While Democrats lost both special Congressional elections in Florida, the party clearly overperformed, narrowing the margins considerably in deep-red districts. The Republican victories, expected by most analysts, gave some relief to GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has struggled to pass legislation with a tiny majority.
In Florida’s Sixth District, Republican Randy Fine defeated his Democratic opponent Josh Weil by 14 points. While that appears to be a comfortable victory, that is less than half the margin tallied by the Republicans last fall, when President Donald Trump and Mike Waltz, the current national security adviser who previously held that seat, won by over 30 points.
Even more troubling to the GOP was Democrat Gay Valimont’s performance in Florida’s First Congressional District, where she lost to Republican Jimmy Patronis. The Republican margin there was 14.8 points, only five months after Trump won the same district by 37 points. In Florida too, Democrats flipped a major Trump county. Valimont won Escambia County -- where Trump won by nearly 20 points last November -- by just over three points on Tuesday.
“When Democrats are outperforming or winning, it’s a big psychological boost in a time when Democrats are feeling pretty low,” noted Democratic pollster John Anzalone in a New York Times interview. “They’re going to be dealing with the political environment that Trump has created, which is not good right now for Republicans.”
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel told a group of canvassers in Waukesha County last weekend that he needs to be elected to provide a “support network” for President Donald Trump and shared complaints about the 2020 election that have been frequently espoused by election deniers.
In a video of the remarks, Schimel is speaking to a group of canvassers associated with Turning Point USA — a right-wing political group that has become increasingly active in Wisconsin’s Republican party.
On the campaign trail, Schimel, a Waukesha County judge and former Republican state attorney general, has repeatedly said he is running for the Supreme Court to bring impartiality back to the body. He’s claimed that since the Court’s liberals gained a majority after the 2023 election, it has been legislating from the bench on behalf of the Democratic party.
But in more private events and to more conservative audiences, he’s often spoken more openly about his conservative politics.
At the Turning Point event, he said that prior to the 2024 presidential election, the country “had walked up to edge of the abyss and we could hear the wind howling,” but that the Republican party and its supporters helped the country take “a couple steps back” by electing Donald Trump.
Democrats and their “media allies” still have “bulldozers waiting to push into all that,” he said, by bringing lawsuits to stop Trump’s efforts to dismantle federal agencies without the approval of Congress, end birthright citizenship and fire thousands of federal workers.
“Donald Trump doesn’t do this by himself, there has to be a support network around it,” Schimel said. “They filed over 70 lawsuits against him since he took the oath of office barely a month ago, over 70 lawsuits to try to stop almost every single thing he’s doing because they don’t want him to get a win. They’re so desperate for him to not get a win that they won’t let America have a win. That’s what they’re doing. The only way we’re going to stop that is if the courts stop it. That’s the only place to stop this lawfare.”
When Schimel was the state attorney general, he lobbied the Republican-controlled Legislature to create the position of solicitor general under the state Department of Justice to help him file lawsuits against Democratic policies enacted by then-President Barack Obama. Republicans cut the position after Democrat Josh Kaul defeated Schimel in the 2018 election.
During his time in office Schimel joined a lawsuit with the state of Texas to have the Affordable Care Act declared unconstitutional. After the suit was successful in a Texas court, he said, “I’m glad he did this before I left office, because I got one more win before moving on.”
Kaul withdrew the state from the lawsuit after taking office in 2019, and the the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the suit by a 7-2 vote.
But, in his Turning Point remarks, Schimel accused his opponent, Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, of participating in the kind of “lawfare” that is being used against Trump now.
“My opponent is an expert on lawfare,” he said, citing her work as a lawyer against the state’s voter ID law and support from liberal billionaire donors.
Crawford campaign spokesperson Derrick Honeyman said that Schimel’s comments show he’ll be a “rubber stamp” for the Republican party.
