On the menu today: Tuesday could have been much worse for Republicans; those two U.S. House special elections in deep-red territory in Florida turned out to be relatively easy GOP wins, even if the margin of victory was lower than in normal November circumstances. But the Wisconsin Supreme Court election wasn’t all that close, and Elon Musk had seemed to revel in the notion that the race was a referendum on himself and President Trump. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of NATO allies are getting back into the business of acquiring and deploying landmines, and a much-needed observation about military alliances and defense expenditures.
The Mixed Bag of the April Fool’s Day Elections
The good news for Republicans is that House Speaker Mike Johnson wakes up to an imminent, er, gargantuan GOP majority of 220 to 213. After a lot of nervousness and runaway Democratic fundraising leads, both GOP House candidates — Jimmy Patronis in the first district, Randy Fine in the sixth district — won with almost 57 percent of the vote. Yes, these margins are down significantly from a normal GOP House wins in these places, but if Democrats couldn’t win in either of these districts in a lower-turnout (less than 200,000 votes in either!) special election, with huge fundraising numbers, they’re probably not winning in these districts for a long, long time.
The bad news for Republicans is that the Wisconsin Supreme Court race turned out to be a thumping — a 55 percent to 45 percent win for Judge Susan Crawford, backed by the state Democratic Party. I don’t want to alarm anyone, but a couple of days ago, Elon Musk declared, “This Wisconsin Supreme Court race might decide the future of America and Western Civilization!”
But last night, Musk changed his tune and argued that “the most important thing” was the voters’ passage of a referendum approving a constitutional amendment requiring photo ID for voting. Wisconsinites have needed photo ID to vote since 2016.
The progressive-minded majority will keep their four to three advantage on the state supreme court. In the coming months and years, the court is expected to ensure that legal abortions continue in the state, accept a Democratic redrawing of U.S. House of Representatives district lines, and overturn the union reforms enacted by former Governor Scott Walker way back in 2011. (In the interim, the state supreme court ruled those reforms were constitutional twice.)
But what really has Democrats ecstatic was that they wanted to turn the state supreme-court race into a referendum on Musk. After Musk donned a cheesehead hat at a Sunday rally on behalf of Republican-backed judge Brad Schimel, the New York Times wrote, “The billionaire Mr. Musk looked very much like a candidate at this rally, putting himself front and center in the final stretch of an election.”
It’s a reminder to Republicans that while Americans may like the concept of the Department of Government Efficiency in theory, they’re not particularly enamored with Musk himself. The most recent Harvard-Harris poll found 39 percent of respondents feel favorably about Musk, and 49 percent feel unfavorably.
(I was also struck by a poll of North Carolinians that found, “51 percent said they don’t believe Musk is working in the best interests of the public in his stated effort to promote government efficiency. On the other hand, 40 percent said they trusted in the tech billionaire’s efforts.” The irony is that the poll was conducted by . . . Elon University, a private university in Elon, N.C., with no affiliation with the billionaire. I wonder how often Elon University gets mistaken for Musk’s proposed “Texas Institute of Technology & Science” . . . and I wonder how often both get mistaken for the University of Austin.)
Before the results were in, Cygnal pollster Brent Buchanan concluded, “The more unique the time of the election, the more college-educated voters participate comparatively. This benefits Democrats greatly now as it did Republicans decades ago. There’s not much to read into these elections beyond the Diploma Divide.”
Okay, but special elections matter a lot when the balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives is close, or if a state’s supreme court comes down to one election.
Nate Silver answered the question on my mind, which was how many special elections get held, on average, each cycle:
Well, in interregnums between general elections from 1973 through 2024, an average of nine special U.S. House elections took place. Here, I’m counting all special elections, including those that ended up falling on Election Day in a general election year or featured two candidates from the same party. . . . We could see a deluge of special House elections this cycle like we did between 2016 and 2018 (there were 14). Or it could look more like 2002-2004, when there were only 5.
As I noted last week, three House Republicans are octogenarians and Indiana’s Jim Baird turns 80 in June. I hope they all live to be 100, and as far as we know, they’re in good shape for their ages. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise has made a full recovery from blood cancer. But you just never know when there’s going to be an unexpected vacancy.
