Our Election Guide

Off-year elections aren’t as consequential as presidential or midterm elections. But governors’ races and ballot measures still matter plenty.

“They allow us to get a sense of where voter attitudes and energy are moving,” said Carolyn Ryan, a managing editor of The Times who used to run our Politics desk.

We were talking in her office in the center of the newsroom, with editors and reporters lined up outside to get her counsel. “They’ll deliver the best view yet of how voters are feeling and reacting to the first year of the second Trump administration,” she told me.

There are two possibilities for that view, and they could both end up being true.

• Republicans want to see whether the gains Trump picked up among both young and nonwhite voters have cemented. That is particularly true of the contests in California, New Jersey, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

• Democrats hope the results show that they are not still reeling from their loss of the White House in 2024, and that they can point to a path forward for 2028.

Here’s what to watch for tomorrow.

For 15 years, California has used a nonpartisan commission to draw the map of congressional districts. That meant neither side got an advantage, even if it controlled the State House. It proved popular, and a number of states created similar commissions. But Trump has pushed red states to make new districts that favor Republicans so they can hold onto the majority in Congress.

In response, California’s leaders are asking voters to set aside the existing maps and replace them with ones drawn by Democratic lawmakers. The result could flip as many as five seats in next year’s midterm elections.

Republicans call it a power grab. Democrats call it part of a national effort to establish a check on the power of the Trump administration.

Carolyn and Jess Bidgood, who hosts the On Politics newsletter (sign up!), call it a test measuring the desire of voters in states run by Democrats to take on the president. “In this hyperpartisan moment,” Jess said, “the real question is, Are voters willing to be hyperpartisan?”

It’s the new against the familiar in the mayoral race here, with Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani well ahead in the polls against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the activist, radio personality and former subway guardian Curtis Sliwa. Mamdani has promised to make the city affordable — and drawn fire from his rivals, as well as some Democrats, for left-wing views and criticism of Israel. Watch for a changing of the guard or a repudiation of an upstart. Trump has vowed to punish the city if Mamdani wins.

• Here are the latest polls on the race.

• See the candidates’ stances on the issues.

• And these are the five key voting groups that could decide the election, including faith voters and young voters.

New Jersey

The governor’s race between Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat who has served in the House since 2019, and Jack Ciattarelli, a Republican businessman and former state legislator, is the one both Jess and Carolyn are watching most closely. It’s a nail-biter, with recent polls showing Sherrill’s lead slipping amid a lot of negative advertising. (Ciattarelli has accused Sherrill of misconduct during her time at the Naval Academy. Sherrill has accused Ciattarelli of spreading misinformation about opioids.) “The race has been a lot closer than many experts would have expected,” Carolyn said.

The state’s majority-Hispanic townships all swung for Trump. Tomorrow’s vote will test the durability of that rightward shift, our reporters write.

The people of Virginia typically vote for governors who are members of the party that’s not in the White House. No wonder the Democrat in this year’s race, Abigail Spanberger, a moderate former House representative, holds a significant polling lead over her Republican rival, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.

Spanberger has built her campaign not on national issues, but on how much it costs to live and thrive in Virginia, which she argues has been disproportionately hurt by the government shutdown. But she’s also known to compromise. Earle-Sears, for her part, has secured only a lukewarm endorsement from Trump, who usually keeps his distance from Republicans he thinks will lose. “I haven’t been too much involved in Virginia,” Trump said.

So why watch this one? Two reasons. Whoever wins will be a barrier breaker: No woman has ever served as governor of Virginia. Second, as Jess pointed out, if Spanberger wins, some Democrats will say her campaign could provide a road map for Democrats in the midterms — and beyond.

Here are the latest polls on the race.

Pennsylvania

That doesn’t sound very exciting. (“True,” Jess told me.) But the outcome of the election could determine whether the seven-member court has a liberal majority during the 2028 presidential election. Jess said this matters because the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court is the highest court in the most important swing state in the country.

Read more on why this election matters.

Maine

I’ve got family in Maine and will be watching the results there closely. A proposal the state’s voters will take up tomorrow would eliminate two days of early absentee voting, require photo identification in order to vote, ban prepaid return envelopes for absentee ballots and limit drop boxes.

“It’s pretty hard to convince voters to make the cumbersome process of voting harder,” Jess said. “So I think the vote will be a test of Trump’s rhetoric about rigging elections, about voter fraud, and how deeply that message has resonated with the electorate.”

