The Briefing, Vol. XIII, Issue 13
Mar. 31, 2025
This week:
- Republicans in danger of losing two key races
- Stefanik nomination withdrawn to save endangered House majority
- Texas primary showdown: Cornyn trails Paxton in a hypothetical primary matchup
Outlook
Complacent Republicans: In victory, Republicans became complacent. It’s the only explanation that fits.
Given the steep rise in general public satisfaction with the direction of the country, it seems very unlikely what liberals keep claiming — that Trump voters regret their votes. Indeed, polls suggest that they are generally thrilled to see what he’s doing, and they don’t regret it at all — even the now-famous Wisconsin man whose wife was detained for overstaying her visa.
What’s more, the polls reflect continued satisfaction with Trump at a level he has never enjoyed previously. Trump, who has had net negative approvals throughout his career, now has 50 percent approval in the new CBS News poll. Although he has lost some ground already on the economy, immigration enforcement is his most popular issue, and “Trump’s efforts to cut staff at government agencies” is also approved of by 50 percent of voters.
This points to complacency, not a massive political reversal, as the best explanation for Republicans’ electoral swoon in 2025 so far.
Back in January, Democrats flipped a state senate seat in Iowa that Trump had carried by 21 points. Many wrote this off as a fluke in a low-turnout special election. But then this month, Iowa Republicans only just barely hung on to an open state House seat that Trump had carried by 27 points. A loss would have cost them their two-thirds supermajority in the chamber.
In Pennsylvania, Republicans narrowly dropped a state Senate seat in heavily Republican Lancaster County that Trump had won with 57 percent of the vote.
The only conclusion is that there is an alarming complacency right now among Republican voters. If they haven’t already snapped out of it, it’s going to cost them dearly.
Tuesday elections: Tomorrow, voters in Florida-1 and Florida-6 will go to the polls to replace members of Congress who resigned. The First District is considered a lock for the Republican candidate, but the sixth has become an unnecessarily competitive race amid Republican complacency. At the moment, state Sen. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) is now expected to squeak it out based on improvements in early Republican turnout. Yet it is a big problem for the Republican Party that he is dramatically underperforming against a Democratic candidate who wants to disarm the police and withdraw U.S. support for Israel. It is noteworthy that the Democrat, Josh Weil (D), has benefited from despondent Democrats making nationwide small-dollar donations in hopes of chalking up a win. He has reportedly outraised Fine by a significant margin.
An even more important contest takes place in Wisconsin, where voters will choose a new state Supreme Court justice. A victory by former Attorney General Brad Schimel would restore the court’s conservative majority; a victory by Judge Susan Crawford would preserve a liberal majority and allow Democrats to potentially gerrymander the state in order to gain as many as two additional U.S. House seats. A liberal majority might also undo Wisconsin’s historic and hugely popular Act 10, the 2011 law that produced an estimated $36 billion in savings for state and local governments by de-fanging the state’s powerful public-sector unions.
The Wisconsin race is the subject of a massive concerted push by Republicans. It has now drawn upwards of $100 million in campaign spending, including about $20 million by Elon Musk himself, who has been giving away money to pledge-signers as he did in the last weeks of the 2024 election. In recent weeks, Schimel has trailed in the polls but was closing the gap and seems to have momentum going into the final weekend.
In a reverse of past practice, Republicans are likely to use the state’s same-day voter registration law to their own benefit as they seek to turn out low-propensity Trump supporters on election day itself. At stake is the important question of whether Republicans can still win big races if Trump isn’t on the ballot.
Trump has already endorsed Schimel, and Musk was campaigning with him over the weekend.
Stefanik nomination: Related to the Republicans’ woes in special elections is Trump’s need to withdraw the nomination of Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. It’s not that Stefanik did anything wrong — rather, Republicans simply aren’t in a position to give up her House seat in the event that they lose former Rep. and now National Security Advisor Mike Waltz’s (R-Fla.) seat in Northeast Florida.
This isn’t necessarily because the New York seat would be at risk (although this wouldn’t be the first time if Democrats were to win it). The reality is that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) will likely hold the seat open and empty for months before bothering to call a special election, as she and other Democratic New York governors have long been wont to do with Republican House seats when they come open.
If Fine were to lose in Florida, and Stefanik to quit the House, it would result in Republicans having only 218 seats — a majority of just one — once Democrats return to full strength as expected (two of their members in safe districts recently passed away).
This would make Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) task of passing a reconciliation tax cut bill that much harder, especially given the unlikelihood that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) will cooperate. Failure to extend the 2017 tax cuts would be a disaster for Trump’s agenda, and one he is unwilling to risk, which is why he asked Stefanik to remain in the House for now.
‘Signal-gate’ fallout: By now, it is well known that more than a dozen senior administration officials, including National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Vice President JD Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were discussing strikes in Yemen over the Signal app, and that Waltz apparently accidentally included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg on the thread. This was obviously a huge black eye for the administration, but also one that needs to be kept in perspective.
The new CBS News poll, having been taken after the scandal was known, shows that the public understands this was either a “very” or “somewhat serious” matter (as 75 percent said), but that they are not too terribly bothered by it and haven’t had their faith in Trump shaken just yet. This is probably because there were no negative consequences of this mini-scandal. It was also a rare error in an administration that had been humming along surprisingly smoothly. As Trump put it, this was “the only glitch in two months.”
Is this too glib? Probably. Objectively, this screw-up merits someone getting fired. But here’s the problem: As Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) discovered during a CNBC appearance, Democrats are not really in a strong position to demand that anyone be fired. “Signalgate” is a long way from Biden’s Afghan withdrawal, for which no one was fired or disciplined. It is also a long way from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s drone massacre of an innocent family (including seven children) with Hellfire missiles that occurred in August 2021. Even though it was quickly established that none of those killed in the U.S. strike were involved in terrorism, not a single person in the Biden administration or the Department of Defense was fired or held accountable for what was obviously a far more consequential error.
None of that excuses Signalgate, of course. It’s still a pretty bad mistake, even if there were fortunately no negative consequences. And from a political perspective, it puts a dent in the armor of an administration that has, up to now, at least seemed to display swift and ruthless competence in nearly every aspect of its running.
That said, Democrats are treating this less like a genuine problem and more like it is their first political toe-hold of 2025 — like a life raft, they cling to it and are loath to let it go. Most of the outrage is fake, in the sense that they are not as concerned by the fact that it happened as they are eager for something, anything, that can shift the topic of conversation from their own party’s infighting and malaise and turn public opinion at least slightly against Trump.
Senate
Texas: Bad news for Sen. John Cornyn (R), who trails Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) by 11 points in a hypothetical Republican primary, 38 to 27 percent. With numbers this bad for an incumbent, and a net-negative 22 point approval rating, Cornyn might not make it to a runoff election. Paxton’s decision on whether to run will need to come down relatively soon, given the early date of Texas’s primaries in March 2026.
Cornyn, dogged by low approval ratings, is nonetheless a Trump ally. The former Texas Supreme Court justice helped Trump choose his three Supreme Court appointments in his first term.
One way to avoid a nasty showdown without anyone losing face would be for Trump to appoint Cornyn to a position in the administration or, if one opens up any time soon, to a seat on the Supreme Court.
