Dem
47
GOP
53
While we are not a newspaper, we do tend to cover events soon after they have taken place. Sometimes, after the dust has settled, there's a bit more to be added. So it is with the election results from Tuesday.
When we first wrote about the results from Florida, we observed that you could plausibly see good news for Republicans, or good news for Democrats. From the Republican vantage point, they held the two seats, and both candidates performed about in line with the PVIs of the districts they will now represent. From the Democratic vantage point, their two (losing) candidates outperformed the Democrats who ran in those same districts 5 months ago, and by double digits in both cases.
There are a couple of Florida data points that have been pointed out in the last 48 hours, and that we think are worth passing along. First, four very red counties make up FL-01. When Gay Valimont was defeated back in November, she lost all four of them by sizable margins. On Tuesday, however, in her second bite at the apple, she actually won one of the quartet, turning a 14-point deficit in Escambia County 5 months ago into a 3-point victory. This was the candidate's most dramatic improvement across the four counties.
Why is this significant, at least potentially? Well, Escambia County is home to a very large population of federal workers. It is the nerve center of U.S. Naval aviation, and has numerous other government concerns, employing both civilian and military personnel. You can probably see where this is headed. If there was going to be a backlash to what Elon Musk and his Musketeers are doing, you'd expect to see it in FL-01 (home to more federal employees than any other House district in Florida), and especially in Escambia County. And, at least tentatively, it sure looks like that's what happened.
In addition, this spreadsheet from The Downballot is very interesting. There have been a total of 13 special elections since Donald Trump took office, the two in Florida, and 11 elections for state legislatures scattered across half a dozen different states. And in those 13 elections, the Democrats outperformed their November results in 11 of them. And in 10 of the 11, the overperformance was in the double digits. For example, the blue team did 16 points better than in November in the election for Pennsylvania SD-36, 19 points better in the election for Maine HD-24, and 25 points better in the election for IA SD-35. One special election can easily be an outlier, but 11 of 13 (10 of them overwhelming) suggests a trend. Is the problem a backlash against Trump? Or is it that he's not on the ballot, and so the MAGA Militia isn't showing up to vote? Maybe both? If it is either of these things (or both), then it's a dynamic that figures to continue into November of next year.
And that brings us to one last item, a close look at the Wisconsin results courtesy of Politico. Despite Musk's outlay of $20 million, and despite an aggressive GOP get-out-the-vote effort, officially-nonpartisan-but-really-a-Democrat Susan Crawford outperformed Kamala Harris in every single county in the state. Crawford did particularly well in swing counties, where she outdid Harris by an average of 12 points. And while we've written "special elections are wonky" a million times, what happened in Wisconsin didn't really unfold like a special election. As we pointed out in our initial writeup, turnout was nearly identical to a real, bona fide midterm election, with both sides ginning up their voters to try to get them to the polls. If you wanted a dress rehearsal of a midterm election, you couldn't get much closer than Wisconsin this Tuesday.
It is a very long time until Election Day 2026, of course, but the early signs continue to suggest that the general rule of "the party that holds the White House takes it in the teeth in the midterms" will hold. (Z)