Washington
\nUS President Donald Trump suffered a triple defeat as Democrats won high-profile state and mayoral elections to underscore his unpopularity on first anniversary of his dramatic election win today.<\/p>\n
The last night results amounted to a sweeping repudiation of what critics have called Trump\u2019s politics of division, and a test of his influence ahead of electoral battles looming on the state and national level.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Virginia governor\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s most populous city.<\/p>\n
Murphy and Northam painted their wins as rejections of the polarisation that to a large extent characterized Trump\u2019s 2016 campaign and much of his first year in the White House.<\/p>\n
The results mark a revival of political fortunes for the Democratic Party, which had failed to win a number of previous special elections in several states this year triggering concern about how to counter Trump\u2019s influence.<\/p>\n
A victory for Gillespie would have served to validate Trump\u2019s aggressive style, and form a blueprint for how mainstream Republicans can embrace Trump issues without necessarily embracing the controversial man himself. In his typically combative style, Trump swiftly sought to distance himself from Gillespie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Washington US President Donald Trump suffered a triple defeat as Democrats won high-profile state and mayoral elections to underscore his unpopularity on first anniversary of his dramatic election win today. The last night results amounted to a sweeping repudiation of what critics have called Trump\u2019s politics of division, and a test of his influence ahead […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9731,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9730"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9732,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9730\/revisions\/9732"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}