Voters in Wisconsin and Florida Swing Toward Democrats
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Barely two months into Donald Trump's second term has the mega voter backlash already arrived as Democrats resoundingly on Tuesday win a state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin while making big gains in two Florida special house elections. Meantime, Speaker Mike Johnson is forced to cancel this week's voting agenda in the House after a GOP revolt on proxy voting.

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We're joined again today by my colleagues, editorial board member Colin Levy and columnist Alicia Finley.

Trying to read the tea leaves of special elections and off-year elections can be tricky given how much the makeup of the electorate can change. But after polling suggesting that this Wisconsin Supreme Court race was going to be a close-run thing, a remarkable result, the winner is liberal new justice Susan Crawford by about 10 points, 55 to 45. Let's listen to a piece of her victory speech last night. So today,

Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections, and our Supreme Court. And Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.

And here's a piece of the concession by conservative judge Brad Schimel. The numbers aren't going to turn around. They're too bad, and we're not going to pull this off. So thank you guys from the bottom of my heart. God bless you. God bless the state of Wisconsin. God bless America.

Colin, what's your read of these results? One thing that is always difficult to tease out is how much of an election outcome is based on turnout, which side had more enthusiasm, which side was better at getting their committed voters to the polls, and how much of it is voters in the middle who are undecided swinging one way or another. On the turnout question, I saw one analysis today saying that Brad Schimel got about 62%

of the vote total that President Trump had in Wisconsin, whereas Crawford got about 77% of the Kamala Harris vote total. So it does look like at least part of the story is huge Democratic enthusiasm. I think for sure. I mean, honestly, Kyle, this was a turnout race exactly like we thought it was going to be. And Democrats really turned out huge in Milwaukee and in Madison. To give you a taste of it, I do have some of these numbers here.

Dane County, which includes the areas around Milwaukee, hit 95 percent of 2022's fall gubernatorial turnout. And those are huge numbers for a spring election. And it shows how motivated Democrats were to send a message that, you know, this was really about a lot more than just the two state Supreme Court candidates voting.

The rest of the state averaged around 88 percent of that 2022 race turnout. But it certainly wasn't uniform. And the biggest turnout was coming in those Democratic areas. You mentioned the presidential turnout, and I have some of those numbers, too. Dane was 78 percent of its 2024 presidential turnout and Waukesha was around 73 percent.

Brown County, which is much more rural but surrounds Green Bay, where Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris 53 percent to 45 percent in November. That was, as you said, only around 67 percent of turnout in this election. So the Democrats were turning out at huge levels that were like fall general election and the GOP just didn't. And you can't get over that hurdle.

pretty much no matter what. One of the lessons here is about the role of money in politics. Alicia, some of the reporting is that Elon Musk himself dropped something like 25 million into this race, which is a big number for, I guess, any election from one man, but also for a state judicial race. There was a lot of talk about Elon Musk trying to buy a state Supreme Court seat

And I am often skeptical of that kind of language. There's a long record of self-funding millionaire, billionaire candidates who are on the ballot themselves, putting tons of money into their campaigns and falling completely flat because it turns out that voters have a mind of their own. And a lot of times they're skeptical of this kind of self-funding. It feeds a perception of

among some elements of the electorate, that that's not the way they want to do politics. And it gets people motivated and out to the polls, it seems. I think that's right, though you have to take into account that there was a lot of big money on the liberal side. J.B. Pritzker, who's an Illinois Democratic governor, came in big, and he's another billionaire, and he donated heavily for Crawford. I'll put it this way, the Democratic campaign.

to take back that seat. So did George Soros. He donated a couple million dollars to the state party. So there was a lot of money coming in from both sides, which to some extent can help with running ads across the state of Wisconsin. It's a relatively actually small state with a relatively inexpensive media market. So $100 million, which I think was the estimate of how much total money was poured into the race and the most expensive state judicial race in history. That

can go a long ways as state like Wisconsin. So I think people were exposed to arguments on both sides. And I think to Colin's point, what really helped Democrats was just the sheer motivation. I'm sure some of their money that was going in for the Democratic side wasn't helping to organize and turn out their voters. That was essentially a lot of what Musk was doing in his $1 million sweepstakes to get conservatives to try to register and to commit to voting.

