What Are the Results of the Off-Year Elections?

As this essay is written on Tuesday evening, results are coming in for the off-year elections in blue areas like New York City, New Jersey, and Virginia, and it looks like Democrats will occupy the mayor’s office in NYC and the governor mansions in New Jersey and Virginia. It is possible for conservatives to look at Democrat wins tonight and feel like the sky is falling. However, such thoughts may be wrong. Bradley Devlin, politics editor for The Daily Signal, shared the following information. 

As I previously wrote for The Daily Signal:

On Tuesday night, the temptation for professional and casual election observers alike will be to assume that if more candidates win with D’s next to their names than R’s, Democrats are in the driver’s seat for the midterms, and vice versa….

The truth is that the party identification of Tuesday night’s winners are oftentimes bad predictors of how the chips will fall in the midterms.

What we did learn from the 2025 election cycle that culminated in Democrat victories across the board, however, is that Democrats have no interest in moderating.

Their base has the basest desires. They demanded the government shutdown, now the longest in U.S. history. They embraced Mamdani’s democratic socialism. They pulled the lever for Virginia Attorney General-elect Jay Jones, who explicitly called for the death of a former speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates and his family. This, of course, came less than two months after the most high-profile political assassination of my lifetime.

And the Democrat base has rewarded its Democrat candidates for their hostility, extremism, and violence.

James Madison, the father of the Constitution and one of Virginia’s finest statesmen, wrote in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Perhaps the 2025 elections demonstrate the opposite truth: If men were devils, no government would be sufficient.

Sounds like I’m getting swept away. I am not. This radicalism forced Democrats to spend more money on races Republicans thought unwinnable just two months ago – much less before the 2024 election, when Trump made massive inroads in both New Jersey and Virginia.

Take Jones’ message, “war to the death” with my political opponents, and Mamdani’s “let them eat cake” from government-run grocers, and see how it plays in the purple areas of Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Texas. It won’t….

While Democrat radicalism makes the stakes of each and every race in the 2026 midterms that much higher, conservatives now know the Democrat playbook for 2026. With well-laid plans, there’s hope to find peace in Canaan.