Democrats Won a Trump +55 District

By Jacob Weindling | May 22, 2025 | 3:48pm

Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel

Elections Special Elections

There have been some pretty stunning special election results this year. All should come with the caveat that ever since 2017, special elections have favored Democrats, but what has happened so far this year has accelerated that trend. The week after Trump’s inauguration, Democrats won a special election for a State Senate seat in Iowa’s District 35, which Trump won by 21 points in November. A couple of months later, Democrats won a State Senate seat in Pennsylvania’s 36th district, which has voted for a Democratic president just once since 1856. The Downballot has an excellent tracker for every special election this year, and so far on average, Democrats are running 15.5 percent ahead of their 2024 results, faring worse than their 2024 margin in just 2 of 22 special elections, both coming in South Dakota.

That average was raised two days ago when New York’s State Senate District 22 produced a margin that defies all conventional political logic and wisdom. Trump won this south Brooklyn district 77 percent to 22 percent in November, then Democrat Sam Sutton won his election this week by a margin of 35 points—a gobsmacking 90 percent swing from how this district voted in the presidential election just a little over six months ago.

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All politics is local so you can’t just look at everything as a direct repudiation of Trumpism. The previous congressperson Sen. Simcha Felder was a conservative Democrat who caucused with the GOP, and Sutton’s nonprofit work for years has made him a “fixture” in the community according to the local Democratic Party. The Republican he defeated, Nachman Caller, is an attorney who ran for the state Assembly ten years ago. Candidates matter and it seems as if the Democrats had a real advantage on that front in this race.

The dynamics of a Trumpy district with a conservative Democrat who caucuses with the GOP are very unique, but the margin that Sutton won by is impossible to ignore. I don’t care how popular you are locally or how rooted you are in the community, a 90 point swing in six months is telling you that something significant has occurred.

It’s still too early and special elections are too small to make any grand conclusions yet, other than the fact that the electorate’s shift towards Democrats is real enough so as to spook Trump into pulling Elise Stefanik’s UN nomination over fears they would lose that special election in a district she won by 24 points in November. This shift has happened all over the country, from Virginia to Iowa to New York to Oklahoma, providing Democrats with evidence that there is electoral upside in leaning into Trump’s growing unpopularity.