Ugly fallout for Trump and GOP after election debacle
When I heard that the Democratic candidate in FL-6 was polling ahead or close to GOP candidate Randy Fine in a district that voted for Donald Trump by 30 points, I took things with a grain of salt. Winning would mean a heavy lift that would likely only happen with extremely poor turnout, and even though Josh Weil raised substantial amounts of money, not a lot of it was spent on advertising, which you need to do in a special election just for purposes of reminding people that one is actually taking place – which is why I encouraged people to donate their money and time to places where we had more realistic odds of winning, and thankfully you largely did so by getting out the vote for Susan Crawford.
What I cared about was how the margins would look in Florida’s special elections – and both Republican House candidates dramatically underperformed Trump’s win – a pattern in line with the Democrats winning in Wisconsin and also in Pennsylvania last week. You would also expect that Republicans would be celebrating their wins even if they lost the supreme court seat, but there’s not really a whole lot of celebrating going on – with louder mumblings of Elon Musk being on his way out and in Florida, Ron DeSantis is lighting into not just the Republican state legislature for not letting him act as a king, but also at their winning candidate – who he called “a squish” – not well-liked and largely functioning there as a placeholder for Trump’s votes.
This isn’t the kind of behavior you do when you win – nor is it what you do when you’re hoping to be the future face of your party, so we suspect DeSantis’ scheme of getting his wife elected governor isn’t going to go over so well next year. Look around at this party and you’ll see a lot of disease symptoms that go beyond people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. We’re clearly off to the races in November, with a few more special elections to go, and we’re almost certainly going to see more fallout as unpopular policies like the tariffs get even less popular. Let’s put in the work and win in 2025!
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making