Ron Brownstein: “With resounding wins in Tuesday’s Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, Democrats substantially repaired the most important cracks that President Donald Trump made in their coalition in the 2024 election. That gives Democrats reason for optimism — though not yet certainty — that they are on track for a solid recovery in the 2026 midterm election…”

“Even the most optimistic Democrats don’t contend that Tuesday’s results prove the party has solved its problems with those voting blocs….

 “But the Democratic wins do signal that exuberant Republican predictions after 2024 — that Trump had engineered a durable realignment, particularly among working-class Hispanic, Black and Asian American voters — were premature.”

“Shortly after Zohran Mamdani was anointed the mayor-elect of New York City, he strode onto the stage of a cavernous, ornate theater, put his hand on his heart, smiled his signature smile and nodded to a socialist forebear,” the New York Times reports.

Said Mamdani: “As Eugene Debs once said, I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity.”

“In nearly every facet of Mr. Mamdani’s identity — his ethnicity, his religion, his democratic socialism, his age, Mr. Mamdani represents change. And in his first remarks since he was declared the winner of Tuesday’s election, Mr. Mamdani, 34, shied away from none of that.”

CNN: The inside story of Zohran Mamdani’s triumph and what happens next for New York.

Washington Post: “Mamdani won two-thirds of voters under 45 in preliminary exit polls, while Cuomo led him by 10 points with voters 45 and older. The polls also showed an education divide: College graduates backed Mamdani by 55 percent, while voters without college degrees narrowly favored Cuomo.”

John Ellis: “Democrats are now more likely to vote in off-year and mid-term elections than they were, say, 25 years ago. That’s a big change and perhaps the most pertinent one with regard to last night’s results. If Republican voters are less likely to vote in off-year and mid-term elections, more of them need to be fired up.”

“The single best motivator of GOP voters is President Trump. The fact that he was publicly AWOL from all three races suggests that had he hit the campaign trail and stumped for the GOP in all three states — urging ‘the base’ to ‘get out and vote’ — it would have hurt, not helped, the GOP’s cause.”

Punchbowl News: “If Republicans aren’t scared by what happened Tuesday night, they should be.”

“One year after President Donald Trump and Republicans won the White House, Congress and every battleground state, Democrats struck back by painting Virginia and New Jersey blue Tuesday night, shifting the map leftward in county after county…”

“This was a Democratic romp in the midst of a national crisis over the now record 36-day government shutdown. It should send a stark message to Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune that the national tide has shifted decisively from last year’s Republican victories.”

Gerald Baker: “On paper, he is the kind of Democrat that might have been invented in a laboratory of perverted social science by a MAGA Dr. Frankenstein: a socialist, an immigrant, a Muslim, son of a movie director and a professor of postcolonialism, holder of a degree in “Africana studies,” a 34-year-old whose experience runs the gamut from co-founder of the Bowdoin College chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to membership of the New York state Assembly for the last five years, with stints as a rap producer and tenant organizer…”

“In case those credentials weren’t enough, he has enhanced his status as tribune of lost causes, saying at various times that he wanted to ‘defund the police,’ ‘globalize the intifada,’ open city-run grocery stores and reinvent an America in which there were no billionaires.”

New York Times: “The arc of his success is nothing short of staggering. At the start of the year, Mr. Mamdani was polling at 1 percent, tied, as he likes to say, with the candidate known as ‘someone else.’ Few New Yorkers recognized his name, and his own political team put the odds of winning as low as 3 percent.”

“Now, at age 34, he will be New York City’s youngest leader in more than a century, amid a pile of historic firsts: the first Muslim mayor, the first South Asian and arguably the most influential democratic socialist in the country.”

All across the country tonight, voters are weighing in on mayoral contests, ballot measures, and special elections — in total more than 20,000 races — that could hint at the national mood heading into 2026.

Which local results do you think will send the biggest political shockwaves?

Leave your reactions in the comments.

Rep. Mikie Sherrill won the New Jersey governor’s race, NBC News projects, defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli after a hard-fought contest in which President Donald Trump loomed over voters’ choice.

Decision Desk HQ projects Zohran Mamdani to win the New York City Mayor election.

Pennsylvania voters approved the retention of three state Supreme Court justices, NBC News projects, preserving Democrats’ 5-2 majority on the battleground state’s high court.

In a city where change seems in the air, tonight’s mayoral outcome promises to recast City Hall’s priorities on affordability, public safety and housing.

Is New York ready to break from the past — or is this a reaffirmation of the status quo?

Polls close at 9 p.m. ET.

Decision Desk HQ projects Jay Jones (D) to win the Virginia Attorney General election.

With the Garden State’s governor’s race under the microscope, tonight’s results could reveal whether traditional partisan leanings hold or if a shift is under way.

How will every corner of New Jersey — from suburban towns to urban centers — respond?

Polls close at 8 p.m. ET.

Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) was projected to defeat Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R) in Virginia’s gubernatorial election on Tuesday, according to Decision Desk HQ, becoming the first woman to serve as governor of the commonwealth.

As Virginia’s turnout comes in, voters are electing not just a governor but making a statement about national momentum and state-level change.

What does the outcome tonight signal about the direction of the Commonwealth — and how might it shape the 2026 midterms?

Polls close at 7 p.m. ET. 

Nate Silver: “Cuomo simply doesn’t have any foundation of people voting for him for positive reasons. In last week’s Quinnipiac survey, for instance, which actually showed a slightly closer race than most, the only demographic group to give Cuomo a favorable rating above 50 percent was voters aged 65 and older, and then just barely at 51 percent (against 38 percent unfavorable).”

“Republicans don’t really have much basis to be comfortable with Cuomo; he governed as a fairly moderate but nevertheless partisan Democrat in his three terms (one truncated) as governor. But Cuomo also lost the Democratic nomination to Mamdani and is attacking Zohran from the right. Independents, meanwhile, have no particular reason to like someone who is such an avatar of the political establishment.”

“And every voter can object to the extensive list of sexual harassment accusations against Cuomo — although for whatever reason, a lot of polls show him doing better among women than among men.”

“Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the dean of New York’s congressional delegation and an avatar of old New York politics, made it to Election Day without endorsing Zohran Mamdani, the young Democratic nominee for mayor with leftist views,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Schumer, who voted early, was reticent on Tuesday to even say whom he cast his ballot for.”