What the 2025 Elections Mean for Campaign Pros
The 2025 elections are officially over and 2026 is around the corner.
While it can be tempting to write off this year’s elections as little more than an off-year blip on the radar, this year’s campaigns offer some key lessons for political professionals on everything from digital strategy to messaging.
Here are some takeaways from Tuesday’s contests:
Affordability Won the Day
There’s plenty of daylight between candidates like New Jersey Governor-elect Mike Sherrill and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. But one issue, in particular, tied together their campaigns: Affordability.
Democrats’ success in Tuesday’s elections offered a clear indicator that voters – whether they’re New Yorkers, New Jerseyans or Virginians – are frustrated with the high cost of living. The results offer at least some evidence that bread-and-butter issues, like the cost of rent and groceries, are going to be what resonates with voters in 2026.
Especially in a party as ideologically fractured as the Democratic Party, the affordability issue could offer a unifying theme.
“It really hinges on those candidates that get it and are connecting with voters in their frustration and their pain and offering a vision for moving forward,” said Jessica Mackler, the president of the Democratic-aligned EMILY’s List.
Content Matters
Countless column inches and airtime have been dedicated to discussing Mamdani’s digital strategy.
His viral videos swept social media feeds beyond the city he was running to lead and won him the attention of influencers, celebrities and scores of young voters, who not only watched his campaign’s content, but reposted and responded to it.
The lesson, according to one Democratic digital strategist, is that successful campaigns not only need to produce a lot of content, but the right kind of content.
“[Mamdani] wasn’t afraid to turn himself into a meme. Nothing about his videos felt inauthentic – I think you could say he wasn’t ‘cringe’ with his stuff,” the strategist said. “That’s probably, at least partially, because he’s a millennial. But it’s also a good case study in knowing your audience.”
But It Has to Be Backed Up By Action
Even if Mamdani knew how to get attention online, viral content only goes so far. One of his campaign’s biggest successes was converting that attention into tangible action.
Solidarity Tech, the CMS that Mamdani’s campaign used to manage its volunteers, helped create an integrated pipeline between the campaign’s online content and its volunteer database. Interested voters who might have otherwise kept scrolling through their social feeds suddenly found themselves receiving follow-up texts and event invites.
The end result: The campaign’s infrastructure helped get people away from their screens and to canvassing events and phone-banking sessions.
Mamdani’s campaign also experimented with an Instagram chatbot called Manychat that helped respond to comments and collect email addresses, driving tens of thousands of interactions that campaign staffers and volunteers would have otherwise manually fielded.
The takeaway for campaigners: Digital and content strategy shouldn’t just grab attention, but should drive engagement and mobilization.
The GOP’s 2024 Gains Among Latinos Might Not Stick
There’s plenty of election data to dive into in the coming weeks as both parties look for clues and trends ahead of the 2026 midterms. But an early look at the election results suggests that Republicans’ gains among Latino voters in 2024 may not have the staying power that the GOP had hoped for.
Take Passaic County in New Jersey, for instance. President Donald Trump carried the heavily Latino area in 2024 by 3 percentage points after former President Joe Biden won it four years earlier by 17 percentage points.
On Tuesday, voters there reversed course. Sherill beat out Republican Jack Ciattarelli in Passaic County by 15 percentage points, representing an 18-point swing from just a year ago.
Likewise, in Cumberland County, another heavily Latino part of the state, Sherill won by a 4-point margin. In 2024, Trump carried it by about 4 percentage points.
Taken together, the results suggest that Republicans can’t necessarily depend on the coalition that helped elect Trump in 2024 to keep them in power in 2026.