But in the end, as you say, voters made up their minds and whoever spent the most didn't actually end up having that big of an impact. Hang tight. We'll be right back. Optimism isn't sunshine and rainbows. It's fixing things, changing the way we fix things. It's running the world on smarter energy. Because if optimism never stops, then change can't either. GE Vernova, the energy of change.

Welcome back. Colin, what do you make of the results here now for these court cases that are going to be so important in Wisconsin in coming years? A big one, of course, is Act 10. That was mentioned yesterday. That's the law signed by Scott Walker that limited collective bargaining by public

workers in many cases, and some analyses say that it has saved taxpayers billions of dollars. Notable that last year, a judge in Dane County said that big parts of that law are unconstitutional. This is maybe going next to this Wisconsin Supreme Court, a liberal majority that is going to be maintained there. And interestingly, Judge Crawford, now going to be Justice Crawford, worked as an attorney on an earlier challenge to act

10. Do you think there's any possibility she is going to have to recuse from these kinds of challenges? Or is this election result pretty much, in your mind, the beginning of the end, potentially, for that Act 10 reform? I think, unfortunately, it is the beginning of the end. And, you know, Justice Crawford has been asked about whether or not she'll recuse from that case. And she basically said, well,

Well, she might consider it if it was exactly the same case. But since it's not exactly the same case, I would expect that she won't recuse. And, you know, I think it's a shame in some ways, Kyle, that we didn't hear a little bit more about Act 10 from the candidates themselves and strategically speaking in the advertising during this campaign, because they spent a lot of time hearing about

some of the judicial records of the candidates. And I think voters could have profited from hearing a little bit more about the fact that if this new progressive majority overturns the law, which is highly likely, if the court overturns it, the state is going to have a major financial problem on its hands. You know, there's probably no way to balance the budget without raising taxes.

You know, if Act 10 savings and some of these other guardrails on union negotiating just disappear, you're going to have every local government and every school district that's been using those savings. You know, they're going to have to seriously reconsider how they operate. Maybe the answer will be property taxes. You know, I saw a study saying that they might have to raise property taxes 600 to $1,000 a year.

And I think that's something that voters deserve to know. I will say, too, just if I can ramble on a little bit here philosophically in the aftermath of this, what I think really is a mess. I think Republicans have to be looking at this and realizing that they don't

have a winning coalition when Donald Trump isn't on the ballot in Wisconsin. And importantly, that Elon Musk is just not a comparable proxy. I mean, I think if I'm being honest, he comes off as like a

Tesla metrosexual, and it just doesn't really connect with your rural barstool Trump voters. It's just not a motivating proxy. It didn't turn out to be. So for all of his money and involvement in the race, it was like vampire garlic for Democrats, but it didn't provide the same draw for Republicans. The spread was about 10 points. So that's frankly a route. And the Republicans got really hammered in the suburbs, you know, especially by college educated women.

So there's a lot to think about there. Similar shifting these two Florida House special elections. One of these seats was won by former Congressman Matt Gaetz in the Florida panhandle with about 66 percent of the vote in 2024. The other was won by now National Security Advisor Mike Waltz on the coast with about 66 percent as well. Those are safe votes.

red seats. But the shift in the vote totals here in the margins is about nine points between November 2024 and today, Alicia. Republican victories in both seats, but only with about 57% of the vote

And so that makes you wonder how many Republican congressmen today are thinking to themselves, well, hang on, I won my seat last fall by only about five points or three points. Is this the kind of shift that could come and swamp me in the midterm elections? And Alicia, notable that we're talking about this on what President Trump has called a

Liberation Day. We are waiting here for the announcement of his tariffs, his reciprocal tariffs to come down. Some reporting I saw this morning that even in the White House, they are not exactly sure what President Trump is planning to announce this afternoon. How much of a message

Do you think this is to the Trump administration to be careful what their next moves are, to stay focused on the issues that got the president reelected, immigration, the border, inflation, the economy? And is there any chance, any hope, do you think, that they are a little bit chastened by this result and maybe the reciprocal tariffs today are not going to be quite what they had been intended to be?

