Congressional Democrats inspired by their party’s wins across the nation this week are planning to lean in on messaging on rising energy prices as they aim to take back House and Senate majorities in next year’s midterm elections.
Exit polls following Tuesday’s contests showed voters in Virginia and New Jersey were motivated primarily by opposition to President Donald Trump and disappointment in the economy when they handed Democrats sweeping electoral wins.
Democrats have already been hitting electric utility costs as a top messaging point ahead of midterms. They’re seeking to blame Trump and Republicans for price increases across the country, pointing to factors like Trump’s cancellation of wind and solar projects and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s termination of clean energy tax credits.
Now, the wins for Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger, New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill and others are giving Democrats hope — although Republicans have sought to downplay their importance. Voters identified the cost of living as a top concern and electricity as one of the main drivers.
Down-ballot races similarly heavily favored Democrats, as did a pair of statewide races for Georgia’s Public Service Commission.
“Yesterday, from coast to coast, voters sent a resounding message that they reject the Republican agenda. They are raising costs on everything from health care to housing to utilities,” Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told reporters Wednesday.
“Trump and House Republicans promised on Day 1 to lower costs and they’ve broken that promise over and over and over again. It’s going to cost them the House majority,” she continued.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called the election a rejection of the Trump agenda and promised that Democrats “will continue to lead on the issue of affordability.”
Democrats in the Senate are similarly bullish.
“It should serve as nothing short of a five-alarm fire to the Republicans. Their high-cost house is burning. And they’ve only got themselves to blame,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).
“The election showed that Democrats’ control of the U.S. Senate is much closer than the people and the prognosticators realize,” he continued. “The more Republicans double down on raising costs and bowing down to Trump, the more the Senate majority is at risk.”
“People don’t like bans on solar energy, which is right now the cheapest and quickest way to get electricity onto the grid,” Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, a leading Democratic voice on climate change and clean energy, said of the outcomes.
“In New Jersey, Virginia, Georgia, they all ran on a cheap, clean energy message, and it worked,” he continued.
Both Spanberger and Sherrill made electricity prices a major focus of their campaigns, as both states saw double-digital percentage growth in costs. Spanberger promised to protect residents from shouldering costs associated with the booming data center industry, while Sherrill said she’d freeze rate hikes.
Their Republican opponents tried to push back with their own solutions. In Virginia, Winsome Earle-Sears blamed wind and solar and promised to get the state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, while New Jersey’s Jack Ciattarelli said he’d reopen shut-down nuclear power plants.
Dan Kanninen, a Democratic strategist and founder of Arc Initiatives, said this week’s races demonstrate that Democrats can win on affordability and show the beginnings of a road map to doing so in the midterm elections.
“The key for Democrats will be to continue to focus on affordability and not take the gains last night for granted. And as Republicans inevitably try to change their talking points, Dems need to remind voters what Republicans actually did when they took power,” he said via email.
“They crawled over broken glass to deliver tax cuts to billionaires, then promptly abandoned — or even callously punished — everyone else out of pure retribution politics,” Kanninen added.
Luke Bassett, director of energy security at the Searchlight Institute, said a key takeaway from the races is that each successful candidate used issues tailored to their constituencies, not just a single national message.
Bassett’s group has been encouraging Democrats to talk less about climate change and instead espouse other policies that could help the climate, like adding solar and wind generation to the grid.
“It’s less about one particular message and more about the skill the candidates are showing in being responsive to their voters. And that translates, hopefully, to the same skill set that other candidates in other districts or states or cities, etc., can use,” he said.
Republicans are far from throwing in the towel on energy prices. It was a topic of discussion Wednesday morning when Trump brought Senate Republicans to the White House for breakfast, said Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.).
“President Trump and the work that we’re doing is bringing those prices down from the inflation created by the Biden administration. But we need to make sure people know that,” Hoeven said in an interview.
The lesson from this week’s elections is that “we need to talk about it more and get the word out,” he added.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) all but dismissed the impact of the elections, with the exception of Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City mayoral race.
House Republicans doubled down on their efforts to connect Democrats with Mamdani and his support for democratic socialism, saying House Democrats across the board “have embraced him with open arms.”
“Off-year elections are not indicative of what’s to come. That’s what history teaches us,” Johnson told reporters.
“When we go into next year and the midterms, we’re very bullish about the outcome. We have an extraordinary record to run on,” he added, asserting that: “We’ve got American energy dominance revved and going again.”
