The 2025 elections, set for this coming Tuesday, tell an unsurprising story: Backlash to an increasingly unpopular Donald Trump is lifting Democratic and liberal causes across the country, from governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey to a redistricting referendum in California to New York City’s mayoral battle.
Where the story gets more interesting, and where the implications get more dire for the GOP, is how the Republican candidates in these races have reacted to this backlash. Despite everything, they have neglected to even try to distance themselves from the president, in a sharp break from the expected political playbook.
New Jersey’s governor’s race could, in theory, be competitive. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee, has a winning biography as a moderate former Navy helicopter pilot, but has struggled with some interviews and failed to meaningfully separate herself from incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy (D), who has middling approval ratings. Trump made significant gains in New Jersey in 2024, though he still lost the state by 6 percentage points.
Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican former state assemblyman who nearly pulled off a shocking upset of Murphy in 2021, is considered a strong candidate. But while he sat out the 2016 election entirely because he thought Trump was a “charlatan” and spent his 2021 race dismissing Trump as a non-issue – “What does Donald Trump have to do with our property taxes?” he asked at one point – he’s run in 2025 as a full-on MAGA supporter, telling a debate crowd the president is “right about everything that he’s doing” and refusing to even criticize Trump for cancelling an ultra-important infrastructure project in the state.
Ciattarelli’s transformation neatly illustrates the trap the GOP has placed itself in: They’ve turned essentially all of the political decision-making over to a single man. This has some advantages for the party, not least of which is Trump’s popularity with the base means he can break from GOP orthodoxy on issues like abortion with relative ease, and empower other candidates to do so. But in off-year elections defined by backlash to the party in power, it essentially guarantees GOP candidates are not going to be able to meaningfully separate themselves from an increasingly unpopular president.
“The ship has sailed on Republicans being able to separate themselves from Trump,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant with extensive experience in Virginia. “If you’re a Republican who disagrees with Trump, you’re just a Democrat at this point.”
And make no mistake: Trump is becoming deeply, deeply unpopular. Polling released this weekend from CNN, the Washington Post/ABC News and NBC News all show him at least 10 points underwater in favorability, with his ratings on the economy and inflation even worse.
Both the GOP candidates and Trump realize that showing up in many of the blue-tinted locales hosting elections in 2025 would do more harm than good ― he’s limiting himself to hosting tele-townhalls on Monday night rather than doing one of his increasingly rare but still signature political rallies. In comparison, national Democratic figures led by former President Barack Obama are campaigning in both Virginia and New Jersey.
“Let’s face it, our country and our politics are in a pretty dark place right now,” Obama said at a 7,000-person rally in Norfolk with former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia. “It’s hard to know where to start, because every day, this White House offers up a fresh batch of lawlessness and recklessness and mean-spiritedness and just plain craziness.”
However, staying away does not necessarily mean separation. In the Virginia governor’s race, Republican candidate Winsome Earle-Sears has backed Trump’s massive federal employee job cuts ― which, in a state with a significant federal workforce, is roughly the equivalent of a coal country Democrat backing former President Barack Obama’s environmental policies. But while Kentucky and West Virginia Democrats responded at the time by suing the Obama administration and shooting the cap-and-trade bill in ads, Earle-Sears has declined to criticize the cuts. Spanberger is expected to easily triumph.
“You deserve a governor who will work with Democrats and Republicans to grow our economy and not stand by while Virginia’s workforce is under attack,” Spanberger said in Norfolk.
Republicans say the reluctance to criticize the president is strategic, since most of their voters ― particularly the ones who are not guaranteed to turn out ― simply like the president more than they like downballot members of the GOP.
“There’s broad recognition that any winning coalition for Republicans today requires Trump voters who have showed up to vote for Trump but not for candidates downballot,” said Jesse Hunt, a former communications director for the Republican Governors’ Association. “There’s not a sense that we can ignore the issues they care about, or ignore support for the president of the United States, and they will show up just because they don’t like the Democrat.”
Democrats are skeptical that the trade-off will work out. Many of the voters Trump brought over to his side in 2024 have rapidly soured on him, as shown by his plummeting approval ratings among both young and Latino voters.
“The low propensity voters they won in 2024 didn’t fall in love with Donald Trump; they just trusted Trump more on the economy than they trusted us,” Ferguson said. “It’s a misunderstanding of what happened to think the way to win this is to just turn those people out.”
Candidate ties to Trump are going to get even more obvious in the 2026 midterms. GOP consultants admit winning Trump’s endorsement in a race is now usually a candidate’s top priority, even above consolidating local support or raising cash for television ads. And Trump has already endorsed in many of 2026’s most crucial races, including Senate races in North Carolina and Michigan, as well as governor’s races in Georgia, Florida and Ohio.
Trump’s power, for instance, has already forced the GOP to switch candidates in North Carolina, arguably the most important Senate race in the country in 2026. After GOP Sen. Thom Tillis said he could not support the health care cuts in the deeply unpopular Republican budget passed earlier this year, Trump threatened to oppose him — and he quickly decided to retire rather than run for reelection.
Rather than look for a candidate who can make similar claims to independence, the GOP quickly rallied behind Michael Whatley, whom Trump had picked to run the Republican National Committee. Whatley cleared the field and won Trump’s endorsement almost immediately, but early polls have shown him consistently trailing former Gov. Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee.
“I think you’re going to see all of our candidates that will win the primaries and win the general election will be strongly aligned with the Trump administration,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), a former chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told HuffPost not long after Tillis announced his retirement. “I think you’re going to see high degrees of alignment, and very little separation on any major policy issues.”
Hunt said he did expect the Trump administration to grant leeway to candidates in close races.
“This White House is sharp and they understand the president’s agenda depends on Republicans winning control of Congress in 2026,” Hunt said. “There’s not a purity test in every race on every issue, particularly when it’s something a candidate believes is necessary to win a race.”
Trump’s unpopularity obviously does not solve all of the Democrats’ problems. The New Jersey race remains within striking distance for the GOP, even if Sherrill is a clear favorite. And while Spanberger is a heavy favorite, the attorney general race in the state is a toss-up between incumbent Republican Jason Miyares and Democrat Jay Jones, in large part due to a scandal where Jones fantasized about political violence in text messages.
The scandal, Democrats admitted, has damaged Jones. But much of the damage has come from fundraising drying up. Miyares, unlike Ciattarelli or Earle-Sears, has aired significantly more ads than his Democratic opponent. And Earle-Sears’ campaign has also aired ads on the scandal, fruitlessly trying to tie Spanberger to it but putting it in front of voters nonetheless.
Even here, though, Democrats say loyalty to Trump could cost Republicans. Miyares has been a steadfast supporter of the president and is counting on voters who backed Vice President Kamala Harris to vote for him out of their distaste for Jones rather than by demonstrating an independence from the Trump administration’s diktats.
“Democratic AGs have sued the Trump administration more than 50 times,” said one Virginia Democrat who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the race. “If Miyares had joined just one of those lawsuits, we would be absolutely toast.”
Arthur Delaney contributed reporting.