Election warning signs for the GOP: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, a newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, Steve Kornacki explains why the New Jersey governor election results could have ramifications for the GOP across the country. Plus, Andrea Mitchell breaks down how the economy is becoming an even bigger issue for President Donald Trump with his sweeping tariff policy before the Supreme Court.

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— Adam Wollner

Two warnings for Republicans in the New Jersey governor results

Analysis by Steve Kornacki

Between the two gubernatorial elections yesterday, Virginia was supposed to be the lopsided one — and it was, with Democrat Abigail Spanberger crushing Republican Winsome Earle-Sears by 15 points.

But New Jersey looked like it was going to be a different story. The polling was competitive, and Republicans nominated a battle-tested candidate, Jack Ciattarelli, who’d nearly won the governorship four years earlier. Recent momentum was on the GOP’s side, with President Donald Trump coming within 6 points of Kamala Harris there last year — a giant improvement from his 16-point loss in 2020. And Democrats were privately sharing alarm that their nominee, Mikie Sherrill, seemed to be wilting under the spotlight.

But it was all a mirage. Sherrill walked away with a 13-point win, nearly matching Spanberger’s margin in Virginia.

It’s a concerning outcome for Republicans, because the two main ingredients in the Sherrill landslide have potential ramifications that extend well beyond the borders of New Jersey.

First, there are the well-to-do suburbs and bedroom communities. These are traditionally Republican areas populated with college-educated, white-collar professionals who are deeply uncomfortable with Trump. When he nearly won four years ago, Ciattarelli clawed back many of the suburban voters his party had been shedding in the Trump era. This time around, their verdict was decisive: They wanted to vote against the party of Trump.

Consider Hunterdon, Morris and Somerset counties, which have the highest median incomes and the highest concentrations of white residents with college degrees in New Jersey. In each one, Ciattarelli’s margin was 12 to 14 points worse than in his 2021 campaign. But his numbers in these counties were in line with Trump’s showing last year.

In fact, Ciattarelli fared worse than Trump in Morris, although some of this could be due to it being Sherrill’s home county.

But what about Ciattarelli’s home base of Somerset, where he also lagged behind Trump? It demonstrates the motivation of anti-Trump suburbanites now that he’s back in office, and it suggests that further GOP erosion is possible — in New Jersey and in similar areas around the country.

The other ingredient in Sherrill’s win involves nonwhite voters, with whom Trump made his biggest gains in 2024. These voters had not backed Republicans in the past, but Trump’s surprising inroads raised hope among his party — and trepidation among Democrats — that a broader shift might be underway, not just in New Jersey but nationally.

In this way, Ciattarelli was a test case: Could these gains transfer to a Republican running without Trump on the ballot?

The answer is a resounding no. In New Jersey municipalities that are at least 60% Hispanic (and where results are currently available), all of Trump’s 2024 gains were washed away Tuesday night.

Similar results can be seen in heavily Asian American areas in Middlesex County, where Trump also made notable gains last year.

Had Ciattarelli combined his suburban performance from 2021 with Trump’s 2024 inroads among nonwhite voters, he would have won. And if he could have retained at least some of both, the race would at least have been tight.

That would have given Republicans a nice post-election talking point, but it also would have been a genuine source of midterm optimism for them. It would have shown that the anti-Trump suburban passions were cooling and that partywide growth with nonwhite voters was continuing apace.

But Ciattarelli got neither. And as a result, he got clobbered.

Read the full story from Steve →

More from last night’s elections:

• Bridget Bowman, Adam Edelman and Ben Kamisar have six big takeaways, breaking down what the results mean for Trump, the midterms and beyond.
• Political operatives and leaders on the progressive left and MAGA right are looking to nationalize Zohran Mamdani’s narrative as he begins his transition from campaigning to governing the nation’s largest city, Allan Smith writes.
• Outside of Tuesday’s higher-profile races, Democrats scored notable down-ballot victories in Virginia, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Mississippi, Megan Lebowitz reports.
• Democrats Christian Menefee and Amanda Edwards advanced to a runoff in the special election to replace the late Rep. Sylvester Turner in Texas, Owen Auston-Babcock notes.

Trump's tariffs draw Supreme Court scrutiny with the economy at the top of voters' minds

Analysis by Andrea Mitchell

Exit polls show that the big winners in yesterday’s off-year elections — Democrats Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherill and Zoran Mamdani — share one common denominator: They won in large part because voters are dissatisfied with how President Donald Trump is handling the economy.

Their skepticism marks a significant erosion of one of the chief reasons Trump was re-elected just one year ago. And no economic policy is more identified with his second term than the one debated in today’s gripping Supreme Court argument: His unprecedented claim that imposing tariffs on a global scale is a broadly defined emergency power of the president, not Congress.

Predicting Supreme Court decisions is perilous, but oral arguments indicated this case might not result in another 6-3 ideological split favoring Trump. Veteran Supreme Court observer Linda Greenhouse predicted in The New York Times that “listening might even be fun.” She was right, at least for fellow nerds like me who are fascinated by the case. But it may not have been as much fun for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who showed up in the august Supreme Court chamber to hear the arguments in lieu of Trump, who had floated the idea of attending in person.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who argued the case for the White House, didn’t just get peppered with questions from the three liberal justices appointed by Democratic presidents. Sauer faced skeptical inquiries from conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett as well. The overriding issue: Why should the president have the power to abrogate what has for almost 250 years been deemed the legislative branch’s prerogative to raise revenues, even in emergencies? It’s what the conventionally conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page this week called Trump’s policy of “usurping Congress’s power over taxes and tariffs.”

Barrett also zeroed in on retaliatory tariffs, the levies Trump has imposed on nearly all of America’s trading partners. One example arousing a lot of criticism from critics of the policy: the 50% tariff he levied against Brazil, with which the U.S. enjoys a trade surplus — not for economic reasons, but because Trump was upset former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was charged with attempting a coup after he lost re-election. More recently, Trump threatened an additional 10% levy against Canada, a key U.S. trading partner, in response to a provincial governor’s anti-tariff ad repurposing a Ronald Reagan speech.

Critics of Trump’s policy argue that the impact of the tariffs is already feeding inflation, with worse effects to come. And the Canadian tariffs could have a particular impact on Rust Belt states that were key to Trump’s 2024 victory — and could be an early warning for Republicans in next year’s midterms.

The erratic nature of Trump’s tariff decision-making was already unnerving U.S. allies around the world. Now, it may be feeding into the economic anxiety of voters — including those critical to Republicans’ efforts to hold onto the House next year and the future of Trump’s agenda.

Related read: ‘Golden age’: Trump touts his economic agenda a day after heavy GOP election losses, by Matt Dixon

That’s all From the Politics Desk for now. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Adam Wollner.

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