On the menu today: It’s special-election season again. Yesterday, Pennsylvanians went to the polls for a pair of state legislative races; in less than a week, Floridians elect the replacements for Mike Waltz and Matt Gaetz; and Wisconsinites will soon make their choice in a key state supreme court race. On just about every front, the early numbers are not where Republicans would like them to be — an indicator that either Republicans in Washington are less popular than they think they are, or the Democratic grassroots are enraged and fired up and showing up for early voting, while the GOP’s grassroots are growing complacent and tuning out the special elections.
Watch the Special Elections
A week from now, the perception of Republican national political momentum may dramatically change — or everything could turn out fine for the GOP.
Yesterday, voters in Pennsylvania cast ballots in two special state legislative elections, one for a vacant state house seat in the Mon Valley region southeast of Pittsburgh, and the other for a state senate seat in Harrisburg. Democrats won both; the stakes were higher in the state house race and Democrats will continue to control the chamber, 102 seats to 101.
But the Democratic win in the state senate race was in extremely GOP-friendly territory:
In a stunning outcome, Democrat James Andrew Malone defeated Republican Josh Parsons to win the 36th Senatorial District seat in Harrisburg.
President Donald Trump rolled to a +15 victory in the district back in November, but northern Lancaster County voters made a statement heard ’round the Keystone State on Tuesday.
The district has only had four representatives since 1983 — all Republican — Noah Wenger, Philip Price, Mike Brubaker and Ryan Aument. And the closest race since 2000 was a 23,000-vote victory for Brubaker in 2006.
“Tonight in Lancaster County, Pennsylvanians rejected a candidate who embraced the extremism and division coming out of DC,” tweeted Gov. Josh Shapiro. “In a district carried comfortably by Donald Trump just a few months ago, they chose a better way forward — an embrace of competence, commonsense, and a desire to bring people together. Congratulations @MaloneForSenate. Looking forward to working with you in Harrisburg to continue delivering results and getting stuff done for all Pennsylvanians.”
The last time this district voted in 2022, Ryan Aument didn’t even have an opponent. Back in 2018, Aument won with more than 66 percent of the vote. Republicans will keep control of the Pennsylvania State Senate, but the state GOP is now left wondering how such a normally safe district slipped through its fingers.
Special elections are weird. Turnout is almost always dramatically lower than it is in a normal November election. You can see Republicans winning congressional races they would otherwise never win — Hawaii’s first district, Anthony Weiner’s old district in New York City, and vice versa. Those of us who cover and analyze politics can read too much into them, because sometimes they’re omens of the midterms to come, and sometimes they aren’t. In 2009, Republicans went zero-for-five in special House elections, and then enjoyed the landside of the 2010 midterms.
On April 1, voters will go to the polls in Wisconsin to elect a state supreme court justice and in Florida for two special U.S. House elections.
In Wisconsin, liberal justice Ann Walsh Bradley is retiring, and Democrat Dane County Circuit Court judge Susan Crawford is facing off against Brad Schimel, the former Wisconsin state attorney general and a circuit court judge in Waukesha County.
Last month, the editors of NR warned:
Conservatives in Wisconsin need to win a state supreme court election to prevent Scott Walker’s Act 10 union reforms from being overturned. Don’t worry, you did not mistakenly click on an editorial from 2011, when conservatives were in almost the exact same position. Fourteen years later, the Left is still mad about Act 10, and Wisconsin voters must elect Brad Schimel to the supreme court on April 1 to preserve it.
Our Audrey Fahlberg interviewed the GOP nominee Schimel. “Judges should faithfully apply the law the way the legislature wrote it to the facts of a case,” he said. “We shouldn’t decide what’s good policy and what’s bad policy. The legislature is, frankly, free to write bad laws if they want to. Judges don’t get to interfere with that.”
Wisconsin updates its early voting numbers weekly and doesn’t break them down by party. But the turnout in the state’s heavily Democratic counties is surging compared to four years ago:
Milwaukee County, the state’s largest county and the one that is home to the most Democrats, led all counties in ballots returned with 54,750. That is more than 46 percent ahead of this point two years ago. Liberal Dane County, the state’s second largest county and home to the state capital of Madison and the University of Wisconsin, has also seen a 46 percent increase.
The good news for Republicans is that turnout is also going up in GOP counties:
Voting was up in the three suburban Milwaukee counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington, which are commonly referred to as the WOW counties. Ballot returns were up more than 62 percent in Waukesha and 51 percent in Ozaukee. In Washington, the most heavily Republican of the three counties, early voting was more than double two years ago.
In Brown County, the state’s fourth most populous one, which is reliably Republican, early turnout was up more than 34 percent.
In November, Trump won the state, but by nine-tenths of a percentage point — so Republicans don’t have much margin for error here.
