Republican Randy Fine won a special election for a House seat in Florida vacated by Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, which will help Republicans preserve their razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives.
However, Democrats are likely to have performed better in the Republican district than they did in November, after their candidate Josh Weil put up a stiff challenge in the eastern coastal district that Trump carried by 30 percentage points in the November elections.
Before Tuesday’s special elections, the GOP held 218 seats in Congress’s lower chamber and the Democrats 213. But despite their disappointing performance inthe presidential election, Democrats appear to be continuing their streak of strong performances in off-year elections nationwide. Last week, a Democrat won an upset victory in a state senate race in Pennsylvania and the Trump administration a day later withdrew their nomination of congresswoman Elise Stefanik as UN ambassador, a decision widely seen as fueled by concern over creating another vacant House seat.
More broadly, Wisconsin and Florida voters went to the polls on Tuesday in elections that some see as a test of Donald Trump’s popularity and Elon Musk’s political clout. The most closely watched contest is for a seat on Wisconsin’s seven-member supreme court. Conservatives are trying to flip ideological control of the court, which currently has a 4-3 liberal majority. In Florida, much of the attention is on a special election to replace Mike Waltz, who resigned from Congress to serve as Trump’s national security adviser.
Cory Booker, the Democratic US senator from New Jersey, has broken the record for longest speech ever by a lone senator – beating the record first established by Strom Thurmond, who spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes in opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
“I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able,” Booker said near the start of his speech. “I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our nation is in crisis.” He concluded his speech after 25 hours and five minutes.
Thousands of Health and Human Services employees across the country are being dismissed as the Trump administration began implementing its controversial workforce reduction plan, which could ultimately remove 10,000 staff from the department through forced layoffs. The job cuts mark the first tangible impact of health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s departmental overhaul announced last week.
The European Union has a “strong plan” to retaliate against tariffs imposed by Donald Trump but would prefer to negotiate, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has said. Trump, who has upended eight decades of certainties about the transatlantic relationship since taking office, has threatened tariffs on goods from around the world from Wednesday.
Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team is finalizing the dismantlement of the US Agency for International Development, ordering the firings of thousands of local workers and US diplomats and civil servants assigned to the agency overseas, two former top USAID officials and a source with knowledge of the situation said on Tuesday.
US attorney general Pam Bondi directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, the man accused of fatally shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside a Manhattan hotel on 4 December.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 31 March 2025.
