Upcoming Elections

Getting involved early is how race trajectories are changed -- here's a very incomplete guide...

The Washington state Democratic Party caucus in Seattle on Feb. 9, 2008. (Joe Mabel / Creative Commons photo.)

As far as TFN is concerned, the definitive source for news about campaigns and elections is Bolts Mag. Check ‘em out and see what they’ve got to say about the races you’re interested in. Ballotpedia is a good resource for just-the-facts.

TFN doesn’t focus much on elections, preferring to concentrate on policy and systemic issues like some fucking snob too fucking good to get its hands dirty on the campaign trail. That said, when we’ve got the bandwidth, we’ll try to post info here about upcoming races.

A few staunch Newsfuckers have volunteered to help keep this page up to date. So, thank you, and take it away…

Contributing Reporter: Paula Schaap. I’m a lawyer and business and economics journalist who lives in the greatest city in the world, New York (no, I’m not willing to engage in debate on that one). More caveats: I am a diehard Democrat, so don’t look to me for fair and balanced when it comes to election reporting. I will, however, try to be somewhat accurate in reporting facts; my opinions are another thing altogether.

Nov. 4, 2025

CONGRESS

Relax, you didn’t do a Rip Van Winkle, fall asleep and wake up in 2026. There are two special elections for the U.S. Congress in 2025 still coming up this year: Tennessee’s 7th CD, where Republican Mark Green resigned and Texas’ 18th CD, where Democrat Sylvester Turner died (RIP). But the reason there isn’t that much for TFN to say about those elections is because each is slated to stay on their respective side of the political aisle. Still, if there ends up being a real race for one of those seats, or an upset, pundits will fall all over themselves telling us why it harbors good or ill for either party. Which maybe it will, or maybe that’s just how the [fill in your favorite regional saying here] in Tennessee or Texas.

GUBERNATORIAL

Two states are holding gubernatorial elections in 2025: New Jersey and Virginia.

New Jersey

For the first time since Mikie Sherrill, a Congresswoman, prosecutor and military veteran, prevailed in a crowded Democratic primary, a late September Emerson College poll has her Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, running even with her. Ciattarelli, a former New Jersey Assemblyman, is back for his third try at the governor’s mansion, and is, predictably, being supported by Donald Trump. But, given that Trump has been in a race to the approval bottom in New Jersey, according to the same poll, that could prove to be Ciattarelli’s Achilles heel.

Reasons cited for the narrowing race are the usual cost-of-living issues, especially property taxes and electric rates, with electricity costs rising 17%-20% in June, according to the Regional Plan Association. Ciattarelli is trying to tie rising energy costs and Sherrill to departing governor Phil Murphy, whose approval rating mirrors Trump’s. But the GOP nominee’s full-throated support of Trump means he also supports Trump’s punishing Democratic states and their voters with his cap on the SALT deduction.

Recently, the Trump administration’s usual bungling resulted in Sherrill’s unredacted military records being released, which included things like her social security number. Democrats are alleging the release came at the behest of people supporting Ciattarelli.

Sherrill’s program is the usual Democratic centrist agenda of tax credits and better-living-through-more development. Her prosecutorial background shows in her promise to go after “bad actors and special interests,” including pharmacy benefit managers and grid operators who, her campaign says, drive up energy costs. She also says she’s pro clean energy.

Sherrill and Ciattarelli faced off in their first debate September 21. CNN’s takeaways are here. If you want to watch the whole thing, you can watch it on C-Span. We’d watch it for you if we weren’t too busy catching up with “Slow Horses.”

Virginia

As New York and New York-adjacent voters, we don’t pay as much attention as we probably should to Virginia, which is or maybe used to be (?) home to many government agency offices, before Elon Musk’s DOGE got busy making America suck again. And, indeed, Virginia’s year-over-year GDP in the second quarter of this year slowed to 1.7% from 3.1%, according to the BEA. Though it’s hard to trust any data coming out of a Trump-run government (cf. Trump’s firing of BLS head Erika McEntarfer because her agency reported, you know, data), we’re going to trust the BEA on this one, for now, because it’s not the kind of topline economic number that the Trump administration cares about, or, probably, even knows how to find.

Anyway, back to the Virginia gubernatorial race.

Democratic Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger’s GOP challenger is Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears. The fact that Earle-Sears is Black and born in Jamaica likely isn’t proving much of a help to her given Trump’s anti-immigration policies that mostly, and horribly, affect non-white immigrants. Indeed, polls show Spanberger leading comfortably, sometimes by double digits.

