Donald Trump and the Republicans ought to be wary of a possible blue wave in next year’s midterms. On Tuesday, voters in Florida and Wisconsin signaled dissatisfaction with Elon Musk, the GOP and the president. On the surface, the results spelled political equipoise. No seats changed hands.
A closer look, however, reveals possible headaches for Donald Trump and his party.
In a special election in Florida’s sixth congressional district to fill the vacancy left by Mike Waltz, Trump’s beleaguered national security adviser, voters elected Randy Fine, a Republican state senator, as Waltz’s replacement. Last November, Trump won the district by a whopping 30 points. By contrast, Fine’s margin was about 14 points.
Beyond that, voter turnout was markedly lower than a half-year ago. Talk about underperforming.
Then again, the closeness of the contest came as no surprise to the White House. A poll conducted by Tony Fabrizio, a pollster to the president, actually showed Fine down by four points less than two weeks before the election. Those figures gave Trump and Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, plenty to worry about.
Fabrizio’s survey also triggered Trump’s decision to pull the nomination of Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the UN. Although she represented a so-called safe GOP district in upstate New York – “Mississippi with icicles”, in the words of one observer – the president was not prepared to take unnecessary chances.
He made the right call, politically speaking. Turns out, Florida’s sixth congressional district was not the only storm cloud in the Sunshine state.
The election to fill the seat vacated by Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first pick for attorney general, in the first congressional district experienced an even larger drop in GOP support. Back in November, Trump garnered a 37-point margin. On Tuesday, Republican Jimmy Patronis carried the district by about 13 points, a 24-point decline.
In hindsight, Trump was right to end Stefanik’s dreams. The GOP dropoffs in Florida’s first and sixth congressional districts signaled that the battle to replace her would have been a nailbiter.
Every vote counts, the saying goes. Quite possibly doubly so in the House. Mike Johnson maintains control by the thinnest of margins. On a good day, the Republicans will now hold 220 seats in the 435-member chamber. The results out of Florida are a warning that his tenure is in jeopardy come January 2027.
Earlier on Tuesday, the House rejected an attempt to thwart an effort to enable new parents to vote remotely. Nine Republicans joined the Democrats to hand the speaker a humiliating loss. Johnson labeled the result “disappointing”. The headline at Axios blared: “Mike Johnson scraps his whole week after brutal defeat”. Apparently, being the party of “traditional family values” doesn’t necessarily translate into support for newborn babies and their moms.
The results of the Tuesday’s House races also bear strong similarities to the special elections of 2017 and 2018. Back then, Democrats ran about 15 points ahead of Hillary Clinton’s performance on election day 2016.
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Over in the midwest, voters stuck a finger in the eye of Musk, the king of Doge. Wisconsinites elected the liberal Susan Crawford to a seat on the state supreme court. With more than half the vote counted, she held an insurmountable double-digit lead. Musk’s expenditures of time and money in favor of Brad Schimel, her conservative opponent, were in vain.
In the run-up to the election, Musk handed out $1m checks to voters. In the face of a legal challenge, Musk prevailed, claiming that efforts to restrain his expenditures constituted a violation of his rights under the first amendment.
Just days before the election, Musk also appeared onstage wearing a giant yellow cheese hat. His nod to Wisconsin’s dairy industry and the state’s beloved Green Bay Packers amused the crowd and the denizens of X, the Musk-owned social media platform. Actual voters, however, not as much.
Whether Musk steps back from the spotlight or whether Trump reels him in remains to be seen. Regardless, a Marquette poll shows his favorability ratings to be underwater, 38-60.
With the stock market in the doldrums, stagflation a real possibility and tariffs on tap, Trump and his minions have a real problem. To add to their woes, estimates peg economic growth for the first quarter of 2025 to be in retrograde. Higher prices loom. The rationale for swing voters to cast their lot with Trump dwindle daily.
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