Discontent with the economy is once again proving to be the primary force in U.S. politics, defining elections in three states on Tuesday and punishing the party in power.
Democratic candidates who focused their messages on economic issues will now lead the country’s biggest city, as well as two states: In New York City, which elected a 34-year-old democratic socialist as mayor, it was housing affordability and the cost of big-city living. In New Jersey, a nearly 20% rise in power prices over the past year amped up voter frustration. In Virginia, voters felt the effects of President Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce and a government shutdown that has left many workers there without paychecks.
Across the board, the biggest contests on Tuesday were decided by voters who listed the economy or cost of living as the leading issue where they lived. Exit polls conducted by the firm SSRS show those voters broke for the Democrat by nearly 2-to-1 in all three races.
Many of the same frustrations that propelled Trump to office last year now appear to be working against Republicans. High prices for food, transportation and housing remain well above voters’ comfort level. The rate of price increases is well below its high point in 2022, but inflation has ticked up a bit lately in part because of Trump’s tariffs. New problems have also emerged to fuel voter frustration, including a slowdown in the hiring rate.
The stock market is producing big gains for investors, and spending by top earners is powering the economy. Yet wage growth for lower-income earners is stalling, and many younger Americans are shut out of the housing and job markets.
That dynamic of a two-speed economy seemed to work in favor of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who made the case that the economy wasn’t working for everyone and cast landlords and billionaires as adversaries.
Mamdani catapulted from an unknown state-assembly member to mayor-elect by running a social-media-savvy campaign focused on cost-of-living issues. He promised free child care, free buses and rent freezes for residents living in rent-stabilized apartments. He has said he took a page from the Trump campaign’s successful focus on Biden-era inflation.
Mamdani said Tuesday night that voters had delivered “a mandate for a city we can afford.”
Phil Rubianes, 26, cast his first vote ever when he voted for Mamdani in the Democratic primary. He also volunteered for the candidate a few times. The UPS driver has long been a fan of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) but never found any other politicians worth making the trip to the polling site for.
He hopes Mamdani can help the city’s housing-affordability crisis. When he moved to New York in 2021, a time when rents were depressed during the pandemic, he paid $1,000 to share an apartment on a leafy street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Rent hikes have prompted him to move twice since then and he now pays $1,500 a month to share an apartment with four other men in the Ridgewood area of Queens, which is farther from Manhattan. “It’s basically a dorm,” he said.
Many of his fellow drivers who supported Trump in 2024 supported Mamdani over his affordability promises. “When you hear free child care, freeze the rent, it’s hard to say no. Just having the chance at enacting such a big change in the city, it’s worth betting on,” Rubianes said.
Some of the city’s wealthiest people recoiled at the prospect of a Mamdani win. The rich Upper East Side and Tribeca neighborhoods went for former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Voters whose families earned $300,000 or more a year broke for Cuomo by 62%, compared with 33% for Mamdani, according to exit polls.
But Mamdani signs were a frequent sight in the windows of multimillion-dollar Brooklyn townhouses. Tony Park Slope favored Mamdani by more than 55 percentage points, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from the New York City Board of Elections.
Mamdani’s affordability message even resonated with voters who would be considered well off in many other parts of the country. Yet even middle-class earners find it hard to keep up with the city’s astronomical costs. Mamdani won those earning between $100,000 and $299,999 a year by 53% to 39%, according to an SSRS poll.
Margaret Ross-Martin moved to the city a decade ago and earns $185,000 a year helping municipalities develop plans to decarbonize their economies. “If you had told me five years ago this would be my salary, I would think that’s so crazy, that’s so much money,” the 35-year-old said.
The reality of earning that much in post-pandemic New York is far different. She rents a below-market-rate, one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn’s affluent Carroll Gardens neighborhood. She travels to the Park Slope Food Coop to save on groceries and limits going out to eat.
“It’s remarkable to me how financially stretched I feel and I cannot even imagine what it’s like to be working a minimum-wage job trying to raise a family,” Ross-Martin said. “I went to go pick up trash bags at a bodega and they were $18. A can of soup is $6. It’s laughable.”
Ross-Martin, who volunteered for Mamdani’s campaign as coordinator of canvassers, said residents of gentrifying neighborhoods such as Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant were particularly receptive to the campaign’s affordability message. Neighborhoods where residents are at the greatest risk of being priced out favored Mamdani over Cuomo by a full 27 percentage points, according to the Journal’s analysis.
Mamdani also had a 14-point lead in neighborhoods with above-average poverty rates, the analysis showed.
Surging power prices were a big factor in the New Jersey governor’s race: Nearly nine in 10 voters called the cost of electricity a problem where they live, according to exit polls.
Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the majority of those voters, exit polls showed, riding a wave of anger among residents and business owners over rising electricity bills. Retail power prices in the state were up 19% this August from a year earlier, according to the latest data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, among the steepest increases in the U.S.
Sherrill said during the campaign that she would declare a state of emergency on utility costs, which she said would allow her to freeze rates in place while pursuing cost-reducing measures. Her opponent, Republican Jack Ciattarelli, pledged to quit a regional carbon-reduction program as a way to lower power bills.
Democrat Abigail Spanberger was elected governor of Virginia, where the federal government’s shutdown is curbing economic activity by over $1 billion a week.
In Virginia, home to one of the country’s biggest concentrations of federal workers, the monthlong government shutdown and Trump’s cuts to the federal workforce have angered many voters and pushed them to vote for Democrats, local economists said. Exit-poll data showed those who have been most affected by government cuts this year went for Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, by 40 percentage points over Republican Winsome Earle-Sears.
The shutdown is depriving many federal workers of paychecks and reducing economic activity statewide by more than a $1 billion a week, with the damage concentrated in the Washington, D.C., suburbs in the north of the state and in the military stronghold in the Hampton Roads region, said Robert McNab, chair of the economics department at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va.
“I think the primary issue for voters in Northern Virginia was obviously reductions in federal employment and uncertainty surrounding federal grants and contracts,” McNab said. “We’ve seen continued unemployment claims that are higher for Virginia for every week in 2025 relative to ’24 and ’23. And when you look at the composition of continued unemployment claims, most of those claims are in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads,” he added.
Spanberger won support by focusing her campaign squarely on economic issues, while Earle-Sears focused on “divisive social and cultural issues,” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.
Cultural issues were more salient four years ago, when Glenn Youngkin rode to victory on parental anger over pandemic school shutdowns and transgender rights issues, Rozell said.
“That worked well for Republicans four years ago,” Rozell said. This time, “it just did not work with voters during a period of some degree of economic anxiety.”
Write to Jeanne Whalen at Jeanne.Whalen@wsj.com, Rachel Louise Ensign at Rachel.Ensign@wsj.com, Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky at jjw@wsj.com and Brian Whitton at brian.whitton@wsj.com