You can follow all the election updates tomorrow on our website. Now, let’s get you caught up on the latest news.

THE LATEST NEWS

Trump Administration

• President Trump said the U.S. was not planning to go to war with Venezuela, but he suggested that it was time for the nation’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, to leave office.

• A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration cannot send in National Guard soldiers to Portland, Ore., for another few days, until she makes her final decision.

• The nuclear testing ordered by Trump will not involve nuclear explosions, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said.

Europe

• The British police arrested a man after a stabbing rampage on a train injured 11 people. Officials said that it was not terrorism related, but offered no other potential motive.

• France used its trove of DNA profiles to find some of the Louvre suspects, showing the power of DNA databases for solving crimes.

More International News

• An earthquake in northern Afghanistan killed at least 15 people. The quake struck near Mazar-i-Sharif, a city known for its magnificent Blue Mosque.

• Xi Jinping, China’s leader, gave two cellphones to South Korea’s president, who asked how secure they were. His answer: “You can check if there’s a backdoor.”

• A massacre is unfolding in Sudan, and the world is largely looking away, my colleague Declan Walsh writes in The World.

Other Big Stories

• Two Kenyans won the men’s and women’s races in the New York City Marathon: Benson Kipruto — by three hundredths of a second — and Hellen Obiri.

• There was an explosion at Harvard Medical School, but officials said it only damaged a small section of a hallway.

OPINIONS

Regardless what polling on single issues might suggest, Americans are moderate. They’re primed to vote no on almost any change, German Lopez writes.

Metropolitan Diary: Don’t let the city eat you.

Personal assistant: In her 1993 biography, Maria Riva revealed the price she paid for the fame of her mother, the movie star Marlene Dietrich. Riva died at 100.

SPORTS

Personal victory: After facing seemingly insurmountable odds, India’s national women’s cricket team won its first World Cup.

N.F.L.: The Los Angeles Chargers rallied around Daiyan Henley, who helped his team beat the Tennessee Titans. See what happened in Week 9.

N.B.A.: The Oklahoma City Thunder are the N.B.A.’s last undefeated team standing as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander led his team to a win over the New Orleans Pelicans.

It’s been 43 years since Martha Stewart published her first cookbook, “Entertaining,” and exploded the idea of the modest dinner party. Out was a roast chicken and green salad. Here came “A Light Summer Dinner for Eight to Ten” or “A Hawaiian Luau for Twenty,” all accompanied by beautiful antiques, copious candles, miles of jacquard.

The book was equal measure camp and goal-setting, as my old pal Julia Moskin writes today: “an odd hybrid of a professional catering manual, an aspirational but practical cookbook and celebrity lifestyle porn.”

It remains so today, as Martha’s publisher issues a reprint this week. Julia uses the new edition to take measure of what’s changed for Martha, for our cooking, for our kitchens and cookbooks and dining rooms. For more than four decades, Martha has been a hero — and, to some, a cartoon villain. She has always argued, Julia writes, “that domestic goddess is a role worth striving for — a creative and professional project akin to directing a movie or building an app.”

“I wanted to be a homemaker,” Martha told her in an interview. “I wasn’t a housewife or a housekeeper. I wanted to make a home.”

More on culture

• The novelist Peter Orner has a lovely review of John Irving’s latest, “Queen Esther,” a novel that returns readers to the world and the characters of “The Cider House Rules,” from 1985. That’s welcome news to Orner. “I needed this dose of old-school New England decency,” he writes. “Few skewer sanctimony quite like Irving at his best. More important: I fell in love, once again, with his people.” I’m in!

• “There’s an inherent theatricality to church,” writes the critic Alissa Wilkinson, “and a furtive spirituality to theater. In form, they’re similar: Everybody crowds into a room, usually sits facing the same direction, and focuses on a central action — at least for a while.” Alissa uses those parallels to explore a number of recent shows that dance between art and religion. It’s smart.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

Here’s a new recipe that you may well bake on repeat from now through the end of the year. It’s for salted butterscotch chocolate chunk cookies — essentially chocolate chip cookies that have been discovered by Hollywood and cast in the next season of “The White Lotus,” cookies that might date a financier or a basketball star. Crisp edges, chewy centers and intense butterscotch flavor pair beautifully with crunchy toffee and soft chocolate chunks under a scattering of flaky sea salt. Glamorous!

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …