until the deadline in the House-passed bill, senators are actively discussing whether House Republicans will need to pass a new measure to extend funding past the current mid-November date.
“Those conversations should be happening right now,” Thune said.
The consensus among Democrats is that Trump will have to take a more active role in ending the shutdown stalemate.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) reached out to Trump about setting up a meeting to negotiate an agreement to end the shutdown.
“I would like to meet with both of them,” Trump said. “But I set one little caveat: I will only meet if they let the country open.”
During a lunch he hosted for Senate Republicans in the Rose Garden on Tuesday afternoon, Trump called Democrats obstructionists for requiring a negotiation on their demands in exchange for the votes to reopen the government.
“And the reason they are doing it is because we’re doing so well,” Trump said. “We’re doing so well all over the world.”
Schumer told reporters outside the Capitol on Tuesday evening that Trump has an obligation to negotiate with Democrats.
“The president should meet with us. It’s not me, him, or anything political. It’s that the people are in crisis,” he said.”They’re just shocked at how bad this is.”
Democrats are still resistant to Thune’s offer to negotiate an extension of the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced premium tax credits if they reopen the government. They simply don’t believe Republicans are acting in good faith on the issue.
“I think we would operate much better if people trusted each other more,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), a senior appropriator and key player in private informal talks over the ACA subsidies, said.
She told reporters that she has yet to see an offramp from the stalemate but that Congress could extend the ACA open enrollment period, which begins on November 1.
Meanwhile, Paul Ingrassia withdrew from his confirmation hearing to be special counsel for the United States on Thursday before the Senate Homeland Security Committee due to a lack of support from Senate Republicans following the publication of text messages in which he allegedly described himself as having a “Nazi streak” and made derogatory remarks about Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Thune told reporters on Tuesday morning that it would have been a mistake for Ingrassia to show up to the hearing.
Schumer isn’t satisfied though since it seems Ingrassia will remain as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.
“This isn’t anywhere near enough,” Schumer said on X. “Trump has to fire him immediately.”
The Democratic Party is still living in the shadow of 2024.
What began as a brutal presidential race ended in a full-scale political collapse: Former President Joe Biden forced from the race under pressure after that debacle of a debate, former Vice President Kamala Harris losing narrowly across every swing state in a 107-day sprint to sell her candidacy to voters demanding a break from the Biden years, and Democrats lost the Senate and failed to win back the House.
This sequence, of course, handed Republicans total control of Washington for the first time since 2017—and with it, the power to pass Donald Trump’s sprawling megabill filled with his domestic priorities, confirm his most controversial cabinet nominees and claw back billions in previously approved spending through partisan rescissions.
Nearly a year later, Democrats are still trying to rebuild a brand battered by defeat and self-doubt—searching for the right balance between pragmatism, imagination, restraint and resistance.
But as Democrats hold firm in their demands to end the shutdown, three November 4 elections will provide an early measure of whether that effort is beginning to pay off.
California’s Proposition 50 would authorize a one-time mid-decade congressional redistricting to help offset a Texas gerrymander that could cost Democrats up to five seats in the Lone Star State; Rep. Mikie Sherrill is favored in New Jersey’s tightening gubernatorial race; and former Rep. Abigail Spanberger leads in Virginia, where no woman has ever served as governor.
“It will be a signal about where the country is headed in the midst of dealing with the national nightmare that is the Trump administration and the Republican sycophants in the House and the Senate who are embracing all of this extremism,” Jeffries told me about the elections. “That’s why Democrats are fighting hard across the country every day, every week, every month, this year, next year, until we get to the midterm elections and can begin to end the national nightmare that Republicans are visiting on the American people.”
In a somewhat rare move for a state ballot measure, California’s Proposition 50 would authorize a one-time mid-decade congressional redistricting. If approved, the state legislature’s new maps—drawn in response to a Republican-led redrawing in Texas—would be in effect from 2026 until the post-2030 Census round. The campaign, however, has not been without controversy: Opponents decry it as a partisan gambit and warn of setting a precedent for mid-cycle map changes, while some good-government groups remain wary. Either way, California voters on November 4 will decide whether the state will go on the offensive in the redistricting war or stick with the status quo.
“It’s a moral defense and a strategic offense. It is a must. There may be no free and fair elections in 2028 if we cannot neutralize the chaos from Trump,” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) told me. “300,000 Black women across the country became unemployed in three months. If we can’t win in CA, expect more of this.”
The New Jersey gubernatorial race has emerged as a key test of the Democratic brand in a state with a blue tilt but no guarantee of safe outcomes. Sherrill, a former U.S. Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who flipped New Jersey’s 11th congressional district in 2018, clinched the Democratic nomination for governor after defeating a crowded field in June. Her campaign emphasizes service, steadiness and affordability for Garden State families, positioning her as the most electable Democrat in the race. She will face Republican Jack Ciattarelli in November, a contest being watched not just as a state race but as an early indicator of voter sentiment toward Democrats under the current national climate.
Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) ran for the House in the 2018 cycle after seeing his state’s voters replace then-Republican Gov. Chris Christie with Gov. Phil Murphy after Trump was elected in 2017.
“It’ll certainly send signals in terms of what direction we’re going,” Kim said of the upcoming New Jersey race. “I was just on the ground. We got a lot of good energy there right now.”
In Virginia, Spanberger, a former congresswoman and ex-CIA officer, is seeking to become the state’s first female governor—and to give Democrats a much-needed win in a political climate dominated by President Trump. She faces Republican Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears in a race that’s shaping up as a referendum on competence, stability and the cost of living. Spanberger has built her campaign around pragmatic themes—lowering costs, improving education, and protecting personal freedoms—while steering clear of the partisan fights consuming Washington. History, meanwhile, may be on her side. Except for 2013, Virginia has elected a governor from the opposite party of the sitting president in every election since 1977, a pattern that gives Democrats cautious optimism heading into November.
“I hope it’s going to send a big signal that folks are rejecting the current administration,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) told me about the race.
The 2026 midterms are still a political lifetime away, and there’s no guarantee that the results in California, New Jersey or Virginia will carry into next year. Off-year elections tend to turn on local dynamics that don’t always translate nationally. But these contests do reveal what Democrats want the party to be known for heading into 2026: candidates focused on kitchen-table issues like health care, the economy, education and housing—rather than the endless churn of MAGA culture wars.
In California, Democrats are signaling they won’t sit quietly while Texas gerrymanders away Democratic seats, a move that could resonate with voters frustrated by what they see as years of one-sided aggression from the right. And in states like New Jersey and Virginia, Democrats are testing whether a focus on affordability, education, and public safety can persuade voters without getting pulled into the GOP’s polarizing fights over immigration and crime.
Even so, Democrats have reason to be cautiously bullish about their odds of clawing back at least one chamber. Historically, the president’s party almost always loses ground in the midterms, and Trump 2.0’s brazen executive overreach and poor approval on the economy give Democrats an opening to harness that pattern. On top of that, Senate Democrats have quietly improved their map: Schumer has landed strong recruits in Ohio (Sherrod Brown’s bounceback bid for a fourth term), North Carolina (Former Gov. Roy Cooper’s entry into the race a few months ago to put the Tar Heel State in play), and Maine (where Gov. Janet Mills could be formidable if she withstands a primary challenge from Graham Platner)—all contests that could make the 2026 landscape far more competitive than it appeared just a few months ago.
For all the work Jeffries has poured into shaping the Democratic storyline through the trio of November 4 elections, one race closer to home has proved trickier to navigate: the New York mayoral.
Zohran Mamdani has jolted the city’s progressive grassroots with the kind of urgent, movement-based energy national Democrats have been trying to recapture. But the very traits that animate his following also alarm the party’s establishment. His democratic-socialist label, unvarnished criticism of Israel, past embrace of “defund the police,” and refusal to back Harris in 2024 have made him a lightning rod—and, for Republicans, a gift-wrapped caricature of what they want voters to believe Democrats have become.
Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have expressed little interest in that fight and have instead focused their ire on congressional Republicans since the June primary for passing Trump’s megabill and their unwillingness to extend the ACA premium subsidies. The Brooklynites’ jobs, as they see it, are to win back majorities in their respective chambers, not referee an intraparty identity contest.
Although both have held back from formally endorsing Mamdani and have not indicated they will eventually, they plan to speak with him before early voting begins on Saturday as they navigate the local and national ramifications of their decisions.
Jeffries has promised for months to weigh in before then. When pressed this week on whether that was still the plan, he didn’t hedge or elaborate.
“Yes, that’s my intention,” he said.