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A year ago, President Trump won the White House, promising to fix the economy. On Tuesday, Republican losses delivered a reminder of the high political price that the party in power pays when voters are still feeling squeezed.
Mr. Trump himself was not on the ballot, and he never held rallies in either of the states where new governors were elected on Tuesday. But the president was still a central character in the campaigns, a mainstay of the Democrats’ advertising and their arguments on the stump.
Democratic victories in New Jersey and Virginia were built on promises to address the sky-high cost of living in those states while blaming Mr. Trump and his allies for all that ails those places. In New York City, the sudden rise of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist with an ambitious agenda to lower the cost of living, put a punctuation mark on affordability as a political force in 2025.
The results on Tuesday came after a drumbeat of polls showing that Mr. Trump and the Republican Party have seen their longtime edge on management of the economy evaporate.
“Exactly one year ago, we had that big beautiful victory, exactly one year,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday at a breakfast with Republican senators at the White House. “And last night it was not expected to be a victory — it was very Democrat areas — but I don’t think it was good for Republicans.”
Mr. Trump’s own meandering focus on the economy has given plenty of fodder to Democrats. He tore down the East Wing for a new ballroom, lavishly remodeled the Lincoln bathroom, paved over the Rose Garden for a patio like the one at Mar-a-Lago, and threw a “Great Gatsby”-esque Halloween party with the theme “a little party never killed nobody” during a government shutdown and on the eve of cuts to food assistance.
“Trump is indifferent to the pain American families are feeling,” said Representative Suzan DelBene of Washington, who is leading the campaign arm of House Democrats headed into the 2026 midterms.
Only 30 percent of voters believe Mr. Trump has lived up to their expectations for tackling inflation and the cost of living, according to a recent NBC News poll, his lowest mark for any issue asked. And a meager 27 percent of voters in a CNN poll in late October said Mr. Trump’s policies had improved the country’s economic conditions — less than half of those who thought he had made matters worse.
“Trump promised to lower costs on Day 1,” Ms. DelBene said. “It’s a big broken promise from the Republican Party.”
Abigail Spanberger, a Democratic former congresswoman, flipped the governorship of Virginia with a campaign highlighting the fallout for the state’s economy from Mr. Trump’s efforts to dismantle parts of the federal government. Mikie Sherrill, a four-term congresswoman, won with a platform that prominently included a Day 1 promise to declare a state of emergency on utility costs and freeze rates.
Both won by double digits.
The New Jersey race was especially revealing because the Republican nominee, Jack Ciattarelli, had tried to tap into the same frustration that voters have about the economic status quo — and direct that rage at Democrats who control the state government. But ads that had attacked Ms. Sherrill as “more of the same but worse” ultimately fell flat.
Kiersten Pels, a Republican National Committee spokeswoman, said that “these off-year races in deep-blue states aren’t predictors of 2026.” She insisted that voters still trusted Mr. Trump and that Democrats had gone “far left.”
Mr. Mamdani’s rise from obscurity to national stardom showed the mobilizing power of affordability for Democrats. He used a campaign centered on specific and sweeping promises to defeat a once-powerful former governor, Andrew M. Cuomo.
And Mr. Mamdani contrasted his own economic focus with the president’s wandering eye on the topic, at times saying that Mr. Trump had won on three promises in 2024 — to punish his enemies, do mass deportations and ease the cost of living — but only followed through on the first two.
Robert Blizzard, a Republican pollster, warned his party not to dismiss Mr. Mamdani and his “laserlike focus on” affordability, even as Republican strategists were eager to make the 34-year-old democratic socialist the next face of the Democratic Party.
“Don’t just chalk up a Mamdani win to a woke candidate winning a woke city,” Mr. Blizzard said. “This is the wake-up call for policymakers on both sides of the aisle about the importance of focusing your campaigns on cost and affordability.”
In Washington, congressional Democrats have opened a front in the affordability wars through a government shutdown that is now the longest in American history. Senate Democrats are so far refusing to vote to reopen the government unless Republicans and Mr. Trump agree to address health care costs that are rising as federal subsidies lapse.
But the political dynamics at play on Tuesday were simple and familiar.
Voters are unhappy about the economy and are starting to blame Republicans instead of Democrats.
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President Trump was a central character in this week’s elections, even though he never held rallies in Virginia or New Jersey, where key elections for governor unfolded. Credit…Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
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