“Brad Schimel’s latest remarks are no surprise, especially coming from someone who’s been caught on his knees begging for money and is bought and paid for by Elon Musk,” Honeyman said. “Schimel is not running to be a fair and impartial member of the Supreme Court, but rather be a rubber-stamp for Musk and a far-right agenda to ban abortion and strip away health care. Schimel has recently been caught behind closed doors saying the Supreme Court ‘screwed’ Trump over by refusing to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and these latest remarks are all part of a pattern of extreme and shady behavior from Schimel. Wisconsin deserves a Supreme Court Justice who answers to the people, not the highest bidder.”
Schimel’s campaign has received millions in support from political action committees associated with Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who has been leading Trump’s effort to slash government programs.
Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that Schimel told a group of supporters in Jefferson County that Trump had been “screwed over” by the Wisconsin Supreme Court when it ruled against his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In his remarks in Waukesha, he highlighted a number of talking points popular with many of the state’s most prominent 2020 election deniers. He blamed decisions by the Supreme Court for allowing those issues to persist.
“There were a string of other cases that the Supreme Court refused to hear before the election that impacted the election that year unquestionably,” Schimel said.
Schimel pointed to the issue of special voting deputies in nursing homes as a major problem.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, officials known as special voting deputies who normally go into nursing homes to help residents cast absentee ballots were unable to enter those facilities.
Republicans have claimed that decision allowed people who should have been ineligible to vote because they’d been declared incompetent to cast a ballot. Conspiracy theorists have pointed to affidavits filed by family members of nursing home residents that their relatives were able to vote. Only a judge can declare someone incompetent to vote, however.
The issue led to the Republican sheriff of Racine County to accuse members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) of committing felony election fraud and became a target in former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s widely derided review of the 2020 election.
Schimel also blamed the election commission’s decision to exclude the Green Party’s candidates from the ballot that year for Trump’s loss. WEC voted not to allow the party on the ballot because there were errors with the candidate’s addresses on the paperwork. The party sued to have the decision overturned, but the Supreme Court ruled 4-3 against the party because it was too close to the election.
While conservatives held the majority on the Court at the time, Schimel blamed liberals.
“Well, that was with three liberals and a conservative getting soft headed,” Schimel said, referring to Justice Brian Hagedorn, who frequently acted as a swing vote when conservatives controlled the Court.
Schimel added: “Those billionaires from around the country said, ‘What if we could get four liberals on the court? Then we don’t have to fool a conservative into doing something stupid.’ And then they did it in 2023. They bought that election, and they stole the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and they put us in chaos ever since.”
Mike Browne, a spokesperson for progressive political group A Better Wisconsin Together, said Schimel is willing to say anything to curry favor with right-wing supporters and financial backers.
“Brad Schimel has extreme positions like using an 1849 law to try to ban abortion, supporting pardons for violent January 6 insurrectionists, endorsing debunked 2020 election lies, and shilling for Elon Musk,” Browne said. “His bungling attempts to try to talk his way out of it when he gets called out don’t change the fact that time and again we see Brad Schimel on his knees for right-wing campaign cash instead of standing up for Wisconsin or our rights and freedoms.”
The Schimel campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
If a special election in Pennsylvania’s very red 36th state senate district offers any guidance, a wave of voter anger is looming over the MAGA Republicans. In what experts described as “a major upset,” voters who chose Donald Trump last fall by 15 points, voters yesterday elected a local Democrat and rejected the GOP nominee for the open seat.
Democrat James Andrew Malone, the mayor of East Petersburg, defeated Republican Josh Parsons, a Lancaster County Commissioner, by a scant 482 votes, or just under one percent. But Malone’s narrow victory is seen as a bellwether because the Republicans were expected to win the seat easily.
Berwood Yost, a pollster at Franklin and Marshall College, noted that Republicans had easily won the Lancaster County district for decades. In 2022, Ryan Aument, the Republican who then held the seat, had run unopposed. When Aument stepped down to take another position he left an opening for Democrats.
But neither Yost nor other Keystone State experts anticipated the Democratic surge that propelled Malone. On Tuesday, Yost told a local radio station that it was “hard for me to imagine that there would be an upset here. Let's remember Josh Shapiro, who is the current governor, who is a talented politician, he couldn't win Lancaster County over [2022 Republican gubernatorial nominee] Doug Mastriano - even though he carried many other places in the state.”
