WEB DESK
US President Donald Trump suffered a triple defeat as Democrats won high-profile state and mayoral elections. The elections underscore his unpopularity on first anniversary of his dramatic election win on Wednesday.
The last night results amounted to a sweeping repudiation of what critics have called 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 Trump.
And in New York, progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio rode a wave of hometown distaste for Trump to cruise to re-election in America’s most populous city.
Addressing supporters in a hotel ballroom, Mr. Gillespie tried to tack a courteous finale on to a rough-and-tumble race, offering his assistance to Mr. Northam going forward. “I wish him nothing but the best success,” Mr. Gillespie said.
Mr. Northam’s victory was a tonic to an anxious national party that has been reeling since Mr. Trump’s win last year and was demoralized by losses in special House elections in Montana and Georgia.
A native of Virginia’s rural Eastern Shore, Mr. Northam, 58, was perhaps an unlikely vessel for the resistance-era Democratic Party. But the left overlooked the two votes he cast for George W. Bush before he entered politics, and his résumé — he is a pediatric neurologist and Gulf War veteran — proved far more appealing to the state’s broad middle than Mr. Gillespie’s background as a corporate lobbyist.
The Democrats’ success here came as Mr. Gillespie, trailing in the polls, turned to a scorched-earth campaign against Mr. Northam in the race’s final weeks. Mr. Gillespie, a fixture of his party’s establishment who had once warned against the “siren song” of anti-immigrant politics, unleashed a multimillion-dollar onslaught linking his rival to a gang with Central American ties and a convicted pedophile who had his rights restored, while also assailing Mr. Northam for wanting to remove Virginia’s Confederate statues.