The Briefing, Vol. XIII, Issue 14
Apr. 7, 2025
Outlook
Split decision: It was a tale of two elections.
In Wisconsin, Republicans were clobbered. More on that below. But in Florida, they avoided the total derailment of President Trump’s agenda last week by winning two special elections for U.S. House.
Republicans Jimmy Petronis and Randy Fine are replacing former Reps. Matt Gaetz (R) and Mike Waltz (R), respectively after each won by double-digits.
Democrats have tried to make something of the fact that both candidates underperformed President Trump in their respective districts. In Petronis’s panhandle district, he won by just 15 points, compared to Trump’s more than 30-point victory in November. Fine, whose race was considered to be much closer, won by 14 points in his district on the state’s northern Atlantic coast, again less than half of Trump’s margin.
In truth, all the talk about Democrats closing the margins is mostly what the kids nowadays call a “cope.” The reasons for the smaller margins should be clear. In an extremely low-turnout special election in which hard-core Democratic voters are significantly more riled up than Republicans, and in which Democrats (partly as a result) raised and spent many times more than their Republican counterparts, they still lost seats they would lose under normal circumstances.
Fine, especially, was outspent nearly 10-to-one by his opponent, yet performed better than polls had suggested.
The two outcomes give Republicans 220 seats in the House and, for now, a seven-seat margin over the Democrats. Democrats will have the opportunity to narrow that to a five-seat margin in special elections later this year due to the recent deaths of Reps. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Sylvester Turner (D-Texas). The election to replace the former will take place in late September. The latter has not yet been scheduled, and Gov. Greg Abbott (R) seems to be in no hurry to set a date.
All this means that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) won’t have as hard a time moving Trump’s agenda through the House — particularly the budget reconciliation bill or bills that will that set the Trump administration’s income tax agenda, renewing and building upon the 2017 tax reform bill.
Wisconsin: But if Republicans staved off a disaster in Florida, they were shellacked in Wisconsin. The officially non-partisan state Supreme Court race proved every bit as much a rout for the victorious Democrat, Judge Susan Crawford, as anyone had expected before Elon Musk got involved, Trump endorsed, and a national full-court-press get-out-the-vote effort began for Republicans. Again, Democrats are much more riled up by the 2024 result and came out to vote in much bigger numbers. They managed to preserve a 4-3 liberal status quo, which could allow Democrats to gerrymander the state’s congressional districts and even possibly throw out Act 10, the popular reform measure which since 2011 has helped save state and local governments tens of billions of dollars.
The result — conservatives’ third straight loss for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court — saw Crawford win 1.3 million votes. That is significantly less than Trump’s 1.7 million in November, but also more than twice the tally of the last conservative who actually won a seat.
Republicans are going to have to do something about these judicial by-elections in terms of candidate quality and election mechanics if they want to avoid destruction in the near future. It is already evident, just three months into his second term, that they cannot just coast to victory on Trump’s success or endorsement.
Tariffs: President Trump is riding high when it comes to approval ratings and political success. But he was also evidently serious when he promised “big, beautiful” tariffs. And the markets aren’t liking it one bit. Indeed, stocks took an enormous “liberation day” beating last week as a consequence of the president’s new worldwide tariff scheme. Meanwhile, oil prices are plunging, suggesting that the market is pricing in a global recession.
Trump has been framing this as an inevitable dose of short-term pain that will be followed by prosperity — the “taking one’s medicine” part of the recovery. That could perhaps prove true if enough trading partners quickly demand bilateral free-trade deals and Trump agrees to them. But for now, massive corrections to the stock market are putting the first major chink in Trump’s armor.
If you’re going to have some economic chaos, the time to do it is at the beginning of your term, long before the next big election. But the fact is, Trump’s second presidential administration’s success or failure could well depend on a series of moves that strongly contradict established economic theory.
Hands off: There is some irony to the fact that Democrats used to be the party of tariffs, and Republicans (for the most part) the party of free trade — indeed, a clip has been circulating of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) from 39 years ago arguing for tariff reciprocity. Indeed, there is some residue of this recent change in the parties’ respective reactions, since many Democrats still don’t believe in free trade.
But the continued and glaring disconnect between the Democrats and the issues that matter to voters was evident with the “Hands Off” rallies they staged over the weekend in many major cities. The anti-Trump Left doesn’t seem to understand that it could find a much more sympathetic hearing by complaining about international trade, the stock market and the destruction of people’s retirement savings — or even about U.S. farmers suddenly seeing their export markets dry up — than they ever will by decrying government efficiency efforts and the layoffs of thousands of government bureaucrats.
Governor 2025
New Jersey: Republicans, definitely underdogs in this year’s governor’s race especially after Trump’s win, are nonetheless enjoying some headway in bringing their party registration totals closer to parity.
Registered Democratic voters now outnumber Republicans in Jersey by just under 820,000. This is a significant improvement from the 982,980 gap of five years ago (recall that former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli (R), who is running again, nearly pulled off an upset in the 2021 governor’s race. The Democratic advantage was 921,000 as recently as last September, suggesting a huge uptick in Republican activity in recent months.
Whomever Republicans choose to nominate this year, there is serious talk of New Jersey becoming a swing state in future presidential races, given Trump’s unexpectedly close six-point loss in the Garden State.
Governor 2026
Florida: House Speaker Mike Johnson has officially thrown his weight behind Rep. Byron Donalds for Florida governor. The door is not yet closed for Casey DeSantis to enter the race, but Donalds is getting dangerously close to clearing the field.
In the meantime, term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis has not been at all shy about airing grievances against Republicans. This is not intended as a criticism but rather as an observation. DeSantis may have turned Florida into a model of conservative governance, but he is not trying to win any popularity contests or make peace with fellow Republicans in order to give his wife an easier path to the nomination if she chooses to run.
The governor asserted last week, for example, that Rep. Randy Fine (R), just elected last week, underperformed as he did because of his repellent personality and his opposition to DeSantis’s immigration policy in the state Senate. If anything, this rhetorical hint points away from a contested 2026 primary, but bear in mind that there is a very long way to go before Florida’s Aug. 18, 2026 primary, one of the last on the calendar next year.
Senate 2026
Nebraska: In yet another attempt by Democrats to escape their brand’s toxicity, they appear set to run the same independent candidate for Senate next year as they did last year — Dan Osborn, no relation to the former state college football coach.
Despite eschewing the Democratic label — a must in Nebraska’s statewide politics — Osborn will likely have a more difficult time making it a real race against Sen. Pete Ricketts (R) than he did when he made it a relatively close race against Sen. Deb Fischer (R).
New Hampshire: Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) is running for the open seat being vacated by incumbent Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.). According to polls, he begins as an underdog against former Gov. Chris Sununu (R), whom President Trump has met and urged to run. Trump seems unbothered by Sununu’s past reluctance to support him.
