There were two special elections in Florida on Tuesday. One of them was for a House district that includes Mar-a-Lago. The other was a Senate seat in the Tampa area. Democrats won both and both were flips.
ETA: Is he going to congratulate her or call it a rigged election?
Why not both?
Reports are that DJT used a mail in ballot for this primary. Like he has done many times in the past.
Mail in ballots and a flipped seat: more Democrat cheating!
I am hopeful for what this as a possible trend but I will try to temper my enthusiasm. I don’t quite trust special elections to show overall trends across the country. I small motivated group can sway things easier in a special election than in a full normal election.
It looks like turnout was relatively high for a special election but still low. For the house race the last election had 96,000 votes cast. This election had 33,000 votes cast. The big difference seems to be with unaffiliated voters voting blue. I don’t know how good this source is but it seems pretty straightforward with vote totals.
https://flvoicenews.com/turnout-troubles-cost-republicans-in-florida-special-election-upsets/
Yeah, I wouldn’t put any faith in anything less than a 2 digit swing, and even that is merely hopeful rather than an absolute good sign.
20 point swing still depends on the candidates. Sometimes you have a Republican candidate who is more unlikeable and/or toxic than usual, for instance, the North Carolina governor’s race, where initial returns on election night seemed good for Kamala Harris but it turns out that it was just the Democratic governor himself doing really well, not a groundswell of backlash against the GOP.
Now a 20 point swing in what appears to be run of the mill candidates from both parties, neither uncharismatic nobodies nor people with lots of open baggage, that might be a positive sign.
There’s been a handful of upsets like this that point to voters being sick of MAGA. I do wonder if it’s survivorship bias, I don’t follow every state and local election so maybe these are outliers and most elections are still showing strong support for Rs.
I also think that this is part of the reason Trump has such a hard-on for the SAVE act. And if Republicans are going to lose big in the midterms, I can’t see the Republican establishment holding out through November. At some point they’ll realize that Trump is right, that wide-scale election intimidation and voter suppression will be needed to prevent a decade or more of Democratic rule.
I don’t think the old-guard GOP Senator thinks that way. And many of the younger ones are too stupid to understand.
Take John Thune, for example. He was elected to the Senate in 2005, a full 10 years before MAGA was a thing. John Cornyn has been in the Senate since 2002.
These guys are well aware that the filibuster is a fundamentally conservative device, and that it has protected GOP interests far more often than it has protected Democratic ones.
They also know that even when the Democratic Party seems to be cresting and riding a wave of demographic realignment (say, 2008), things always swing back. The GOP didn’t need massive voter disenfranchisement to win in 2010 (+7 in the Senate, +63 in the House) - these things just happen naturally.
I actually think the Democrats should call the “won’t sign anything until SAVE is passed” bluff by funding DHS (with some carve-outs for ICE) and seeing if Trump really wants to take all of the blame for refusing to sign it.
Trump has a hard on for the SAVE act because he’s an idiot, and/or he thinks it’s good politics. He’s been convinced that voter fraud is a big deal and that if it weren’t for illegal voting Democrats would never win. And more to the point, his MAGA base absolutely believes it. This is nonsense, of course. Trump is adamant that the SAVE act should have stuff in it about transgender women in sports as well. If that’s not enough to show that it’s purely political theater I don’t know what would do it. It’s red meat for the base, and a way to beat up on “RINOs” like Cornyn in the primaries.
They are not. The Downballot’s special elections spreadsheet shows that beating Harris’s numbers in the district (often by double-digit margins) has been the norm, not the exception, for special elections held in 2025 and 2026. Most of them are beating Biden’s numbers from his 2020 win, as well, although usually by smaller margins.
This doesn’t necessarily point to the same thing happening in the midterms, of course – the thing about special elections is that, by definition, they’re happening at an unusual time of year and not tied to a national messaging campaign, which means that only the voters who are most motivated and paying the most attention show up. For the moment, that’s Democrats and independents who are seriously pissed off at Trump; complacent people tend to be focused on other things.
Well, that’s kind of what this was (at least the West Palm Beach one). In 2024 the GOP candidate won this FL House District by 19 points. This time the Democrat won by 2. That’s a 21-point swing.
And there is nothing odd or toxic about the GOP candidate. He got Trump’s endorsement, and was on the local city council. He wasn’t an incumbent, but other than that he had every advantage you would want.
ETA: On preview I see that’s probably what you were saying… so consider this an agreement with your position!
Handful? More like 13 special election flips for the D-team; none at all for the R-team. Take a look at the link @Fretful_Porpentine posted in the post just after yours. (Note that that comes up with only 2026 races; if you hover over the “All cycles” link, it brings up a menu that has a link to the 2025 races.) Most of them, even the ones that the Rs held on to, have double digit swings towards the Ds.
Just a reminder here that Democrats always outperform in special elections. It doesn’t necessarily reflect a shift in regular elections.
Always since Trump, IIRC. The consensus prior to that was that the GOP did better in specials since they had more reliable voters. Low-info low-propensity voters have shifted MAGA pretty hard. Whether they show up in November (and then whether they vote GOP) is the big unknown.
It would not surprise me if that district flips back at the midterms when the other 2/3 of voters show up. It’s still a good sign that voters are motivated against Trump when they come out to off year elections.
Yeah, it very likely will switch back. But even if it goes from R+19 to R+9 that’s a huge swing and would almost certainly mean the Democrats regain the House and might even pick up a random Senate seat.
The interesting thing is that republicans still outvoted democrats in that election by several thousand. Either a large majority of unaffiliated voters went blue or there were a decent number of red registered voters who switched. Or a little bit of both.