Breaking down the Wisconsin, Florida special elections

Democrats on Tuesday scored a win in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, while Republicans held on to two seats in deep-red Florida districts, raising questions about what the results mean as both parties look ahead to next year’s midterms.

While off-year special elections don’t see the same turnout as a general election, Democrats say President Trump and Elon Musk are proving to be turnout machines for their liberal base. Some Republicans have brushed off the results, however, noting that their voters tend not to turn out in full force when Trump isn’t on the ballot.

Still, the results have given Democrats a much-needed shot in the arm as they look toward both the Virginia governor’s race in November and next year’s midterms, when historically the party in power loses seats in Congress.

“Republicans everywhere can no longer deny the toxicity of Trump 2.0,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin told reporters on Wednesday, predicting a possible “blue wave” in 2026.

Florida state Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried added that Tuesday’s results should “send shivers” down the spines of every Republican running in a district who won by 15 points.

But Republicans aren’t as convinced Tuesday’s results provide insight into next year’s midterms.

“I think what it shows is that unless you have a turnout comparable to a presidential election, the Republicans in Wisconsin are at a disadvantage,” said Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who was President George W. Bush’s Wisconsin director for his 2004 reelection.

Graul cautioned against reading too much into what the Wisconsin election results could mean for either party as a unique off-cycle spring election.

“If you look back in Wisconsin history, these April elections are almost never predictors of the future,” he said.

Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center of Politics, too, suggested of the Florida and Wisconsin elections that he didn’t “necessarily know if this is predictive of anything,” but the results showed similar signs of Democrats’ performance right after the 2016 election.

Voters headed to the polls in Wisconsin and Florida to weigh in on multiple special elections. In the Sunshine State, Republican candidates Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine easily won their races to fill vacancies in Florida’s 1st and 6th congressional districts, respectively.

One of the biggest surprises of the night was that Florida’s 1st Congressional District was just as competitive as the closely watched race in the 6th District.

Both Fine and Patronis won their districts by roughly 14 points, underperforming Trump in November’s general election. And Democrat Gay Valimont notably flipped the 1st District’s Escambia County, winning it by just more than 3 points. Trump, in contrast, won that county by nearly 20 points five months ago.

Strategists note Democrats’ high-propensity voters turned out in greater numbers, while lower-propensity GOP voters stayed home. Trump has seen massive success in general elections by targeting low-propensity voters, who tend to be less educated and come from lower income brackets.

In 2023, the 1st Congressional District had a poverty rate of 11.3 percent, while the median household income was $75,000 a year. In comparison, the 6th Congressional District had a 14.1 percent poverty rate and a median household income of $61,000 in 2023.

“Right now, the Democrats almost have a monopoly on college-educated voters and those are the folks that tend to turn out,” said Ford O’Connell, a Florida Republican strategist. “You see a situation where college-educated voters just vote more often.”

Historically, Republicans have underperformed when Trump has been absent at the top of the ticket, with the exception of the 2021 state elections in Virginia and New Jersey.

O’Connell noted that while Republicans “took care of business” in Florida, there is still room to improve.

“There are a lot of low-propensity voters in today’s Trump GOP, meaning that these voters only turn out in droves when his name as at the top of the ballot,” he said. “Republicans have to make sure before the 2026 midterms that these same voters understand that it’s all hands on deck all the time at the ballot box.”

Over in Wisconsin, Democrats successfully defended the state Supreme Court’s liberal majority. Judge Susan Crawford’s performance in some of the state’s counties was largely identical to how Justice Janet Protasiewicz performed in 2023, the last time there was an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, in a race that also determined the partisan tilt of the high court.

Crawford won the Democratic strongholds of Dane and Milwaukee counties with 82 percent and 75 percent of the vote share, respectively; Protasiewicz won the two with 82 percent and 73 percent of the vote share each in 2023.

In the suburban WOW counties — referring to Washington, Ozaukee and Waukesha — Republican candidate Brad Schimel received roughly the same vote share in all three that conservative Dan Kelly received two years ago.

Overall, Protasiewicz beat her opponent by 11 points, compared with Crawford’s 10-point margin over Schimel.

Still, Crawford overperformed former Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election and won counties including Racine and Kenosha, which Trump had won in 2024.

Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll, said Wisconsin’s race offered an upside to both parties given both sides’ voters were heavily engaged.

“Overall, turnout was up by more than half a million votes, which is astonishing for an April election, but it favored Democrats just a little bit. They added 280,000 votes compared to the 2023 Supreme Court race,” he said. “Republicans added 245,000, so both were really successful in getting additional voters to turn out this time.”

But Franklin noted that the Tuesday election was consistent with the strong Democratic performance seen in the last handful of state Supreme Court elections, noting four of the five last elections were ones that liberal candidates won by double digits.

Some Republicans have sought to downplay the results. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) suggested in a CNN panel on Tuesday that Trump voters “don’t vote in spring elections,” saying it was always going to be an uphill battle for Republicans. Musk, too, appeared to brush off the results, saying in a post on the social platform X, which he owns, that he “expected to lose.”

“It’s not unreasonable to believe that the low-propensity Trump-only voter is uniquely hard to mobilize in a spring election. But getting an extra 245,000 votes is no mean feat,” Franklin said.

“And in fact, the kind of stunning statistic is that Brad Schimel got over a million votes and still lost. There’ve only been two other candidates who’ve ever gotten a million votes, and they both won pretty easily,” he added.

For Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), he said that Republicans’ agenda was the foil in the Wisconsin election, not necessarily Musk.

“Having someone who is out of central casting as a villain like Elon Musk helps, but it’s ultimately, you know, what we keep hearing, is it’s the cuts that they’re doing,” Pocan told The Hill. “The potential cuts to health care and long-term care, to education, to food assistance that people are most concerned about.”

Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler, on the other hand, argued Musk gives Democrats a boost at the ballot box.

“Elon Musk’s money might buy some ads, but it repels voters,” Wikler said. “I hope he stays at the White House with Donald Trump.”

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