Zohran Mamdani, Abigail Spanberger, & Mikie Sherrill — what their victories mean for Dems & the GOP

Election Day 2025 was a good one for less-radical Democrats, or at least Dems who play moderate, as Abby Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill triumphed in Virginia and New Jersey emphasizing their pragmatism, not their progressivism.

Yes, Zohran Mamdani won in NYC, but the Democratic line is a near-guarantee of victory.

As it was, he was held to within a stone’s throw of 50% (one way or another) of the vote by Curtis Sliwa, an . . . idiosyncratic, we’ll say, Republican and by SO-much-baggage-Andrew Cuomo running as an independent.

Cuomo’s career is done, finished, finito: Like also-disgraced-ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer before him, he tried for redemption in a New York City run and failed decisively.

Sliwa’s electoral career is also over, but it never really amounted to much: No skin off his nose, but the fact that he was the Republican nominee, with not even a primary, is testimony to the weakness of New York’s GOP, state and (especially) city — a topic we’ll have much more to say about in the weeks to come.

Of course, we’ll be all over Mamdani, assuming he sticks to his radical guns — but we’d advise national Republicans to avoid obsessing about him, at least until he actually produces disastrous results here.

With control of the White House and (however thin) both halves of Congress, Republicans need to be running on their own accomplishments, showing the voters what they’re for, not simply pointing at boogeymen.

New York Republicans can certainly push Empire State Dems on the Mamdani issue, but he’s just not relevant to most of America; the city’s mayor rarely is, however much most media pretend otherwise.

Though the GOP can sometimes win statewide in Jersey and Virginia, both have become blue states; it’s no real surprise that candidates who ran hard against President Donald Trump won in both (especially when he wasn’t on the ballot to draw his supporters to the polls).

Republicans’ challenge in next year’s midterms will be to draw out the radicalism that Sherrill and Spanberger downplayed: Democrats nationally are still locked into lunacy on social policy (from DEI to trans issues) and bizarro boutique obsessions like killing US energy production in the name of fighting climate change.

The GOP can win a fresh mandate in the midterms by governing sanely and well: Voters will then remember that putting Democrats in charge brought disaster.