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Democrats Can Win Back Trump Voters—If They Don't Blow It
The message from the 2025 election is clear: Some Trump voters will back Democrats if the candidates reach them where they are and talk to them about the issues that they care about most.
Nov 11, 2025
While the media has covered extensively Democratic successes in the 2025 off-year elections, there is one story that has been dramatically undercovered. This is the fact that the 2025 Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races show that Democrats can win over Trump voters. Granted, these are not dramatic slices of the Trump coalition, but they are enough in these hyper-polarized times to win elections.
According to CNN polling, in New Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill in her race for governor was able to win 7% of those who had voted for Donald Trump in 2024. Interestingly, the Virginia exit polling data shows that Rep. Abigail Spanberger won the identical (7%) of Trump voters.
The New York Times’ Nate Cohn is one of the few journalists who has pointed to the New Jersey and Virginia Democrats’ ability to win over Trump voters. He concludes that:
Instead, the two Democrats won so decisively because they also flipped a crucial sliver of voters who said they supported Mr. Trump in 2024. Ms. Sherrill and Ms. Spanberger both won 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters, according to the exit polls. It may not seem like much to flip 7 percent of Mr. Trump’s backers, but consider: When a voter flips, it adds one voter to one party and also deducts one from the other, making it twice as significant as turning out a new voter.
Looking at the exit polling data makes it clear that while the Democrats margins in New Jersey and Virginia were helped by increased Democratic turnout, winning over 2024 Trump voters was critically important.
One of the key parts of the Trump coalition has always been strong and even almost overwhelming support from rural voters. An analysis by Politico of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows that:
Spanberger’s victory was largely driven by massive turnout in northern and eastern Virginia’s urban areas. But she picked up support across the state’s deep-red central and western counties, where Trump’s tariffs have hit the manufacturing and agricultural industries especially hard. Even as her GOP opponent won most of those places, Spanberger posed the best performance by a statewide Democratic candidate in several cycles, according to a POLITICO analysis of voting data in the localities classified as “rural” by the federal government.
To her great credit, Spanberger targeted rural voters and consistently hammered away on how the Trump administration’s tariff policies were hurting them. In comparison with former Vice President Kamala Harris’s performance in 2024, Spanberger outperformed Harris’ margin in 48 of Virginia’s 52 rural localities. The exit polling shows that Spanberger won 46% of rural voters—an eight-point deficit to Republican candidate Lieutenant Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, and a 19-point swing from 2021 gubernatorial Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe’s 27-point disadvantage.
There is also data in the exit polling data indicating that Democrats won back in 2025 Hispanic voters who backed Trump in 2024. The Washington Post reports:
This year, most Democratic statewide candidates won Latino voters by at least 30 points in exit polls, re-creating the margins their party held before 2024. In New Jersey, 18 percent of Latino voters who backed Trump last year cast their ballot for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, exit poll data showed.
The fact that Democrats won over Trump voters in 2025 has profound implications for Democrats in both the 2026 midterms and the 2028. The message is clear: Some Trump voters will back Democrats if the candidates reach them where they are and talk to them about the issues that they care about most. To assume that all Trump voters are absolutely committed to Trump no matter what the circumstances is a mistaken assumption that only hurts Democrats. Successful politics is always about addition.
Hopefully, Democrats learn from their success in 2025 and realize that they can make some Trump voters part of their winning coalition.
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‘People… Have No Idea What It Means’: Hegseth Raises Alarm With ‘Weird’ Military Meeting in Virginia
"This is either a meeting that could have been an email," said one observer, "or something ominous."
Sep 25, 2025
"Nothing good is likely coming out of this," said one Democratic political scientist on Thursday regarding reports that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called a meeting of hundreds of top military general and admirals in Quantico, Virginia next Tuesday.
The highly unusual summit was announced on short notice and no reason was given to military commanders and other leaders stationed in conflict zones, across Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region who are being required to leave their posts for the meeting.
The order applies to "all senior officers with the rank of brigadier general or above," The Washington Post reported. There are roughly 800 generals and admirals in the US military.
"You don’t call [general officers and flag officers] leading their people and the global force into an auditorium outside DC and not tell them why/what the topic or agenda is,” one person familiar with the matter told the Post.
Some sources told the newspaper that the order raises security concerns.
“Are we taking every general and flag officer out of the Pacific right now?” one person said. “All of it is weird.”
The directive comes months after Hegseth fired about 100 generals and admirals and a month after he dismissed top leaders of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Navy Reserve, and the Naval Special Warfare Command, without giving the officials reasons for their firing.
The DIA had found a few months earlier that Iran's nuclear program had not been significantly damaged by US strikes, contradicting President Donald Trump's claims.
The Pentagon has said there will likely be another 10% reduction of generals and admirals, and political consultant Joel Montfort noted that the right-wing policy blueprint Project 2025 "details a plan to remove senior leaders and consolidate power to loyalists" at the Department of Defense, which Hegseth has claimed is now called the Department of War.
“Are we taking every general and flag officer out of the Pacific right now? All of it is weird.”
“People are very concerned," one official told the Post regarding the meeting. "They have no idea what it means."
The Intercept reported that military sources it spoke to "speculated about the purpose, wondering if it might foretell a culling of general officers; a significant reorganization of the military command structure; a threat to eschew contact with the press; or a loyalty oath about putting Trump administration priorities above all else."
"One source, somewhat in jest, evoked the phrase 'coup d’état,' later clarifying they meant a gutting of leaders who might question Trump’s policies," reported the outlet.
Some other officials familiar with the matter told the Post that they believed the Trump administration's desire to make "homeland defense the nation's top concern," rather than China, was likely to be discussed at the meeting.
The order also came a day after the Office of Management and Budget threatened a new round of mass firings at federal agencies unless Democrats in Congress agree to a funding bill to keep the government running before the October 1 deadline.
"This is either a meeting that could have been an email," said Matt Gertz of Media Matters for America, "or something ominous."
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Trump's GOP Blamed as Rural Health Clinics Begin to Fall Under Crushing Weight of Big, Ugly Bill
A Virginia healthcare company said it was closing three rural clinics as part of its "ongoing response to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act."
Sep 23, 2025
Hospitals and healthcare clinics across the US have been announcing layoffs, service cuts, and closures in the weeks since Republicans passed a budget law that's estimated to slash spending on Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.
Monday reporting by CNN highlighted that Augusta Medical Group is closing three of its rural clinics in Virginia. The company said in a statement earlier this month that the closures were "part of Augusta Health’s ongoing response to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the resulting realities for healthcare delivery."
The CNN report noted that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger recently campaigned in Buena Vista, one of the rural communities that will be losing its clinic, to make the case that the cuts in the GOP's budget law should be reversed.
Tim Layton, an associate professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, told CNN that rural areas figure to be particularly vulnerable to the Medicaid cuts given their lower population densities.
"You can expect those places to be impacted by now having people who don’t even have Medicaid,” he said. “With fewer people to spread fixed costs across, it becomes harder and harder to stay open."
Layton also dismissed Republicans' claims to have created protections for rural hospitals with a $50 billion rural health fund, as he described it as a "short-term patch" that will "go pretty quick." KFF earlier this year estimated that rural Medicaid spending would fall by $137 billion as a result of the GOP law, which is nearly triple the money allocated by the health fund.
Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney general, seized on the CNN report and used it to tie incumbent Republican Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares to the national Republican Party's policy agenda under President Donald Trump.
"The Big Bill causing three rural clinics in Virginia to close is just the tip of the iceberg," he wrote in a social media post. "And it's happening because Jason Miyares is too scared to fight against Trump’s Medicaid cuts that will throw nearly 300,000 Virginians off their healthcare."
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten also ripped the GOP for passing Medicaid cuts that are hurting the communities they represent.
"Hundreds of healthcare providers in rural areas depend on Medicaid funding to keep doors open and care for patients," she wrote. "But Trump’s Big Ugly Bill cuts millions from Medicaid, leaving these healthcare providers in jeopardy."
Leor Tal, campaign director for Unrig Our Economy, said that the cuts to Medicaid looked particularly bad politically for Republicans when contrasted to the tax cuts that disproportionately benefit high-income Americans.
“These closures are the congressional Republican agenda in action: cuts to healthcare for rural moms and families, tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires,” Tal said. “These closures are not an accident—they are the direct result of a law written to serve the wealthy and leave working people behind, and unless Republicans in Congress reverse course, more working-class Americans will be left behind while the rich get even richer.”
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