Are the Republicans Stumbling?
Elon Musk may be MAGA Magic Ken, but it looks like all that money could not buy a Wisconsin state Supreme Court seat--and Florida isn't as warm as it used to be either
At a town hall sponsored by his America PAC, on Sunday, March 30, 2025, Elon Musk urges Wisconsin voters to support Republican State Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel.
Is the 2024 MAGA magic fading already?
Don’t bet on it. And yet, yesterday’s special election results in Wisconsin and Florida were…not terrible for the Democrats.
Let’s start with Wisconsin, where the news is good. Liberal Democrat Susan Crawford pulled out a State Supreme Court win yesterday by a healthy ten points, despite tech billionaire Elon Musk having sunk $25 million of America PAC money into the race. Jill Underly was also re-elected as State Schools Superintendent, defeating education consultant Brittany Kinser by a comfortable five points. Kinser, who was running on the Republican ballot line, described herself during the campaign as a “blue dog Democrat.”
In fact, OpenSecrets identifies Kinser as a consistent Democratic donor. That said, she supports school choice and ran a public charter school network. She outspent Underly more than 2-1, much of the money from the Wisconsin GOP, and I am sure she had nothing to do with the mailers and texts targeting blue districts that falsely identified her as the actual Democrat in the race.
However, our main focus today is Florida, where the Democrats did not win either congressional race, but demonstrated potential Republican weaknesses as we make the turn into 2026.
These two special elections, on opposite sides of the state, were in solid GOP districts: the job was to restore two votes to Speaker Mike Johnson’s whisper-thin Congressional majority. FL-06, in northeast Florida, was vacated by Mike Waltz, who is now Donald Trump’s national security advisor and the genius who let Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg into the Signal chat. FL-01 is Matt Gaetz’s former seat, which he vacated to become Trump’s Attorney General. Except that didn’t work out. Long-suppressed evidence of Gaetz’s bottomless yuckiness finally became public, and even Republican Senators found themselves unable to vote for him as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
Democratic Party messaging had held out no hope that either of these seats were winnable, and they weren’t. And yet, here is what I want you to notice. In FL-06, with more than 95% of the vote in, State Senator Randy Fine beat Democrat Josh Weil by 14 points. Yet five months earlier, in November 2024, Waltz won the seat by 33 points.
Those 19 points shifting into the Democratic column are, some pundits argue, the victory. But there’s more. Let’s take a look at the county-level margins. Here are Waltz’s numbers from five months ago:
Courtesy of The New York Times.
And here are Fine’s margins from yesterday:
Courtesy of The New York Times.
You see disproportionate gaps in two places: Volusia County and St. Johns County, both popular destinations for Canadian snowbirds (these are not birds, but actual people who come to Florida in the winter months.)
Like other Florida property owners, these folks have faced escalating insurance costs and HOA fees, which they are paying with weaker Canadian dollars that will decrease further in value as the Trump tariffs go into effect. Then, as one insurance industry site noted a week before the election, there’s the general Canada-hatred, which has caused Canadians who rent or stay in hotels and resorts to cancel their vacations too.
But, you say, Canadians don’t vote in American elections! Right you are.
However, the many Floridians who rely on snowbird home ownership, rentals and tourism for their own income do vote. And what they are seeing is not good: 25% of Florida real estate sales in the past year have been Canadians dumping their property.
So, pay attention to that. We may be seeing something similar in FL-O1, where Gaetz trounced Gay Valimont by 32 points in November 2024. His replacement, Florida’s chief financial officer Jimmy Patronis, beat Valimont yesterday by less than half of that. Here’s the part that intrigues me: in Escambia, Florida’s most western county, Valimont—who lost to Gaetz by 14 points—beat Patronis by 3 points.
People, 20 points is a lot of ground to make up in five months.
There’s more: according to Tobie Nell Perkins at First Coast News, Escambia has not voted for a Democrat in the last eight gubernatorial cycles, and last voted for a Democratic president in 1960, when it went for John F. Kennedy. This area, anchored by Pensacola, is also a popular snowbird destination. What may be more significant is how heavily military the area is: Pensacola contains over 16,000 active-duty troops, and 7400 civilian employees, an estimated 5-8% of whom will get the axe any day now. Greater Pensacola boasts more than 35,000 retired military, contributing to the largest concentration of veterans in any congressional district in the country.
You see where I am going here? During her campaign, Valimont hammered on the cuts to veterans’ services and federal employees. “Trump’s executive orders and the slash-and-burn tactics of billionaire Elon Musk ’s DOGE take aim at federal agencies that serve the region’s veterans,” AP political reporter Kate Payne observed last week; “the faith of some of the district’s conservative voters is being tested.”
Heather Lindsay, a Republican and the mayor of Milton, Florida, in neighboring Santa Rosa County, called the cuts “disastrous,” saying they’re a threat to services that veterans like her brother rely on.
“We have a demonstrated need in this area. And yet they’re going to cut VA services,” Lindsay said in an interview.
Jason Boatwright, a former staffer for Gaetz, said Patronis should be defending the Pensacola VA.
“He needs to stand up and say: ‘You want to make cuts? That’s fine. But don’t do it here. We can’t afford it here,’” Boatwright said.
