Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey stood in front of a train station in a downpour last week, lamenting the demise of a Hudson River rail tunnel after President Donald Trump said he “terminated” federal funding for it.

Four hours south, in a suburban Mexican restaurant, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia delivered a stump speech entirely devoted to her plans to fight the Trump administration.

Neither woman is technically running against the president in their races for governor. But they might as well be.

“There’s only one thing he seems to care about, and that is making sure he never gets crosswise with Donald Trump,” Sherrill told the small crowd of supporters and commuters about her opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, a Republican whom she has labeled the “Trump of Trenton.”

“That’s not who I am going to serve as your governor,” she added.

In 2018, Spanberger and Sherrill rode a wave of anti-Trump energy to win Republican districts and political stardom. Both campaigned then as moderate moms with national security backgrounds.

That center-left strategy — and the educated, suburban political coalition it activated — became a model for Democrats in the elections that followed in 2020 and 2022.

Now, with Trump back in the White House, the two women are positioning themselves as the second coming of Democratic opposition, hoping to once again ride a crest of liberal anger toward the president to power.

As in 2018, both have structured their races as referendums on Washington, casting their opponents as lackeys to a powerful president and promising to fight Trump’s agenda on issues from tariffs to abortion rights. National Democrats have positioned the races as the first opportunity for their powerless party to mount a comeback.

“You’ve got the DOGE cuts, federal contractors getting fired and layoffs and the government shutdown, plus all the other insanity of the Trump administration,” said former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia. “This is as good as it gets to be on the ballot as a Democrat.”

Sherrill sees similarities between her race for governor and her initial run for Congress. Many of the issues that are a focus of her effort — taxes, health care and the commuter rail tunnel — are the same (though there also new topics, like rising costs from tariffs and high electricity prices.)

But Trump’s total control over the Republican Party pushed Ciattarelli, who was endorsed by the president, to embrace elements of the president’s agenda and shifted the tone of Sherrill’s campaign away from talk of bipartisanship.

Views of her own party have changed, too. Just 30% voters said they had a favorable view of Democrats in a Quinnipiac University survey this fall, compared with nearly half who said the same in a poll conducted by CNN in October 2018.

“That experience in 2018 of flipping districts, like we all did, was really the formative experience,” said Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., who also won his seat in 2018 and remains close with Spanberger and Sherrill. Now, he said, “There is discontent with the Democratic Party and there’s discontent with some of the political leadership and people are wanting and demanding more.”

Spanberger’s stump speech in the closing days of her campaign touched on the main points of Trump grievance for Democrats: the sprawling cuts to the federal workforce — an issue particularly acute in Virginia — the president’s erratic tariff and trade policy, cuts to health care spending and aggressive immigration enforcement and deportations.

Those campaigning for her were more direct.

“What is happening is not OK,” Alfonso Lopez, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, told the crowd in Alexandria.

It is helpful for Spanberger to have drawn one of the weakest Republican opponents in recent memory. Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears has raised about half as much money as Spanberger and won only a tepid endorsement from Trump, late in the campaign.

Sherrill has faced a tougher opponent in Ciattarelli, who has tried to combine some of the president’s signature issues, like cracking down on immigration and transgender rights, with his focus on lowering taxes, public safety and improving schools.

She is attempting to replace Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democratic who is finishing his second term. Democrats have not won three consecutive governor’s elections in the state since 1961.

With 860,000 more registered Democrats in the state than Republicans, the question for Sherrill is whether her anti-Trump message will be enough to mobilize Democrats, particularly Black and Latino voters who shifted right during the 2024 election.

As she crisscrossed the state Thursday, Sherrill assailed both her opponent and Trump, linking the agendas of the two men over and over again.

Allies made the stakes even more explicit to the crowd.

“You get to send a message right here in New Jersey that a free people bows to no king,” Pete Buttigieg, the former secretary of transportation, told a cheering crowd at a campaign rally Thursday. “Not three years from now, but this coming Tuesday.”

Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., made the stakes even more explicit to the crowd: “Don’t bring MAGA into New Jersey,” he pleaded.