The first big elections of 2025 were held Tuesday, giving the first major indicator of where the country stands since President Donald Trump’s 2024 election win five months ago.
Wisconsin held a much-watched and expensive state supreme court race featuring a very heavy dose of Elon Musk, while Florida hosted a pair of special elections for U.S. House seats — including one that looked potentially competitive, despite Trump carrying the district by 30 points just five months ago.
In the end, Democrats scored a decisive victory in the Wisconsin race, while Republicans held both Florida seats by double digits — but by significantly smaller margins than usual.
Now that we’ve gotten the fuller results, here are some takeaways.
It was a good election night for Democrats, full stop.
But how good? We’ve seen before that Trump voters just aren’t as likely to show up for races that don’t feature Trump, after all.
The big one was the Wisconsin race, where Democrat-aligned candidate Susan Crawford defeated Republican-backed Brad Schimel by 10 points, 55 percent to 45 percent, in a race that drew tens of millions of dollars in spending. (These races are technically nonpartisan, but the partisan battle lines were drawn.)
That’s a 10-point Democratic win in a state that has been decided by less than one point in each of the past three presidential races.
It’s not a result that’s unheard-of in the Trump era. Democrat-aligned candidates won Wisconsin Supreme Court races by similar margins in 2018, 2020 and 2023, while a Republican-aligned candidate won narrowly in 2019. But Democrats have also had good elections in recent years when Trump wasn’t on the ballot. Their sizable wins here in 2018 and 2020 presaged strong elections for the party.
In Florida, despite Democrats and polls playing up the competitiveness of White House national security adviser Michael Waltz’s old 6th Congressional District, Republican Randy Fine carried it by 14 points. In the 1st Congressional District, formerly held by Republican Matt Gaetz, Republican Jimmy Patronis won by a similar 14.6-point margin.
So, these races didn’t wind up being anything amounting to close calls. But: These are districts that Trump had carried by much larger margins — 30 or more points in each of them.
In the end, Democrats overperformed their 2024 margins by about 16 points in the 6th District (which Trump had won by 30 points) and about 22 points in the 1st (which Trump had won by 37).
There have been about three dozen special elections for Congress since Trump was first elected president in 2016. Democrats’ 22-point overperformance in Florida’s 1st District was their best of any of those races, according to data compiled by the Downballot (formerly Daily Kos Elections). Their 16-point over-performance in the 6th District was tied for their sixth-best.
Given these results, you begin to see why the White House pulled Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-New York) nomination for United Nations ambassador last week. Her district had favored Trump by 21 points, and these results suggest that a Democratic flip was within the realm of possibility.
The numbers look at lot like what they were in the early special elections in 2017, when Democrats overperformed by 21 and 15 points in April and May special elections. Democrats went on to have a good 2018 midterm election.
None of it means Democrats are definitely back and primed for big victories in 2025 and 2026. They’ve done well in off-year and special elections plenty before in the Trump era, and it hasn’t always carried through. But these election results are clearly good signs for them.
And these weren’t the only encouraging results. Democrats also flipped some key seats in Illinois and Wisconsin, and they generally outperformed their 2024 baselines. All the results come shortly after they flipped a Pennsylvania state Senate seat that hadn’t voted Democratic in decades.
Given the history above, it was a risk for Tesla CEO and Trump ally Elon Musk to go so big in trying to influence the results in Wisconsin. He did anyway, and it wound up backfiring.
Musk spent an estimated $25 million on the race, at last check, making him by far the biggest spender. He made appearances in the state to rally support for Schimel. He posted incessantly about it on his social media platform, X. He offered voters money to sign petitions and post pictures at polling places. He even delivered legally dubious $1 million checks to voters.
“This Wisconsin Supreme Court race might decide the future of America and Western Civilization!” he said just days ago.
And Musk decided to do all this even as it’s looking more and more like he’s a political liability for Republicans. Yes, he has gobs of money he can throw at these races. But his efforts to shrink the government through his work with the U.S. DOGE Service have clearly alienated Americans. Most polls show Americans dislike him by double digits.
It’s difficult to say with any certainty whether Musk’s involvement pushed voters into the Democratic camp. As noted, the results were similar to what they have been in some other recent Wisconsin Supreme Court races.
But Republicans did do worse in the Supreme Court race than in the other statewide race where Musk wasn’t such a factor. They lost the state schools superintendent race by just 6 points.
Also, Musk spent lots of political capital at a time when that’s a dwindling resource for him. Many more-studied politicos would have seen the atmospherics and not tied themselves so tightly to what was about to happen. Maybe they would have spent the money but not made so many appearances. And perhaps the civic-minded people of the Midwest weren’t all that happy about a guy so transparently trying to buy their votes.
In the end, it was a clear setback — even an unforced error — for a man whose brand is on the decline. And that should lead to some reflection in a GOP that has bear-hugged Musk.
“I thought [Musk] was going to be an asset for this race,” Outagamie County, Wisconsin, Republican Chair Pam Van Handel told Politico. “People love Trump, but maybe they don’t love everybody he supports. Maybe I have blinders on.”
And Democrats will happily ascribe their win to Musk.
“Today, Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our Supreme Court,” Crawford said in her victory speech Tuesday night. “Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.”
The next big thing to watch will be whether Republicans reckon with what’s looking increasingly like a Musk problem. Do they urge him to stay away? Do they distance themselves more from what he’s doing with the federal government?
It wouldn’t be easy, given the influence he has amassed and how much his brand is now intertwined with Trump. But if there’s one thing lawmakers will tend to pay attention to, it’s when something is threatening their careers and majorities.
It’s one thing for Democrats to do relatively well when turnout is extremely low and wilder swings can happen. But turnout was very good in all of these big races Tuesday.
In Wisconsin, Crawford got 77 percent of the raw vote total that Kamala Harris received in the presidential election five months ago, while Schimel got about 62 percent of Trump’s vote total. Total turnout was over 2.3 million votes — significantly more than even a 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court race (1.8 million votes) that turned into an early referendum on the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Brian Schimming had said his goal was to get 60 percent of Trump’s votes. The GOP did — and still lost decisively.
In Florida, turnout was less than half of the 2024 presidential election, but more than 190,000 ballots were cast in the 6th District. That’s very high for a special election.
It seemed that Republicans flooded to the polls on Election Day after days of party leaders and polls warning about how close the 6th District could be.
It was enough to secure the races with ease for Republicans. But it wasn’t enough to prevent Democrats from huge overperformances, even with the higher turnout.