So I think the Republicans or Trump crowd has tried to rationalize the loss in Wisconsin and somewhat underperformance in Florida. I think it was actually expected that they were going to underperform from the 2024 November numbers in those districts.

And I think they were actually probably happy that they didn't underperform by more. And so they're probably writing it off in some part. But, well, this is a special election. So, you know, Democrats are very motivated. And I think that was a big component of it. They were really depressed in 2024 after Biden dropped.

out. But now they're motivated again because of what Trump, for better or worse, is doing to the federal government, along with Elon Musk, with the Doge restructurings. The tariffs aren't really motivating Democratic voters. But I think there is concern among broad swath of the middle who helped get Trump elected, and I would include a lot of Hispanics, working class voters in that, that the tariffs are

are not very popular. If you look at the polls, independent voters do not support the tariffs, and they do believe that they are going to increase prices. Surveys also show that Americans, by and large, think that Trump should be focusing more on prices and bring prices down, which they haven't seen. Bureau of Economic Analysis PCE index for February, which came out on Friday, showed that actually inflation by at least the Federal Reserve's preferred measure, it has ticked

up. And so people aren't seeing Trump do what they voted for him to do. He's kind of gotten into this kind of ideological obsession with tariffs, which are his household remedy. But people elected him to revive economic growth and bring down prices and restore American prosperity. And if he doesn't do that,

and God forbid we get a recession, which I'm not taking off the table, there could be a route in November 2026 midterms. And sorry to talk so early about the 2026 midterms, but Colin, this obviously matters for policy outcomes. Right now we have a Republican government, a Republican House, a Republican Senate, a

Republican in the White House. And so there is still the filibuster, a 60-vote rule for legislation that makes substantive changes to many laws, but you can work around that in budgetary matters with reconciliation bills and so forth. And also, if Democrats retake control of the House or maybe the Senate in 2026, they get the subpoena power back.

and can start going after Trump administration policies and mistakes by employees and members of the cabinet and can make it a miserable final two years in office for the president if we get into a divided government situation. As we look at these races, these state races, it's also critically important to remember that the voters are still concerned

responding on very individual state issues. And we get into looking at the governance and looking at the national politics

But Republicans held on to those two seats in the Florida congressional races. But the same message was in those numbers, in my view, as we saw in the Wisconsin race. There was just a major spread from where Republicans usually are on those seats. And there's no doubt, of course, that when Trump picked Mike Walz and Matt Gaetz as his initial choice for attorney general, it was presumed

that there was going to be no problem there because those seats were reliably conservative seats and really weren't in much jeopardy. You know, the fact that this was sort of all up for grabs was really notable. I think the message is undeniable. And I would also add that I think what happened in Florida, as you mentioned, is particularly salient because of everything that Trump's been doing on immigration, you know,

states obviously very sensitive to immigration issues, large Hispanic communities and large Cuban communities. So for Florida voters to swing that way is certainly a brushback. And, you know, as you were talking to, I was thinking back a little bit more broadly on the Wisconsin election too, because if you think back,

a decade or so ago in terms of the way these states were handling their coalitions of voters. You know, you had Governor Scott Walker at the time, you know, and he had a coalition at the time that included college-educated voters that seemed to be missing

from the Republican Party now. You know, at the time, they were very focused on these issues like fiscal responsibility, making Wisconsin a good place to do business. And that's true in Florida. It's going to be true in all of these congressional races where voters still care about the issues that are top of the line in their own states. Hang tight. We'll be right back after one more break. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort.

Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast.