Spanberger’s policies track the centrist path of more housing development, going after drug middlemen and supporting public school funding. More tellingly, her endorsements include a number of big unions, most recently the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents a lot of pissed-off federal workers.

Her opponent has not one union endorsement, though there’s a long list of local sheriff endorsements on her website.

Earle-Sears hews close to the Trump line on policy, though she tries (and usually fails) to make her positions sound less retrograde. So she says things like: “Winsome fully supports the Trump administration’s action to restore fairness and safety to women’s sports,” which, as we all know, is anti-transgender athletes.

MAYORAL

New York City

We’re going to cop to being tremendously biased on this one, both for considering the NYC mayoral election to be the most important election this year and also because we have been canvassing for the Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani, ever since we ranked him #1 in the primary. (Though we liked Comptroller Brad Lander a lot, and hope he has a role in Mamdani’s administration.)

As this page went to press (or whatever one says when it’s a click in a CMS), one of Mamdani’s “independent” rivals dropped out: Eric Adams, the city’s current mayor. That Adams was going to drop out was likely a foregone conclusion, given that barely a week goes by without news that some member of his administration, or a close associate, is being investigated or indicted. (Adams also faced federal criminal corruption charges, but Trump’s DOJ asked for them to be dismissed, and they were.)

Adams made the announcement that he was dropping out of the race to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” which is either tear inspiring, or cringe inspiring, depending.

Besides, nobody likes a sore loser, and especially, nobody likes someone who won’t even compete, they’re that much of a sore loser. Adams took himself out of the Democratic primary, but still couldn’t get away from controversy: the city’s independent Campaign Finance Board denied him matching funds citing the (dismissed) federal criminal case, as well as a failure to answer questions about donations that the board deemed suspect.

Turning now to the other “independent” (read: sore loser) candidate in the race, Andrew Cuomo, the city’s former governor who is roundly disliked for allegedly pushing senior citizen homes to take back sick residents during the initial stages of the Covid pandemic, thus potentially putting more lives in danger. Though in Cuomo’s defense, the early Covid months were a shit show in NYC hospitals, with literally no room for the sick and dying.

Less defensible was Cuomo’s treatment of staff, especially female staff, some of whom alleged that he sexually harassed them. (Cuomo has denied the allegations.) Cuomo resigned from the governor job before his third term was up.

Because of what TFN is now trademarking the “sore loser” factor, Mamdani has maintained a commanding lead over Adams and Cuomo. Now that Adams has dropped out – or, as the indefatigable Daily News front cover headline writer put it: Adams: One and Done – Mamdani still has a good lead over Cuomo, but it’s in single, rather than double digits.

The main rap against Mamdani is that he’s inexperienced, which is undeniably true. He has served three terms as a New York State Assemblyman from Astoria and Long Island City, in Queens. He identifies as Democratic Socialist, which history buffs will tell you was also the chosen identification of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. His platform sounds wonderful to anyone who cares about living in a city that’s welcoming to all: Free pre-K childcare, free buses (thank you from the outer borough neighborhoods where the subway lines don’t run), rent freezes for rent stabilized apartments, cracking down on bad landlords and building more affordable housing. He’s also proposing one city-owned grocery in each borough to address high food prices.

To pay for all that, Mamdani wants to hike taxes on big corporations and on the wealthiest New Yorkers. Which, of course, has them threatening to flee NYC, which happens every time someone talks about sharing the tax burden. And we notice that they are still here.

Cuomo, ever the policy wonk, has many similar planks in his platform, with very specific details about how he’s planning to get those planks laid. Which is fine, but is also not necessarily going to deliver the broader picture of what his mayoralty might look like, other than a rerun of his two-and-something governorship. But there are some planks that look like pandering, rather than policy. Like combating anti-Semitism, as opposed to combating racism in general, or beefing up the NYPD. (Now that Adams is gone, Cuomo is likely assured of NYPD votes. Also, those who teared up when they heard “My Way” playing behind Eric Adams.)

And, lest we forget, there is another contender in the NYC mayoral race from the Republican side: Guardian Angel founder and cat lover, Curtis Sliwa. The chances of him winning are slim-to-none, but Sliwa has claimed that people who are desperate to stop Mamdani have offered him lots of money to drop out of the race. Kudos to him for going public with that and for refusing to drop out (so far). And for his love of cats.

