Q&A: What Republicans Can Learn From the 2025 Elections

Tuesday’s elections were, by most measures, a stinging failure for Republicans.

Democrats won the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey. A democratic socialist was elected mayor of New York City. California voters overwhelmingly signed off on new House maps intended to boost Democratic representation.

While many Republicans have sought to shrug off the 2025 elections as inconsequential for the 2026 midterm elections, Albert Eisenberg, principal at the Republican firm Red Bridge, said that the results from Tuesday need to be taken seriously by the GOP if the party wants any chance of maintaining its majorities in Congress next year.

Campaigns & Elections spoke with Eisenberg this week about what lessons Republicans can take from Tuesday’s elections. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

C&E: Just to start off, tell me your thoughts about Tuesday’s elections? Are there any trends that you noticed or anything in particular that caught your attention?

Eisenberg: I just think that Republicans aren’t gonna be able to compete on turnout in off-year elections, because our base has changed so much. The Democrat base is so consistently college-educated, especially women, who are super voters, so I don’t know if that counts as a trend, but it’s certainly a take away. We have to do more persuasion with voters who aren’t hearing from us presently. But the obvious trend is college-educated, white women are super voters for Dems in states like Virginia and New Jersey. We’re just not going to be able to compete, even in ostensibly red districts, without doing more outreach.

C&E: That strikes me as interesting, because Democratic voters have historically been less reliable in off years, but that’s kind of changed. Can you talk a little bit about that? Has there been a change in the way Republican voters vote versus Democratic voters?

Eisenberg: The Republican Party is more working class and more diverse than it has been at any point in anybody’s life who’s alive today. Trump winning voters making under $50,000 a year was the first time a Republican presidential candidate had done that in generations. And all of the data shows that white working-class voters beginning under Obama, Hispanic working-class voters following soon after and, now, Black working-class voters have shifted to the right, at least temporarily, so this is the opportunity zone for Republican campaigns across the board.

C&E: I want to talk about this shift to the right among Hispanic voters, in particular. On Tuesday, we saw a lot of heavily Hispanic areas that swung toward Trump last year swing back towards Democrats. How should we read that?

Eisenberg: I think there are a couple things happening here. One is that Hispanic voters are not Republican base voters yet. They rented but did not buy Republicans in 2024, and you definitely saw a snap back due to people not showing up, campaigns not showing up, not translating the message for these voters on the channels where they get their information. We just really need to take a more robust approach on affordability and trying to notch some wins, which we have on the border and on immigration. But we haven’t gotten in front of these voters to show them why it’s a win. So, yeah, there’s absolutely a snapback among Hispanic voters. I’ve written and spoken about it extensively, but that does not mean there’s not opportunities to do a lot more. We need to hold the voters that we won in 2024, which we did not do this week.

C&E: Looking at [Zohran] Mamdani’s campaign, in particular, we saw a lot of novel digital strategies and outreach strategies. Are there any lessons that Republicans can learn on that front right now? 

Eisenberg: I think that there are things that are unique about New York and about that race and about his opponents, but I absolutely think Republicans need a message on affordability and on housing. I think we actually have the advantage, because our policies result in better outcomes for working people which is why working voters have moved towards Republicans in the last 10 years. But we need to center affordability; affordable housing, lowering the cost of healthcare, improving the quality of healthcare – those kitchen table issues that regular voters care about. If we can deliver wins on it and then show that we’re delivering wins on it, we’ll win more elections. That was one of the things that was missing on Tuesday.

C&E: What is your message to your party? As we head into 2026, if you have one thing that you could implore Republicans to do, what would it be?

Eisenberg: We need to understand that there’s a lot of voters out there that are from communities and groups that we traditionally do not speak too well; voters who could be our voters if we engage them the right way. And that type of outreach isn’t just, like, nice to have, but it’s a necessity. Tuesday’s shellacking just proves that.  It needs to be built into the campaigns from the start. It doesn’t mean hiring one person from a community and making sure they do an event after Labor Day of next year. It needs to be built into the DNA of the campaigns if we want to win blue and purple and even bright red areas.

C&E: Let’s talk about the elephant in the room though. 2026 isn’t a presidential year. Donald Trump isn’t going to be on the ballot. The party in power tends to get the blame when people aren’t happy with the economy and the cost of living. How do Republicans get around that?

Eisenberg:I think that there’s an understanding among voters that you can’t just turn a switch and have the cost of living go down. But what Republicans need to do is make this the laser focus going into the new year. We need actual policies that reduce costs – not just the tax burden, but the cost that people have to pay out of pocket. We need to reduce the cost of healthcare, as well, and then we need to get in front of these voters with what we’ve done. 

Right now, the cost of energy is down. The cost of groceries hopefully will be down. The cost of insurance is up. These are things that we need to focus on meeting people where they are with. After that, then we can do all the nice stuff we want to do with regulations and foreign policy and reworking the federal bureaucracy. But all that comes after we address the main issue facing voters and getting in front of them. So I think that we’re gonna need to have specific accomplishments that we can point to. We’ve lowered the cost of gas. We want to lower the cost of groceries. We are working on healthcare. We’re lowering the cost of your medication. Those are the things that are going to appeal to voters.