“In a district that went to Trump by 15 in 2024 and has a 23-point Republican voter registration advantage, Malone’s victory is a loud and clear rebuke to Republicans’ threats to the programs Pennsylvania families rely on – from Social Security and Medicaid to our public schools,” Martin said.
“To protect working Americans, Democrats like Senator-elect Malone are competing everywhere, and in special elections throughout the country, we continue to overperform as voters join us in fighting back against the Trump-Musk agenda,” the DNC chief concluded.
Parsons, a MAGA Republican who echoed Trump on immigration, crime and the economy, had failed to show up for a candidate forum to debate Malone and a Libertarian Party candidate two weeks ago -- imitating the recent behavior of many GOP elected officials.
Two new polls indicate that Democratic voters are continuing to lose faith in their party as leadership struggles to respond to President Donald Trump.
An SSRS poll for CNN released Sunday found that only 29 percent of adults view Democrats favorably, marking a new low in CNN’s polling since 1992 and a 20-point drop since January 2021. Even Democrats and left-leaning respondents were less enthusiastic about their party, with just 63 percent favorability—down from 72 percent in January.
This starkly contrasts with the survey’s Republican and right-leaning respondents, who reported 79 percent favorability of the Republican Party.
Meanwhile, a second survey released Sunday by NBC News revealed that 27 percent of registered voters hold a positive view of Democrats—the lowest rating recorded in the outlet’s polls since 1990. And merely seven percent of respondents indicated a “very” positive view of Democrats.
While NBC’s poll also found that the Republican Party has a net negative image—49 percent of voters view it unfavorably and 39 percent view it favorably)—it noted that the GOP could at least take comfort in controlling both chambers of Congress and the presidency. Democrats, however, have to cling to the hope that their party might reclaim maybe one chamber of Congress in 2026.
Both surveys suggest that the lack of support for the Democratic Party stems from its own voters feeling fed up. Not only have they witnessed their party’s loss to Trump in 2024, but now they face Democratic leaders attempting to compromise with the president—something Republicans would never consider if the roles were reversed.
As top Democrats continue to bend a knee to Trump, he and Elon Musk have taken a hatchet to the federal government, making massive cuts via the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
The results of these surveys come as Democrats continue disagreeing on the best way to govern. Over the weekend, progressives—and even some lawmakers from the party’s more moderate wing—harshly criticized Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer for conceding to Trump on the GOP-backed government spending bill.
After the House passed a partisan spending bill, Schumer and nine other Senate Democrats voted for cloture on Friday, ending a filibuster of Republicans’ detrimental funding bill. The bill proposed significant cuts to the federal budget while increasing defense spending by approximately $6 billion.
Schumer has defended his decision, even amid calls for him to step down or be replaced. But it remains unclear who he is trying to please. Some of his party members are weary of him, and now the public is shifting their support away from him, too.
In the SSRS poll for CNN, 57 percent of Democrats and left-leaning respondents expressed a desire for the party to focus on obstructing Trump’s agenda, compared to 42 percent who favored working with the GOP.
And NBC reported a similar finding: 65 percent of self-identified Democratic voters want their party to “stick to their positions even if this means not getting things done in Washington.”
Only 32 percent indicated a desire for Democrats to compromise with Trump, which marks a complete reversal from where Democrats stood in 2017, when 59 percent wanted members of Congress to seek consensus on policy.
These numbers may get worse over time, as both polls were largely or wholly conducted before the standoff over the government funding bill. Still, the results underscore how much Democratic voters are itching for their party to play at least some form of defense.
“I’m scared that compromising will lead to the downfall of our democracy, to only be slightly hyperbolic. It’s really scary to see the things being done, the things being slashed left and right without any regard for the outcome,” a Democratic voter and survey respondent told NBC.
These findings also align with a series of polls released last week, which suggest that Democratic voters view their party as ineffective and lacking direction.
Nevertheless, some Democratic leaders appear content to acquiesce to Trump rather than push back. And in doing so, they are alienating voters.