Other Mayoral Elections

There are other mayoral races still to be decided in our vast country, and we get that these races are important to local residents. That being said, what appears to be going on in many of those races, according to the great elections website Ballotpedia, is that a lot of people are piling into mayoral races this year, especially when the incumbent isn’t running again. And it’s pretty hard for us to judge from thousands of miles away what to highlight in those races. So we urge voters to get out and vote because, besides that voting should be a shared civic duty, it also may be, in this day and age, a case of “use it or lose it.”

But there are a couple of Midwest races that have some interesting angles to them, Cincinnati and Minneapolis.

Cincinnati

We were today years old when we found out that the Republican challenger to the incumbent Democratic mayor of Cincinnati is Vice President J.D. Vance’s half-brother. To which we say, sorry, but we all have “that” family member. And now, having caught up a little on the race, we’re not sure which half brother we should be saying that to. (And seriously, what is with this family and their unflattering beards?)

Incumbent mayor Aftab Pureval is Ohio born and bred, and the first Asian-American mayor of the city. He’s a lawyer who worked for the Department of Justice, and Cincinnati corporate giant Procter & Gamble, before he got elected to be Hamilton County Clerk of Courts; one of those “what’s that?” government management roles that actually can make a big difference in people’s lives if done well.

Bowman doesn’t seem to have his own campaign website, but the Hamilton County Republican party has a fairly anemic showing on their website, with print so light we wonder what they really think of the first Republican to show up to run for Mayor in this heavily Democratic city since 2009. He and his wife moved to Cincinnati in 2020 to open their own church (natch) and a coffee shop. He told Newsweek back in April that he wasn’t trying to coast on his brother’s notoriety. We’re not sure why, but we find it incredibly sad that when Newsweek reached out to Vance’s office, the response was crickets.

Minneapolis

We would love to parse out the entirety of Minneapolis’ 13-candidate slate for you, but that would mean less time to watch “Slow Horses.” However, there are two leading candidates – both Democrats, both progressives. Which, to us, sounds like a win-win for Minneapolis, but probably not for supporters of the candidate who doesn’t make it to City Hall.

Jacob Frey, a member of the Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party, is the incumbent, who was elected in 2017. He has the backing of Governor Tim Walz and a host of other party members. He’s also got a fairly lengthy history to run on, which is set out, in detail, on his campaign website, along with his “vision” for Minneapolis.

The other leading candidate is State Senator Omar Fateh, who identifies as Democratic Socialist but has much of the same kind of “vision” platform as Frey. (If you’re wondering why we’re putting the word “vision” in quotes, it’s because we’d like to return to a time when it meant “how’s your eyesight?” and not something grandiose and disconnected from the realities of American politics.)

But, in a move similar to what happened in NYC when the frontrunners in the Democratic primary – Mamdani and Lander – cross-endorsed each other, the top three challengers to Frey all cross-endorsed. (Minneapolis’ general election is ranked choice voting.) Which has made the race both closer, and more interesting.

STATES

Pennsylvania Supreme Court

You would be forgiven if you didn’t know that come November 4, Pennsylvania voters are being asked to vote on whether to retain three of their Supreme Court judges for another 10-year term. From what we’ve read, most Pennsylvania voters are blissfully unaware that’s how the judges of their highest court’s terms are extended after they were initially elected.

The three judges who are up for a retention vote are all Democrats. And, in an effort to change the makeup of the court, which is now 5-2 Democrat, the GOP is pumping money into what normally would go by more unnoticed than your local dogcatcher election. And the DNC is reportedly responding in kind.

If any of those judges aren’t retained, Governor Josh Shapiro can put someone temporarily onto the bench. But here’s the rub: The Republican-controlled State Senate has to approve even temporary appointments and the expectation is, given the chance, they would just let those seats sit vacant until the next time judge elections roll around, which takes place in 2027.

The desire, on the GOP side, is to have a court that will side with their positions on things like gerrymandering or abortion or whether they can overturn the results of lawful elections just by screaming loudly. And the Democrats are, obviously, afraid of all of the above.

My natural inclination would be to say that both political parties are getting way too deep into the weeds on something that is unlikely to have the same impact as, say, a Congressional seat flip. That’s mostly because courts can only have an impact when cases are brought to them to, well, judge. And that is usually a fairly long, arduous process.

But if the GOP fever dreams are of having a Pennsylvania version of the U.S. Supreme Court, well, I have to admit, the Democrats might have a point when they sound the alarm.

For more details on this weedy situation, there is, as always, the excellent Ballotpedia.

And, for those who want to get involved in supporting the Democratic campaign to retain the three Pennsylvania justices the PA Dems have a page with more information and a handy “Volunteer” button that links to groups hosting online and other events via Mobilize.

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- Jonathan