“Rout,” “reckoning,” “bucket of cold water”—these were only a few of the hyperbolic metaphors mainstream and NeverTrump media indulged to describe Tuesday’s off-year elections, in which Democrats prevailed in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey and in New York City’s mayoral election. Eager to discover and promote an anti-Trump trend, and hopeful it will gain momentum in next year’s midterm elections, the doomsayers looked deep into these three races to find some validation and, perhaps, hope.

They should not.

For starters, these were only three elections—all polling in solidly blue constituencies. Virginia, once part of the “solid South,” has not voted for a Republican president since George W. Bush won there in 2004. New Jersey has snubbed GOP presidential hopefuls every election year since Ronald Reagan’s national landslide in 1984. New York City ballots last favored a Republican presidential candidate over a century ago, when Calvin Coolidge became president in 1924.

Of course, this year’s three races were naturally stacked to go blue, but there are other reasons for the Democrat victories. Like midterms, off-season elections also tend to favor the party that is out of power at the national level. With the presidency and both houses of Congress in Republican control, it’s to be expected their support would naturally slide, with lower turnout by registered Republicans and a drop in support from independents.

For all the cant about the results of this small sampling being a referendum on Trump, the president was notably absent from both state races. Virginia Republican contender Winsome Earle-Sears and New Jersey GOP hopeful Jack Ciattarelli have been less than loyal to the president in the past. In 2022, Sears called Trump a “liability” and suggested he should not run for reelection. Ciattarelli has called the president a “charlatan” and an “embarrassment to the Republican Party.” Earlier this year, he criticized Trump for pardoning Jan. 6 defendants and refused during the campaign to identify himself as a “MAGA Republican.” Notably, last year Trump won about 700,000 more votes in New Jersey than Ciattarelli had in his first unsuccessful run for governor in 2021. It is not unreasonable to assume many of those voters stayed home last Tuesday.

Trump did offer perfunctory endorsements of both gubernatorial candidates, but they were halfhearted at best. He did not even bother to say Earle-Sears’s name when he endorsed her in a telephone conference meeting in which he did name and endorse incumbent Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares. He also omitted her—a Marine Corps veteran—from a list of prominent Republicans he named at a celebration for the U.S. Navy’s birthday held in Virginia last month.

Despite much hope, Trump did not campaign in person for either gubernatorial candidate. In New York, Trump derided Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, long the only candidate who pledged to put more police on the city streets, as “not ready for primetime.” The president suggested voters opposing Democratic victor Zohran Mamdani cast their ballots for disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who lost his party’s mayoral primary to Mamdani in June but continued his candidacy as an independent. Mamdani won just over half the vote to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, but who could blame the 30 percent of New Yorkers who turned out for Trump a year ago for not backing their own party’s candidate this time?

House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Thursday that he is confident about Republican prospects in the 2026 midterms. He cited redistricting, a more present Trump, a likely resolution of the government shutdown, an unusually high concentration of contested Senate seats in red states, and other factors that would boost Republican prospects. And that’s all before the country witnesses the coming 10 months of Mamdani’s near-certain misrule of New York, which is likely to be disastrous.

No one in politics can ever afford to be complacent, and there are issues where the Republicans could govern and message better, but the off-term elections of last week will probably be remembered as little more than a blip.