Down in Florida, those two house districts initially looked like no-sweat easy keepers for Republicans. In November, in Florida’s first district in the western Panhandle, Matt Gaetz won reelection 66 percent to 34 percent; this district is scored at R+19 in the Cook Partisan Voting Index. In Florida’s sixth congressional district, Mike Waltz won reelection with 66.5 percent. This district is scored at R+14 in the Cook PVI.
But now in Gaetz’s district, the Republican candidate, state chief financial officer Jimmy Patronis, has to actually work for it:
Republican Jimmy Patronis is having to do something that Matt Gaetz almost never had to do as he campaigns to fill Gaetz’s vacant seat in Congress ahead of the April 1 special — spend money on advertising in a general election.
Democrat Gay Valimont told supporters last week she’s raised $6.7 million to campaign in the seat that has elected a Republican in every election since 1994, and she’s putting that money to use with a blitz of ads on television, billboards and social media.
Patronis has hit back with his own ads, and it’s not hard to find digital billboards around Pensacola with photos of Patronis and President Donald Trump advertising Patronis as “Trump’s pick” for Congress. . . .
There may be some early signs that Patronis has a close race on his hands. Early turnout data from the four counties that comprise District 1 show Republicans with only a 4.9-point advantage with mail-in ballots.
As of Thursday, the supervisors of elections offices in the four counties of Escambia, Santa Rosa, Okaloosa, and Walton reported approximately 19,213 ballots returned. Of those ballots, 45.9 percent were from registered Republicans, 41 percent were from registered Democrats, 11.5 percent were from non-party affiliated voters, and 1.5 percent were from other minor parties.
Those numbers aren’t a sign Republicans ought to panic, but they’re also far from the numbers you would expect to see in a heavily GOP district, in Florida, when Trump and Republicans are seemingly riding high, and the Democratic brand is in the dumpster.
Meanwhile, in the sixth district that encompasses Daytona Beach, credit RedState’s Teri Christoph for noticing the early-voting numbers are not what you might expect in a heavily Republican district. The early-vote numbers, as of this morning:
- In Flagler County, registered Republicans are currently at 6,748 ballots cast, and registered Democrats are at 5,706. Keep in mind, this is the GOP’s best county in the district.
- In Volusia County, registered Republicans are at 9,440 and registered Democrats at 10,064.
- In Johns County, registered Republicans are currently at 1,789 and registered Democrats are at 1,701.
Add it up, and it comes out to 17,977 registered Republicans and 17,471 registered Democrats. Now, not every registered Republican will vote for the GOP candidate, and not every registered Democrat will vote for the Democratic candidate. These numbers don’t mean that Republican state senator Randy Fine is a goner against Democrat Josh Weil. Democrats may well prefer early voting to voting on Election Day. But that’s not quite the cushion a Republican would like to have in these circumstances.
I’ll say this for Democratic Party’s grassroots — when they get beat, they come back a few months later with gobs and gobs and donations for anybody from their party who’s running:
In CD 1 in the far northwest of the state, encompassing Escambia, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, and parts of Walton County, Valimont raised $6.3 million from Jan. 9 through March 12, compared to her Republican opponent, who raised $1.1 million.
In CD 6, which encompasses St. John’s, Flagler, Volusia, and Lake counties, Josh Weil, an Orlando schoolteacher, raised $9.3 million, according to Federal Election Commission records released last week. Fine raised less than $600,000 in that same period.
Earlier this week, NBC News reported, “While party leaders in Washington and Florida are ultimately confident that Fine will pull off a victory, Republicans say they’re frustrated that they need to intervene in a district that Trump won by 30 points last year.”
My guess is that the two GOP candidates in Florida hang on, and the Wisconsin state supreme court race feels like a jump-ball at this point. But even an outcome like that should puncture the GOP’s confidence that the public loves the job they’re doing so far. There are plenty of good reasons to believe the Democratic brand is indeed in the dumpster. But that doesn’t mean quite as much if the Democratic grassroots are mad as hell and show up to vote, and the GOP grassroots is focused on other things than politics right now.
ADDENDUM: I keep seeing people conflating multiple issues regarding the use of Signal by government employees. When people say, “Government officials are allowed to use Signal!” there’s a difference for using it for routine communications — “Let’s move Tuesday’s meeting to 10 a.m.” — and for using it to discuss sensitive information. (Yesterday, director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, insisted — under oath! — that a discussion of “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing” and when the attack would begin did not include any classified information. Our Andy McCarthy finds that very difficult to believe.)
Both Google’s threat assessment team and the National Security Agency warned in February that “a vulnerability has been identified in the Signal Messenger Application. The use of Signal by common targets of surveillance and espionage activity has made the application a high value target to intercept sensitive information.” I’ve seen the contention that Signal is only vulnerable if someone on the chain falls for a phishing scam. Ah, nothing to worry about, then. To be the sort of person who would fall for a phishing scam, you’d have to be the kind of person who would mix up U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer with Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.
Boy, it’s a good thing no one who seems particularly gullible, the kind of guy who says he got duped by Hamas, was using Signal, right? No way somebody like that ever gets suckered by a phishing scam, right?