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With less than two weeks before the election and the pause on federal food aid looming, Jessica Anderson took to social media to remind voters that she knew the strain many people in her Virginia House district were feeling. A decade earlier, as a young mom in the middle of a separation, she had walked into her local social services office and qualified for SNAP and Medicaid. 

Anderson, who won a hyper-competitive race for her Virginia House of Delegates district, said that relating personally to voters’ economic anxieties — many times in personal conversations at people’s doors — was critical to her victory and that of Democrats across the country Tuesday night. 

“Humanizing myself and people seeing a little bit of themselves in me being a working-class mom — especially those in my community that have struggled, or are currently struggling —  they’re like, ‘She gets it,’” Anderson said in an interview Wednesday, juggling lunch before her commute to work as an administrative aide at a local elementary school. “‘She’s someone that has been on the other side of having to ask for help.’”

Anderson will join a powerful Democratic majority in the Virginia House of Delegates, one that is poised to grow from a one-seat advantage by at least a dozen. Democrats in this Southern state will go from the minority party in 2021 to a comfortable trifecta following the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term. The central message: “Chaos” coming from Washington is making your life more expensive. 

At the start of Trump’s second term, sweeping government layoffs job cuts hit federal-worker-heavy communities like Northern Virginia especially hard. The ongoing federal government shutdown, the longest in history at 36 days, means much of the remaining federal workforce is going without pay and families who rely on federally funded food assistance risk going hungry. 

Across the country, Democrats had a night of victories powered by women candidates, many of whom campaigned on the cost of living and energy prices, and achieved historic firsts, including former Rep. Abigail Spanberger as the first woman governor of Virginia and Rep. Mikie Sherrill as the first Democratic woman governor of New Jersey. Downballot, Anderson will join the largest class of women lawmakers in the Virginia General Assembly. 

Spanberger and Sherrill anchored their campaigns on affordability, as did Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor-elect of New York City and downballot candidates across the nation. Voter concern over electricity prices also drove surprise double-digit wins for Democrats in less high-profile races for Public Service Commissioner in Georgia, where Alicia Johnson became the first Black woman elected to a statewide office. 

Elsewhere in the country, Democrats won a supermajority in the New Jersey state Assembly, broke Republicans’ supermajority in the Mississippi state Senate, held control of the state Supreme Court and swept several local races in Pennsylvania, and approved a ballot measure in California to combat Republicans’ push to redraw U.S. House districts in their favor ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. 

Jessica Mackler, the president of EMILY’s List, which backs Democratic women candidates who support abortion rights, said on a Wednesday call with reporters that all of the group’s endorsed candidates had won their elections. 

“If last night made one thing abundantly clear, it’s that we take back power by running women candidates at all levels,” she said. “These are the first major elections of Trump’s term, and we saw that our candidates won big.”

In Virginia, Democrats ran candidates in all 100 seats in the House of Delegates. Their campaign for an expanded majority in the chamber had two important features: It was driven largely by women candidates, and those candidates focused largely on lowering the cost of living. 

Of the 13 seats Virginia Democrats are projected to flip, 10 were won by women candidates. Nine were challengers who took down Republican incumbents, most with comfortable margins. 

One of those successful candidates was Delegate-elect Leslie Mehta, who ousted a Republican incumbent in a suburban district outside of Richmond, the state’s capital. Mehta, a former legal director of the Virginia ACLU, got involved in politics by advocating for lower health care costs after her daughter Brooke was diagnosed with Rett syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, in 2017.     

“After my daughter Brooke passed in 2021, I started doing even more work with Abigail Spanberger, our new governor-elect now, as well as other Democrats and Republicans, to advocate for strong health care across the board,” Mehta said on the EMILY’s List call. “And I wanted to continue that work, and I’m glad to be able to do that here in the House of Delegates.”

Like Mehta, Anderson said voters responded well to personal connections based on struggles to meet their basic needs. “The wins across the nation last night highlighted that people are really tired of the same old cookie-cutter candidate,” Anderson said. “They think that we need really dramatic change, policy-wise, to benefit working-class people and those that are struggling, especially in this political climate and this economy.” 

Anderson ousted a three-term incumbent and Republican leader Tuesday night. Anderson represents a district in southeastern Virginia.

Trump ran on the issue of inflation and promised to lower costs during his 2024 presidential run. In 2025, Democrats criticised Trump and Republicans for imposing tariffs on imported goods and passing a major tax and spending cut bill. Initial returns show that in states like New Jersey and Virginia, where voters turned out at high rates, Democrats on the ballot outperformed Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 margins and made up ground in many areas that had swung toward Trump. 

Tram Nguyen, the longtime leader of New Virginia Majority, a political advocacy group focused on working-class Virginians, said Democrats’ strength this cycle was more closely speaking to the top issues for voters, “instead of trying to make the election about what they want, which we see sometimes on the campaign trail.” 

New Virginia Majority knocked on more than 100,000 doors on behalf of some Democratic candidates, work that started even before the primary. Nguyen said that it was immediately clear to volunteers that the cost of living was the top issue — not long-term economic concerns, but personal and immediate urgency about looming rent hikes, stunted efforts to buy a home, and the cost of groceries at the store that very week. 

With the shutdown and worries about SNAP just days before the election, even voters who don’t receive food aid were feeling the stress of donating to food banks and wondering whether their neighbors would be impacted, Nguyen said. “You’re feeling in your own pocketbook directly or you’re digging into your pocketbook to help, right?” 

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who led Republicans to a sweeping victory in 2021 but will leave office as a powerful Democratic trifecta is ushered in, blamed Republicans’ performance on the shutdown. “Virginians are hurting,” he said in a news conference.

Up and down the ballot, it was disproportionately women candidates who succeeded at connecting with voters’ anxieties and winning the support of voters in areas where Democrats underperformed last cycle. 

“They are able to lead in a way that is connected and focused, and I just think that they have been strong communicators,” Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said Wednesday. 

Meghan Meehan-Draper, executive director of the Democratic Governors Association, told reporters Wednesday that when she started at the organization a decade ago, there were “more governors named John than women.”

“Now we have 10 Democratic women governors, 24 Democratic governors across America who represent the majority of the American population, and so I think we’re in a great place to keep momentum going,” she said. 

“When we think about recovery — solutions that lift up families and the community, women are at the center of that, time and time again,” Nguyen said. “It’s not surprising or shocking to me to see that women are also at the center of leading the way in this particular moment in this country where folks are finding a path out where we are.”