Voters on Tuesday will be casting ballots in U.S. state and local elections with an injection of presidential-level politics, including a pair of competitive races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, the mayoral race in the nation’s largest city and a ballot measure in California that Democrats are counting on for next year’s elections to determine control of Congress.
The off-year elections have drawn President Donald Trump’s attention, and no race has attracted as much lip service or social media opinions from Trump as the mayor’s race in his hometown of New York City.
Though local issues are a major factor in Tuesday’s contests, the winners take on an outsize role in a year when Trump has battled with governors and mayors as he’s deployed National Guard troops and immigration agents across cities and states. For Democrats, the offices offer a chance to push back on the president’s agenda, while Republicans see it as an opportunity to support his aims.
Here’s what to know about Election Day 2025:
Impact on national politics next year and beyond: The one contest on Tuesday that may do the most to shape national politics going forward is a measure on the ballot in California, where voters will decide whether to approve a new congressional map that could flip as many as five Republican-held U.S. House seats to Democratic control in the 2026 midterm elections. California’s Proposition 50 is a response to Trump’s gerrymandering push to keep the U.S. House under Republican control in the 2026 midterms.New York City’s mayoral race: The race to lead New York City features Democratic state legislator and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, whose rising political star has generated excitement from the party’s more progressive wing and apprehension among the party establishment. He is facing former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent and attempting a comeback after resigning four years ago. Meanwhile, Republican Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels crime patrol group, is hoping a divide in the electorate between Mamdani and Cuomo will give him a long-shot opportunity in the heavily Democratic city. Trump has already turned Mamdani into a foil and falsely branded him as a “communist” while urging people to vote for Cuomo and dismissing Sliwa as “not exactly prime time.” How the AP calls races: The AP takes a careful and thorough analysis of the latest available vote tallies and a variety of other election data, with the goal of answering this question: Is there any circumstance in which the trailing candidate can catch up? If the answer is no, then the leading candidate has won. Read more here about how it is done.