Democratic election win is lousy anniversary gift for Republican Trump

WASHINGTON — US President Donald J. Trump suffered a triple defeat as Democrats won high-profile state and mayoral elections to underscore his unpopularity on Wednesday’s first anniversary of his dramatic election win.

The Tuesday night results amounted to a sweeping repudiation of what critics have called Mr. Trump’s politics of division, and a test of his influence ahead of electoral battles looming on the state and national level.

The most damaging defeat was in Virginia, a state bordering Washington seen as a bellwether for national politics with the country gearing up for 2018 congressional elections and the next presidential contest in 2020.

The Virginia governor’s race had all the makings of a nailbiter, but in the end, Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam trounced his Republican rival Ed Gillespie by an unexpectedly wide nine percentage points in the southern battleground state.

In New Jersey, Democrat Phil Murphy reclaimed the governorship with a victory of about 13 percentage points over his rival following eight years of Republican Governor Chris Christie, a onetime ally of Mr. Trump.

And in New York, progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio rode a wave of hometown distaste for Mr. Trump to cruise to reelection in America’s most populous city.

Messrs. Murphy and Northam painted their wins as rejections of the polarization that to a large extent characterized Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and much of his first year in the White House.

“Tonight, New Jersey sent an unmistakable message to the entire nation: We are better than this,” Mr. Murphy declared.

The results mark a revival of political fortunes for the Democratic Party, which had failed to win a number of previous special elections in several states this year triggering concern about how to counter Mr. Trump’s influence in US politics.

“This is a referendum on American values,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said on CNN, speaking of the Tuesday night sweep.

In a statement, the Committee said it had won not just in Virginia and New Jersey but “up and down the ticket across the country” by maintaining or flipping mayoral and state house seats in six other states.

In Virginia, Democrat Danica Roem, 33, made history by becoming the state’s, and possibly the nation’s, first openly transgender state legislative delegate.

A victory for Mr. Gillespie would have served to validate Mr. Trump’s aggressive style, and form a blueprint for how mainstream Republicans can embrace Trump issues without necessarily embracing the controversial man himself.

Now they might be forced to rewrite their playbooks.

In his typically combative style, Mr. Trump swiftly sought to distance himself from Mr. Gillespie, who did not campaign with the president in Virginia.

“Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for,” Mr. Trump wrote in a scathing tweet from South Korea, where he is in the midst of a tour through Asia.

The president insisted that with the US economy doing well, “we will continue to win.”

But some analysts said the results suggest a Democratic wave might be on the horizon.

Virginia was a “bloodbath” for Republicans, Michael McDonald of the University of Florida told AFP. —