Donald Trump is an unpopular president. He has always been an unpopular president. Every time America has held an election while he is in power, his party has lost. That includes off-year elections (even in 2019, Andy Beshear flipped a gubernatorial seat in red Kentucky and Democrats took over the Virginia legislature). When he takes over, he governs badly, people get angry, and they take it out on his party. It’s really that simple, and I don’t understand why this isn’t conventional wisdom.
Given that reality, I don’t know that all the effort to lay out what Democrats must do to win has accomplished much of anything. The iron law of 21st-century politics, beyond Trump’s incompetence, is that in nine of the last ten elections, the parties have traded power, with at least one chamber of Congress or the presidency changing hands. That’s likely to happen in 2026 as well. The party that actually responds to public needs will break this cycle, and Donald Trump resoundingly isn’t up to that task.
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Will Democrats take this opportunity, or will they be content to negative polarize their way back to power, without planning what to do when they get there? The power of Zohran Mamdani’s message came from finding the right problems to address, which is the necessary step to finding the right solutions. But if we zoom in a little closer, we can see a through line that has rapidly become a top-tier issue in U.S. politics: electric bills.
The Georgia Public Service Commission determines what customers pay for electricity by regulating utility rates. Georgia is one of only ten states where utility commissioners are elected. The five commissioners, all Republicans, approved investor-owned Georgia Power, the largest utility in the state, for six rate increases over the past two years. Georgia Power’s profit margins are now the second-highest in the nation, with a return on equity of 12 percent, far higher than their counterparts. I’ve written about how investor-owned utilities use complex models to bamboozle public utility commissioners and get the rate hikes they want.
Two of the commissioners (Republicans Tim Echols and Fitz Johnson) who made those decisions were up for re-election on Tuesday. Democrats Peter Hubbard and Alicia Johnson ran on reducing the return on equity and saving ratepayers $700 million annually. They each won by 26 points, making them the first Democrats to win a statewide race in Georgia in two decades.
You might assume that these districts must be skewed to Democrats, but no: These were statewide races, even though each commissioner represents a particular part of the state. We only had elections in 2025 because they were canceled for the previous two election cycles due to a multiyear legal battle that preserved statewide elections for the PSC.
So one of the biggest swing states in the country saw total blowouts on the level of statewide Democratic wins in California. Sure, part of this is a function of turnout: The preliminary numbers show about 20 percent turnout statewide, compared to around 50 percent for the last midterm election in Georgia. Low turnout favors the more motivated party, and Tuesday’s results show that Democrats were far more motivated. But this is such a giant victory that it’s reasonable to suggest something else is going on: People are really, really angry about skyrocketing utility bills. It’s no surprise that the election where that was the central issue showed the biggest loss for Republicans.
The dynamic was not limited to Georgia. Democrat Mikie Sherrill defied the polls and won a double-digit victory to become governor of New Jersey. In the final weeks of the campaign, she hit on a key promise: to declare “a state of emergency on day one, freezing utility rate hikes … I’m not doing a 10-year study. I’m not writing a strongly worded letter, I’m not going to convene a group, I’m declaring a state of emergency to drive your costs down.” Promising something tangible in the state where utility rates have risen 22 percent in one year clearly paid political dividends. (Republican Gov. Brian Kemp happened to cut a deal with Georgia Power recently to freeze base rates for three years, but when you do that after six rate hikes in two years, and when you exempt fuel and storm damage costs, it lacks punch.)
The other major governor’s race this week was in Virginia, home to more data centers than any area on the planet. The build-out of the computing power needed to generate AI models is seen as responsible for widening energy demand and therefore soaring costs. Democratic Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger said during the campaign that she wanted to see Big Tech companies “pay their own way and their fair share” of costs for data center energy.
Democrat John McAuliff, a former clean-energy staffer in the Biden administration, flipped a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates that Trump won last year by running against the data center explosion. In one campaign ad, he accused his opponent of personally profiting from hundreds of data centers. “I’m tired of losing family farms to data centers,” McAuliff says in the ad.
The evidence is pretty strong that electricity has jumped the line over some other affordability issues and now sits near the top of the list. And Democrats have a pretty good plan to execute to counteract this. First, they can stress reducing the profit margins that utility companies argue they must have in order to stay in business. As much as anything, this is an anti–Wall Street stance: It’s the investors demanding double-digit returns. Utility regulators don’t have to accept that.
In addition, data centers are clearly a fat target from a campaign standpoint. Forcing a choice between food and electricity so someone can make a video of a cat in a sombrero dancing isn’t a trade-off most people will accept.
And then there are the tools that align with environmental imperatives. Amid high energy demand, no power generation facility should be arbitrarily disfavored. Clean energy like solar and offshore wind is vital if the finances are available to build them; Trump’s war on clean energy is totally counterproductive. The situation offers that long-sought way for Democrats to sell the energy transition: It’s actually to reduce costs over the long term.
One of the reasons New Jersey’s utility rates shot up this year was the closure of several power plants; there’s a direct line from Trump denying permits to offshore wind projects that would help New Jersey because he doesn’t like how wind turbines look from his golf course and how much residents are paying for electricity. Jack Ciattarelli, the Republican challenger to Sherrill in New Jersey, aligned with Trump on offshore wind; he got pummeled.
Connecting these power generation projects to the grid, which has become a flashpoint with the grid operator that serves New Jersey and Virginia (PJM), could be another plank of the agenda, along with reconductoring to minimize the loss of energy through power lines.
Democratic solutions on energy affordability neatly connect to Trump’s refusal to allow energy projects to move ahead. And there’s a populist streak to taking on powerful utility monopolies and their financial backers. Delivering success here will build trust in an electorate that has already rejected laissez-faire solutions. It feels like a real opportunity to reset the climate debate as a cost-of-living debate, and reverse the structures of power that have made a basic necessity of life unaffordable.
Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2025. All rights reserved.
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