Democrat Ralph Northam defeated Republican Ed Gillespie in Virginias gubernatorial election Tuesday, granting Democrats their first major victory, and Republicans their first big loss, since the election of President Donald Trump .

Northam beat Gillespie by a comfortable margin of 54 to 45 percent.

The stakes of the closely fought race were especially high for Democrats, who were desperate to hold on to a governorship in a state with a popular Democratic governor and where Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by 5 percentage points in 2016.

The outcome provides rank-and-file Democrats with a much-needed injection of optimism, averting the catastrophic scenario of another crucial loss.

It also deals a blow to the Trump-like right-wing populist playbook that Gillespie employed in his bid to win.

Democrats were anxious all along, at the very end, about whether this thing would go their way, whether their core vote would turn out for them. And it did, said Quentin Kidd, a political science professor at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Theyre breathing a sigh of relief.

Whats more, the significant size of Northams win bodes well for Democrats across the country in the 2018 midterm elections, according to Kidd.

Everything we thought was happening was actually happening, he said. There was a lot of pent up anger and frustration in the Democratic electorate.