Top 5 game-changers from the 2025 campaign trail

In the wake of last year’s tumultuous presidential election, which exhausted many Americans, it was expected to be quiet on the 2025 campaign trail.

But with President Donald Trump back in the White House and Democrats itching to rebound after last year’s ballot box setbacks, 2025’s off-year elections were anything but sedate.

Here are five of the biggest moments that shaped the campaign trail.

5. Democrats overperform in special elections

Just eight days into Trump’s second term in the White House, demoralized Democrats had something to cheer about.

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Democrat Mike Zimmer defeated Republican Katie Whittington in a special state Senate election in Iowa, flipping a Republican-controlled vacant seat in a district that Trump had carried by 21 points less than three months earlier.

Zimmer’s victory triggered a wave of Democrats overperforming in special elections and regularly scheduled off-year ballot box contests.

In Iowa, Democrats in August flipped another Republican-held seat in a state Senate special election, breaking the GOP’s supermajority in the upper chamber for the first time in three years.

“Since the president was inaugurated back in January, there’s been 45 elections on the ballot. Democrats have overperformed in all of them to the tune of about 16 percentage points on average,” Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin touted in a Fox News Digital interview days ahead of the 2025 elections.

4. Inflation persists, making affordability issue No. 1 on the campaign trail

It was the issue that boosted Trump and Republicans in the 2024 elections, as they won back the White House and Senate majority and kept control of the House.

But a year later, the economy, and everyday expenses in particular, are working against the president and his party in the 2025 elections.

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Democrats, with an across-the-board focus on affordability, enjoyed sweeping success at the ballot box earlier this month, with double-digit victories in the gubernatorial showdowns in blue-leaning but competitive New Jersey and Virginia, as well as major victories in high-profile contests in battlegrounds Georgia and Pennsylvania and solidly blue New York City and California.

“Voters are remarkably consistent in their priorities: the economy, the economy, the economy,” noted Wayne Lesperance, a veteran political scientist and president of New England College.

“When you win an election, voters expect you are going to do something to address those concerns and the reality is that the questions of affordability remain unchanged in their importance to the everyday voter.”

3. Jay Jones text messages revealed, rocking the Virginia elections

Virginia Democrats were cruising toward convincing victories in the commonwealth’s statewide elections when a scandal sent shockwaves up and down the ballot.

Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones instantly went into crisis mode after controversial texts were first reported earlier by the National Review in early October.

Jones acknowledged and apologized for texts he sent in 2022, when he compared then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert to mass murderers Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot, adding that if he was given two bullets, he would use both against the GOP lawmaker to shoot him in the head.

But Jones faced a chorus of calls from Republicans to drop out of the race.

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And the GOP leveraged the explosive revelations up the ballot, forcing Democratic Party nominee, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, back on defense in a campaign where she was seen as the frontrunner against Republican rival Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.

Earle-Sears didn’t waste an opportunity to link Spanberger to Jones. And during last month’s chaotic and only gubernatorial debate, where Earle-Sears repeatedly interrupted Spanberger, the GOP gubernatorial nominee called on her Democratic rival to tell Jones to end his attorney general bid.

“The comments that Jay Jones made are absolutely abhorrent,” Spanberger said at the debate. But she neither affirmed nor pulled back her support of Jones.

While the scandal grabbed national headlines, in the end it didn’t slow down the Democrats, as Spanberger crushed Earle-Sears by 15 points. Democrats won the separate election for lieutenant governor by 11 points and Jones even pulled off a 6-point victory over Republican incumbent Jason Miyares.

2. Trump urges Texas to redistrict

Aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterm elections, Trump in June first floated the idea of rare but not unheard of mid-decade congressional redistricting.

The mission was simple: redraw congressional district maps in red states to pad the GOP’s razor-thin House majority to keep control of the chamber in the 2026 midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.

Trump’s first target: Texas.

A month later, when asked by reporters about his plan to add Republican-leaning House seats across the country, the president said, “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.”

The push by Trump and his political team triggered a high-stakes redistricting showdown with Democrats to shape the 2026 midterm landscape in the fight for the House majority.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special session of the GOP-dominated state legislature to pass the new map.

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But Democratic state lawmakers, who broke quorum for two weeks as they fled Texas in a bid to delay the passage of the redistricting bill, energized Democrats across the country.

Among those leading the fight against Trump’s redistricting was Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.

California voters earlier this month overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot initiative which will temporarily sidetrack the left-leaning state’s nonpartisan redistricting commission and return the power to draw the congressional maps to the Democratic-dominated legislature.

That is expected to result in five more Democratic-leaning congressional districts in California, which aimed to counter the move by Texas to redraw their maps.

Meanwhile, an opinion by two federal judges in Texas this month delivered a blow to Trump and Republicans, by ruling that the state can’t use the newly drawn map in next year’s elections. Texas Republicans say they’ll appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.

But the fight has spread beyond Texas and California.

Right-tilting Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have drawn new maps as part of the president’s push. And red-leaning Indiana, Florida and Kansas are also mulling redrawing their maps.

“We must keep the Majority at all costs,” Trump wrote on social media this month.

Illinois and Maryland, two blue states, and Virginia, where Democrats control the legislature, are also taking steps or seriously considering redistricting.

And in a blow to Republicans, a Utah district judge this month rejected a congressional district map drawn up by the state’s GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that will create a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

1. Mamdani wins NYC mayoral primary

Zohran Mamdani’s convincing June 24 victory in New York City’s Democratic Party mayoral primary was the political earthquake that rocked the nation’s most populous city and sent powerful shockwaves across the country.

The capturing of the Democratic nomination by the now-34-year-old socialist state lawmaker over frontrunner former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and nine other candidates propelled Mamdani to this month’s general election victory.

While Mamdani’s 9-point general election victory is a shot in the arm for the rise of the socialist movement as it battles moderate Democrats for the future of the party, it also appears to be the political gift that keeps on giving for Republicans, as they aim to paint all Democrats as far-left radicals.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) was one of the first out of the gate to capitalize on the leftward lurch, firing off an email release minutes after Mamdani’s primary victory, arguing that “every vulnerable House Democrat will own him, and every Democrat running in a primary will fear him.”

And this month, immediately after Mamdani became mayor-elect, the NRCC claimed “the new face of the Democrat Party just dropped, and it’s straight out of a socialist nightmare.”

But Trump’s very chummy meeting with Mamdani recently at the White House seemed to undercut the GOP strategy to use the mayor-elect as a human cudgel.

Democrats insist that the effort to link Mamdani is a distraction from Republicans’ inability to deal with the affordability issue.

“Republican operatives in D.C. know they can’t win on the issues, so we’re seeing them melt down in real time, resorting to ineffective boogeyman attacks. It’s embarrassing,” the rival Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee charged.