New York, New Jersey, California and Virginia. In all local and state elections and polls, the Democrats look to be victorious.
According to Erik Åsard, professor emeritus at Uppsala University, the fact that the socialist Zohran Mamdani wins the mayoral election in New York and the more liberal Abigail Spanberger takes over as governor of Virginia shows a breadth within the Democratic Party.
The party shows that they are a very broad party that accepts candidates who in Europe would belong to different parties, he says and continues:
In Sweden, Mamdani would be a social democrat or left-winger, while the candidate in Virginia would rather be liberal or even moderate.
Threat of communism
But the breadth also means tension within the party.
They attract people from different political parts of society, but also expose themselves to attacks from opponents, says Åsard.
The political opponents will not attack the more moderate Democrats, but instead point to people like Mamdani.
They will go hard and use this Mamdani as a new symbol for the Democrats.
Donald Trump has already painted him as a communist and threatened to withdraw support for New York.
According to Erik Åsard, the elections in the US can be seen as mobilization elections and a protest election against Trump.
It is a vote against the policies that Donald Trump and his administration have pursued.
“Severe miscalculation”
How big of a setback is this for Trump?
It's a bit difficult to grade, but it's a setback. He had particularly hoped for the gubernatorial election in New Jersey where the differences in the opinion polls were small before the election. Now the Democrats won clearly and I think that was a serious miscalculation for the Republicans.
However, Erik Åsard does not think that it is possible to make too big a difference in the local elections.
In these particular places, the trend is the same, the Democrats are doing well on their own and the Republicans are doing the opposite.
But it's not possible to say that it applies to the entire country to a large extent. The US is a giant country and the real measure of value won't be available until a year from now when there are congressional elections, he says.