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.
For that assessment, a reader demanded to know what my major malfunction was, pointing to Trump’s approval rating in the most recent CNN poll. (It was 45 percent, “matching his highest ratings for his first term in office.”)
Oh, and one last point. Any pollster can have a bad day, but I’ve been wary about Trafalgar Group ever since the 2022 New Hampshire Senate race, when that organization’s final poll had Republican Don Bolduc ahead of incumbent Democrat Maggie Hassan, 47 percent to 46 percent. On Election Night, Hassan won, 53.5 percent to 44.4 percent.
In a poll of the Wisconsin Supreme Court race that was completed March 30, Trafalgar had Crawford at 50.8 percent and Schimel at 49.2 percent.
One by One, Landmines Are Coming Back into the Arsenal of NATO Countries
I’m not really pro-landmines; I’ve talked to plenty of people who live with the consequences of their use. But I also feel like the anti-landmine campaign that was so popular for decades hand-waved away why the world’s governments built them, stockpiled them, and used them. They’re useful for making sure the other guy’s army doesn’t come over into spaces you want to control — which is separate from the debate about whether they’re a morally acceptable weapon.
(I was also a little frustrated by a movement that refused to draw a distinction between U.S. landmines sitting on warehouse shelves in South Korea and actual landmines in fields in war zones around the world. The latter is an imminent threat to innocent lives, and the former is not.) If you really want to get rid of landmines, you need a technology that achieves the same objective without the long-term risk to civilian lives. The U.S. has taken a step in that direction with “non-persistent mines” that self-detonate or self-deactivate after a set time period.
Ukraine is now called “the world’s largest minefield,” with an estimated 2 million mines scattered across its fields, forests, and communities. For the Russians, the landmines are a brutally effective tool for slowing or halting any Ukrainian counteroffensive; for the Ukrainians, landmines do the same to slow any Russian advances.
Last month, NATO members Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia announced plans to withdraw from the Ottawa convention banning anti-personnel landmines due to the military threat from Russia:
“Military threats to NATO member states bordering Russia and Belarus have significantly increased,” the countries’ defense ministers said in a joint statement.
“With this decision we are sending a clear message: our countries are prepared and can use every necessary measure to defend our security needs.”
All four countries share borders with Russia. Poland, Lithuania and Latvia also share borders with Moscow’s ally Belarus.
And now another NATO member, Finland, is withdrawing from the landmine ban as well:
Finland will begin the process of withdrawing from the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines and significantly increase defence spending over the next four years.
Prime Minister Petteri Orpo announced the decision at a government press conference on Tuesday. The move would reverse Finland’s 2012 accession to the international treaty and allow the return of landmines to national defence planning.
A formal bill to terminate the treaty will be drafted by the foreign ministry and is expected to reach Parliament before the summer recess. If approved, the withdrawal would take effect six months after the United Nations receives Finland’s notice.
Everybody hates landmines . . . right up until they need to keep a hostile army over there, instead of coming over here.
I don’t expect groups like Amnesty International to applaud the NATO countries’ reversal. But if you don’t want countries to use landmines, you need better alternatives.
ADDENDUM: From Rich’s article today on the value of alliances:
It’s not true that alliances inexorably suck us into conflict, or become “entangling.” In a definitive study of this question in the journal International Security, Michael Beckley found very little evidence for it.
“Over a sixty-two year period in which the United States maintained more than sixty alliances,” he wrote in the 2015 article, “I find only five ostensible episodes of US entanglement” (two crises in the Taiwan Straits, the Vietnam War, and the Balkans wars in the 1990s). Even these cases aren’t clear-cut, Beckley stipulates, because in each there were other reasons for U.S. involvement, and allies tended to restrain us, or we tended to restrain them.
If allies aren’t dragging us into wars, neither are they driving our military expenditures. In a hypothetical world where we had no allies — and so no extra increment of allied military power, or friendly territory to operate from — we’d have to spend more on our defense, not less.