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It was an off-year when it comes to elections, but 2025 was on fire on the campaign trail as next year's looming midterm showdowns took shape.

While it was never expected to match the intensity of the tumultuous 2024 battles for the White House and Congress, this year's off-year elections grabbed outsize national attention and served as a key barometer leading up to the 2026 midterm contests for the House and Senate majorities.

Here are five of the biggest moments that shaped the campaign trail.

5. Trump pushes mid-decade congressional redistricting

Aiming to prevent what happened during his first term in the White House when Democrats reclaimed the House majority in the 2018 midterms, President Donald Trump in June first floated the idea of rare but not unheard of mid-decade congressional redistricting.

HERE ARE THE NEXT BATTLEGROUNDS IN REDISTRICTING FIGHT

President Donald Trump first floated the idea of mid-decade congressional redistricting in June. (Alex Brandon/AP Photo)

The mission was simple: redraw congressional district maps in red states to pad the GOP's razor-thin House majority to keep control of the chamber in the 2026 midterms, when the party in power traditionally faces political headwinds and loses seats.

Trump's first target: Texas.

A month later, when asked by reporters about his plan to add Republican-leaning House seats across the country, the president said, "Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five."

The push by Trump and his political team triggered a high-stakes redistricting showdown with Democrats to shape the 2026 midterm landscape in the fight for the House majority.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas called a special session of the GOP-dominated state legislature to pass the new map.

But Democratic state lawmakers, who broke quorum for two weeks as they fled Texas in a bid to delay the passage of the redistricting bill, energized Democrats across the country.

Among those leading the fight against Trump's redistricting was Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during an election night press conference at a California Democratic Party office Nov. 4, 2025, in Sacramento, Calif. (Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP Photo)

California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 50, a ballot initiative that will temporarily sidetrack the left-leaning state's nonpartisan redistricting commission and return the power to draw the congressional maps to the Democratic-dominated legislature.

That is expected to result in five more Democratic-leaning congressional districts in California, which aimed to counter the move by Texas to redraw their maps.

The fight quickly spread beyond Texas and California.

Right-tilting Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have drawn new maps as part of the president's push.

SETTING THE STAGE: WHAT THE 2025 ELECTIONS SIGNAL FOR NEXT YEAR'S MIDTERM SHOWDOWNS

Republicans are looking to GOP-controlled Florida, where early redistricting moves are underway in Tallahassee. A new map could possibly produce up to five more right-leaning seats. But conservative Gov. Ron DeSantis and GOP legislative leaders don't see eye to eye on how to move forward.

"We must keep the Majority at all costs," Trump wrote on social media this month.

In blows to Republicans, a Utah district judge this month rejected a congressional district map drawn up by the state's GOP-dominated legislature and instead approved an alternate that will create a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

And Republicans in Indiana's Senate defied Trump, shooting down a redistricting bill that had passed the state House.

Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith announces the results of a vote to redistrict the state's congressional map Dec. 11, 2025, at the Statehouse in Indianapolis. (Michael Conroy/AP Photo)

But Trump scored a big victory when the conservative majority on the Supreme Court greenlighted Texas' new map.

Other states that might step into the redistricting war are Democratic-dominated Illinois and Maryland and two red states with Democratic governors, Kentucky and Kansas.

4. Jay Jones text messages revealed, rocking Virginia's elections

Virginia Democrats were cruising toward convincing victories in the commonwealth's statewide elections when a scandal sent shock waves up and down the ballot.

SHOWDOWN FOR THE HOUSE: DEMOCRATS, REPUBLICANS BRACE FOR HIGH-STAKES MIDTERM CLASH

Democratic attorney general nominee Jay Jones instantly went into crisis mode after controversial texts were first reported by the National Review in early October.

Jones acknowledged and apologized for texts he sent in 2022, when he compared then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert to mass murderers Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot, adding that if he were given two bullets, he would use both against the GOP lawmaker to shoot him in the head.

Jay Jones addresses supporters after winning the Democratic nomination for Virginia attorney general as wife Mavis Jones looks on in Norfolk June 17, 2025.  (Trevor Metcalfe/The Virginian-Pilot/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

Jones faced a chorus of calls from Republicans to drop out of the race.

And the GOP leveraged the explosive revelations up the ballot, forcing the Democratic Party nominee, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, back on defense in a campaign where she was seen as the frontrunner against Republican rival Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.

Earle-Sears didn't waste an opportunity to link Spanberger to Jones. And during October's chaotic and only gubernatorial debate, where Earle-Sears repeatedly interrupted Spanberger, the GOP gubernatorial nominee called on her Democratic rival to tell Jones to end his attorney general bid.

"The comments that Jay Jones made are absolutely abhorrent," Spanberger said at the debate. But she neither affirmed nor pulled back her support of Jones.

KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE 2025 ELECTIONS 

While the scandal grabbed national headlines, in the end it didn't slow down the Democrats. Spanberger crushed Earle-Sears by 15 points. Democrats won the separate election for lieutenant governor by 11 points, and Jones even pulled off a 6-point victory over Republican incumbent Jason Miyares.

3. Democrats overperform at the ballot box

Just eight days into Trump's second term in the White House, demoralized Democrats had something to cheer about.

Democrat Mike Zimmer defeated Republican Katie Whittington in a special state Senate election in Iowa, flipping a Republican-controlled vacant seat in a district that Trump had carried by 21 points less than three months earlier.

Zimmer's victory triggered a wave of Democrats overperforming in special elections and regularly scheduled off-year ballot box contests.

Among the most high profile was the victory by the Democratic candidate in Wisconsin's high-stakes and expensive state Supreme Court showdown.

With inflation, the issue that severely wounded them in the 2024 elections, persisting, Democrats were laser focused on affordability, and the wins kept coming.

In November's regularly scheduled elections, they won the nation's only two gubernatorial showdowns — in New Jersey and Virginia — by double digits. And they scored major victories in less high-profile contests from coast to coast.

Rep. Mikie Sherrill celebrates during an election night event in East Brunswick, N.J., Nov. 4, 2025.  (Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The year ended with Democrats winning a mayoral election in Miami, Florida, for the first time in a quarter-century and flipping a state House seat in Georgia.

The Democratic National Committee, in a year-end memo, noted, "In 2025 alone, Democrats won or overperformed in 227 out of 255 key elections — nearly 90% of races."

But Democrats are still staring down a brand that remains in the gutter, with historically low approval and favorable numbers.

ELECTION REFLECTION: 'DEMOCRATS FLIPPED THE SCRIPT' ON AFFORDABILITY IN BALLOT BOX SHOWDOWNS

Among the most recent to grab headlines, only 18% of voters questioned in a Quinnipiac University survey this month said they approved of the way congressional Democrats were handling their job, while 73% percent disapproved.

That's the lowest job approval rating for the Democrats in Congress since the Quinnipiac University Poll began asking this question 16 years ago.

2. Democrats' primary problem

The Democrats overperformed in this month's special congressional election in a GOP-dominated seat in Tennessee, losing by nine points in a district that Trump carried by 22 points just a year ago,

But there were plenty of centrist Democrats who argued that state Rep. Aftyn Behn, the Democratic nominee in the race, was too far to the left for the district.

Republicans repeatedly attacked Behn over her paper trail of past comments on defunding the police.

'FULL-BLOWN BATTLE' BREWING IN DEM PARTY AS MAMDANI-STYLE CANDIDATES RISE IN KEY RACES

And the U.S. Senate campaign launched this month in red-leaning Texas by Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a progressive champion and vocal Trump critic and foil, compounded the argument by centrists.

"The Democratic Party’s aspirations to win statewide in a red state like Texas simply don’t exist without a centrist Democrat who can build a winning coalition of ideologically diverse voters," Liam Kerr, co-founder of the Welcome PAC, a group which advocates for moderate Democratic candidates, argued in a statement to Fox News Digital.

Democratic State Rep. Aftyn Behn speaks to supporters at a watch party after losing a special election for the U.S. seventh congressional district, Dec. 2, 2025, in Nashville, Tenn. (George Walker IV/AP Photo)

And the center-left Third Way, in a memo after the Tennessee special election, argued "there are two projects going on in the Democratic Party right now. One is winning political power so we can stop Trump’s calamity. The other is turning blue places bluer.

"If far-left groups want to help save American democracy, they should stop pushing their candidates in swing districts and costing us flippable seats."

1. Mamdani wins NYC mayoral primary

It was the story that has dominated campaign politics for the past six months.

Zohran Mamdani's convincing June 24 victory in New York City's Democratic Party mayoral primary was the political earthquake that rocked the nation's most populous city and sent powerful shock waves across the country.

The capturing of the Democratic nomination by the now-34-year-old socialist state lawmaker over the frontrunner, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and nine other candidates propelled Mamdani to a general election victory.

Zohran Mamdani delivers a victory speech at a mayoral election night watch party Nov. 4, 2025, in New York City.  (Yuki Iwamura/AP)

Mamdani's primary shocker and, later, his general election victory, energized the left.

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But it also handed Republicans instant ammunition as they worked to link the first Muslim New York City mayor with a far-left agenda to Democrats across the country, as the party aimed to paint Democrats as extremists.

But Trump, who had repeatedly called Mamdani a "communist," appeared to undercut that narrative with a chummy Oval Office meeting with the mayor-elect last month.

Paul Steinhauser is a politics reporter based in the swing state of New Hampshire. He covers the campaign trail from coast to coast."