Lindsay said she doesn’t understand “why more questions haven’t been asked” by Republican leaders like Patronis.
A reliable Republican political consultant I contacted is taking the Escambia results with a grain of salt. Although the GOP had to spend $4 million in FL-06 to beat back Josh Weil, Ryan Girdusky doesn’t see these contests as a referendum on Trump by Republicans, only an energized Democratic one. “I just don’t think people were that engaged,” he told me. “Also, Republicans spent less than $1 million” in FL-01, while Democrats spent $6 million. Republicans “knew it was in the bag so they just didn’t invest in it,” Girdusky explained, and reliably red active-duty military did not make a special election a priority.
So, what have we learned in the last 24 hours?
First, yesterday’s results reinforce what we know: there are Trump voters and there are Republican voters. While the two categories overlap, Trump voters don’t necessarily get off the couch to vote in other elections, even when Elon Musk leaps around the stage in a foam cheese hat handing out checks.
Second, Musk might have been a negative factor in the Wisconsin race, and this is something to watch. As Reid J. Epstein, Julie Bosman, and Emily Cochrane report at the New York Times, the $25 million and massive social media posting Musk invested in the State Supreme Court race did not move the needle—at all. “Even more than Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk emerged in Wisconsin as the primary boogeyman for Democrats,” they write about a billionaire whose approval rating took a steep dive the day before the election. “Instead of making the race an early referendum on Mr. Trump’s White House and abortion rights, Wisconsin Democrats pivoted to make Mr. Musk their entire focus, while Republicans rode the wave of his largess.”
In other words, because Elon Musk is tied to Donald Trump, here is the unexpected opportunity. If attacking Donald Trump doesn’t work, attacking his policies does. Elon Musk has become the face of that. So, if this election had accomplished nothing else, it gives Donald Trump a choice: risk failure by sticking with Musk, or dump Musk and risk having ripped the federal government to pieces for no gain whatsoever.
Fourth, Musk’s unpopularity might also have cut GOP margins in Florida. We don’t know whether Florida veterans voted in significant numbers, but we do know that they—and their dependents—are getting it from two directions: the direct DOGE cuts to the Veterans Administration, and the cuts to other federal agencies and services that disproportionately employ veterans.
Finally, despite the high media focus on how much money is being raised and spent, it appears there are limits to how much a sea of money can accomplish. Can billionaires buy elections? Sometimes, and sometimes not. If voters either do not like the candidate, or they do not like the candidate’s high-profile supporters, they’ll take the money—and then run.
See you on the other side, Val Kilmer:
“Top Gun” is not only the ultimate Age of Reagan movie, it is one of the all-time gay movies that is not gay. And the late Val Kilmer was the true star of the show.
Don’t miss:
My latest podcast drop, featuring historian Noliwe Rooks talking about democracy, education, and her new book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children (Pantheon, 2025).
The four-episode Netflix limited series "Adolescence,” the story of a boy who murders a female classmate he barely knows after immersing himself in the misogyny and self-hatred of the manosphere. You can read more about the creation of the series here.
Short takes:
President Donald Trump keeps insisting that his economic policies are popular, but it ain’t so. “It took Joe Biden until around October 2021 to receive consistently negative job approval ratings for his handling of the economy where he stayed for the remainder of his term,” John Halpin writes at The Liberal Patriot. “Donald Trump reached negative territory on the economy with voters within the first two months of his second time in office.” Trump not only overpromised on lowering the cost of living, tariffs are not popular anywhere outside the Oval Office. “Polling on tariffs varies widely depending on how the question is worded and whether potential impacts are mentioned. But in the most basic test of whether voters believe raising tariffs would help or hurt average Americans, voters overwhelmingly say tariffs hurt average people—61 percent of voters believe this in recent Economist/YouGov polling. Only 14 percent of voters believe raising tariffs helps average Americans.” (April 2, 2025)
Democrats are now howling about the concentration of government power in the West Wing, but they were’t last year. When progressive solutions became mired in regulations, red tape, and procedure (for example, student loan cancellation), they just created shortcuts. “Democrats will need a plan for making government work. But to make that notion plausible, they will need to wrestle with the core contradiction that bedevils their governing ideology,” policy analyst Marc J. Dunkelman writes at The Atlantic. “Progressivism today wants at once to allow government to make big decisions efficiently and to ensure that no one gets snowed in the process. To that end, they decided decades ago to throw their lot in with a notion that procedure can replace discretion. Today, we are all living with the consequences of that mistake.” (April 2, 2025)
I cannot recall a time when a major acquisition by private investors was planned in the White House. But that moment is here in advance of Saturday’s deadline—set by Trump himself—for TikTok’s Chinese owners to shift the lucrative company to U.S. ownership. Today, the White House is “is finalizing plans for potential investors that could include Blackstone and Oracle, as well as a long list of other investors that will likely involve blue chip private equity firms, venture capital firms, and major investors in the technology industry,” Jennifer Jacobs and Sara Cook CBS News reported late yesterday afternoon. “A meeting in the Oval Office will involve key administration officials on the deal, including Vice President JD Vance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. It's unclear if Mr. Trump will approve the strategy or not.” As of this afternoon, it looks like Amazon is a leading contender—making so much about Jeff Bezos perfectly clear. (April 1, 2025)