Though I haven’t heard anything like the rage (well, Republican rage) at pollsters when they failed to predict Donald Trump’s 2016 and 2024 victories, I’m compelled to note that they also just failed to predict the Democratic blowouts of 2025. Republican Jack Ciattarelli, polls told us, was in striking distance of Democrat Mikie Sherrill in the New Jersey gubernatorial contest, while Abigail Spanberger appeared to be poised to win the Virginia governor’s race by a single-digit margin. Instead, Spanberger won by 15 points, Sherrill by 14, and each state saw hefty Democratic gains in their legislatures that took everyone completely by surprise. In Virginia, where Democrats expanded their House margin from 51-to-49 to 64-to-36, Democratic Speaker Don Scott told The Washington Post that he and his colleagues had expected to see “a little wave, but we didn’t see this doggone tsunami.” Neither did the pollsters.
There’s a well-documented host of reasons why polling has grown more difficult in recent decades: Various subsets of the public refuse to talk to pollsters, the transition from landlines to cellphones has been challenging, and so on. But I also think that Trump’s effect on turnout has been consistently underestimated. When he’s simply a candidate, out of office, not responsible for government policy and the state of the nation, he’s a spectacular tribune for the grievances of sometime voters, some legitimate, some not. His vows of retribution against targets whom many of those voters have been schooled to hate draw to the polls those who see a vote for Trump as an emotionally satisfying collective “fuck you” to people they wish to get fucked. When he’s in office, and responsible for the condition of the United States, his conduct draws a comparably large population of those appalled at Trump’s reign of fuck-you-ism to the polls.
Trump in power has meant death for Republican prospects in every election held while he’s occupied the Oval Office: 2017, 2018, 2020, and now 2025. Democrats and some independents quickly grasp that, in Adam Serwer’s Trump-defining words, “the cruelty is the point.” They surge to the polls.
Therein lies the source of last week’s Democratic sweeps.
By the metric of delivering a cosmically fuck-you presidency to his base (and by this metric only), Trump has delivered in his second term. Fucking with immigrants, universities, white-shoe law firms, foreign countries, minority-hiring corporations, politicians who oppose him, civil servants who follow the law rather than his diktats, and just plain people who’ve ticked him off—this has been the primary mission of the Trump administration and the subject of most of its activity. All of this has required an arrogation of power never before claimed, much less attempted, by an American president—a group that generally at least pretends to abide by the limits on presidential power imposed by the Constitution. But to Trump’s fuck-you boys (they’re disproportionately male), rolling over the Constitution is just the ultimate fuck-you to the establishment.
Running second on the list of Trump’s defining activities is demanding praise for his performance and creating ways in which that praise can be demonstrated and memorialized, whether by hanging huge photos of him on government buildings (à la Stalin, Mao, or Saddam Hussein) or building monuments to him like the White House Ballroom, the proposed Arc de Trump on the Virginia side of the Memorial Bridge, perhaps even adding his likeness to Mount Rushmore, and inscribing it on a coin or paper currency, or by finding some way to wheedle a Nobel Prize out of the judges. Third on Trump’s to-do list comes foreign policy, which means claiming credit for whatever accords or cease-fires are out there, and fourth comes domestic policy, which was one-and-done when he passed his tax cut for the rich, paid for by traditional Republican cuts to food stamps and Medicaid.
All this plays well with the hard core of the MAGA base and the far-right media that has worked so hard to create MAGA’s counterfactual universe. But all of it infuriates the Democratic base and raises fears—and creates actual injuries—among many independent voters, who then flock to the polls. In these elections, those groups sum to far greater numbers than the fuck-you boys, whose anger level when Trump’s actually in charge has subsided to the point that many of them don’t bother to vote.
Across the country last week, turnout soared, though not among Republicans, in high-profile, low-profile, and even no-profile elections. In Virginia’s major metro areas (D.C. suburbs and exurbs, metro Richmond, and metro Norfolk), the vote margin by which the Democratic gubernatorial candidate led the Republican was 388,000 in 2017 (Trump in White House), 251,000 in 2021 (Biden in White House), and 696,000 last week (Trump back in White House). Conversely, in Virginia’s rural counties, the vote margin by which the Republican gubernatorial candidate led the Democrat was 85,000 in 2017 (Trump in White House), 164,000 in 2021 (Biden in White House), and 110,000 last week (Trump back in White House). In the Virginia gubernatorial exit poll, 38 percent of voters said one reason for their vote was to express opposition to Trump, while just 16 percent said one reason for their vote was to support Trump.
These turnout surges and declines aren’t just Virginia countercyclicalism. In New Jersey, the total number of votes cast for governor rose from roughly 2.66 million in 2021 to 3.21 million last week, with Republican Jack Ciattarelli’s vote (he was the party’s nominee both times) increasing by about 130,000, but Democrat Sherrill’s vote exceeding that of Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy by a resounding 420,000. A subhead in last Thursday’s New York Times read, “Sherrill energized the Democratic base.” No offense to Sherrill, but I don’t think many observers of that race thought Sherrill was a notably energizing candidate. The credit here goes to Trump. In the New Jersey gubernatorial exit poll, 41 percent of voters said one reason for their vote was to oppose Trump, compared to just 13 percent who said support for Trump was one reason for their vote.
Across the country last week, turnout soared, though not among Republicans, in high-profile, low-profile, and even no-profile elections.
Just across the river from Jersey, in the retention election for three Democratic justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the rate of voter turnout in overwhelmingly Democratic Philadelphia rose from 20 percent of the city’s registered voters in the off-year election of 2021 to 34 percent last week. That latter contest got a good deal of ink for a judicial retention election (a low bar to clear), but I don’t think it was that much of an energizer either, compared to Democrats’ fear that a court composed of Trump Republicans would jigger election rules in MAGA’s favor. All three justices won retention by 22-percentage-point margins.
The surge in turnout that benefited both Spanberger and Sherrill wasn’t just among hardcore Democrats. The New York Times’ Nate Cohn has concluded that both Democrats won 7 percent support in their respective states from voters who said they’d voted for Trump in 2024. This vote shift, and the large-scale return of Hispanic voters to the Democratic column in both states, was surely propelled by these voters’ discontent with Trump’s neglect of the economic problems of middle- and working-class Americans. It turns out that thinking about stealing health care from imagined minorities is a lot more fun than having your actual health care stolen by the president you voted for. Trump’s recent and supremely self-absorbed focus on building his ballroom must have been perceived by these voters as a kind of insult added to the injuries inflicted by his economic policies. As my colleague David Dayen has noted, the soaring cost of electric power, to which Trump was totally indifferent, was one proximate cause of the public’s economic discontent and led directly to Georgia voters ousting two Republican state power regulators and replacing them with Democrats. I suspect some of the Hispanic shift back into the Democratic column was also a consequence of their dismay at seeing law-abiding Hispanic immigrants, perhaps their own friends and relatives, ripped from their families and communities by Trump’s masked agents.
As president, Trump can mobilize even onetime supporters to turn out against him—something beyond his capacities to engender fear and trembling when he’s out of power. By referencing their own opposition to rule by a king, Sherrill, Spanberger, and a host of Democrats across the country turned that fear to their advantage. No question, though, this Trump guy’s a world-class motivator, though whether pro or con depends, to cop a line from Lyndon Johnson, on whether he’s outside the tent pissin’ in (advantage, Republicans) or inside the tent pissin’ out (advantage, Democrats—and America). Pollsters, take note.