From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Welcome back. Meantime, in Washington, the House agenda was derailed this week by infighting among Republicans about whether to bring back proxy voting for new parents. Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna became a mother in 2023, wants to force a vote on a measure to

permit people in Congress, new mothers and fathers, to proxy vote for 12 weeks after the birth of a child. Speaker Mike Johnson has been opposed to that. He and his allies argue that proxy voting is unconstitutional and that any exceptions would turn into the rule. It would be a slippery slope here. There was some procedural maneuvering on

Tuesday. My understanding is that the Speaker tried to put a measure into a House rule to prevent this proxy voting idea. That was then voted down, including by nine Republicans joining with all Democrats. And that has essentially canceled the House agenda for the week, as the Speaker Mike Johnson tells it. Alicia, what do you make of this debate?

It seems to me that it's a sympathetic case, new parents. However, there are all sorts of other sympathetic cases. And if there's one exception granted, I don't know how long it would be until there's all sorts of others granted as well. Right. It is a very sympathetic case because nowadays most parents, at least if you go to work for a big company, most white-collar parents get at least 12 weeks of paid leave.

And so if you actually want to attract people to run for Congress, women in particular of childbearing age, allowing them to vote for proxy might help to provide more opportunities. On the other hand, as you point out, it could be a slippery slope. If somebody has a sick parent or aging parent that needs care, you're going to provide a one-off exemption for that or just provide an across-the-board exemption. Then there will no doubt be

other difficult cases where a speaker might be asked to arbitrate. If somebody gets the flu, for instance. And so I think that's where Mike Johnson doesn't want to go. And then there's the other issue, just the consistency on principle. Republicans opposed proxy voting when Democrats opened it up during COVID, in part so they could fast track and jam through their agenda. Many of these big bills that they passed on party lines, namely the Inflation Reduction Act, but also the American Rescue Plan Act,

The IRA passed with 220 votes, 158 of which were proxy. Now, we haven't gotten a constitutional challenge to this, but there are constitutional concerns, which our editorial pages have raised. And there is a concern that a business, for instance, if it doesn't like a law that was passed,

with a majority of proxy votes, could challenge law based on saying this was not passed constitutionally or is procedurally defective and could use that as a hook to try to overturn a law. So I think that's another concern that Republicans need to be somewhat concerned about. A couple of thoughts I would add here. I think part of what is motivating Speaker Mike Johnson's opposition is that COVID experience that Alicia describes is

The way that the system worked during the pandemic is members of Congress or members of the House who were supposed to be absent would file a letter saying that they were unable to be present because of the public health emergency. And Colin, that seems to have become almost an all-purpose excuse. And part of the reason it did so is that it makes it a lot easier for the leadership of the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi in that case, who had a pretty narrow margin of

to keep enough votes around to pass the kind of legislation that they wanted. The Inflation Reduction Act passed the Senate, and it was the August recess for the House. And so instead of having to try to figure out when to hold that vote, calling everybody back to get a majority, they did it by proxy, 158 proxy votes. And so, Colin, we'll give you the last word, but I think that's the concern here is

is that Congress is supposed to get together and debate these laws, debate these issues, talk to colleagues on their side of the aisle and the other side of the aisle. And if it becomes a norm of voting from wherever you happen to be, and maybe that's on vacation, that that's a change, a real historical change in the way that this body has operated.

For sure. And first of all, I mean, I think I have a bit of an old fashioned view on this. I mean, serving in Congress is a privilege. And I understand that we all went through this period where, you know, we're working from home and it was the pandemic and that sort of became the norm. I don't think anyone should really want that to be the norm anymore. And I think there are decisions that legislators can make where they go, OK,

I don't need to show up for this particular vote. I need to be home with my kids or I've got, you know, a sick mother or, you know, I need to prioritize my family at this particular time.

instead of going in for the vote because there's adequate margins to pass it. But there are going to be other votes, big votes, where, sorry, you got to get someone else to take care of the family and get people to soccer practice. Legislators, congresspeople are just like other humans. They have to decide what their priorities are at times, and they have to decide whether they're going to put their career first

they're serving the American people or whether they're going to put their family first. Those are hard choices. I'm not denying that. I think it's great that there are parents, including working mothers who are serving in Congress. I think those are really important voices in our government. But that balancing act is real. It's real for everyone. And I don't think in any way it should relieve them of the responsibility for having to show up for work on big votes.

Thank you, Colin and Alicia. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button, and we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch.