This will be short because no one will read it anyways. As others have pointed out the Florida special House elections netted an 19% electoral shift, which is an absolute blowout for the blue team, even considering the wonkiness of wonky special elections. But there’s a little more in the voter data to discuss. I compared the vote total from the 2024 general election for both House elections in Florida. Below is FL-1:
Clik here to view.
When folks say special elections are wonky, what they are mostly referring to is turnout apathy. Almost 6 in 10 people who voted in 2024 didn't show up to vote 6 months later. The turnout reduction was disproportionate: the voter loss was 65.6% for the GOP. Nearly 2 out of 3 Matt Gaetz voters failed to show up for Patronis. On the Dem side, however, we still lost 1 in 2 voters. This is the point of the diary. The votes needed to win the election outright were there. That changes everything. That’s the difference between a wonderful “blue shift narrative” to a “we-won-bitches!”, devastating-knock-out blow story. The Dems needed 22,032 more votes to win, out of 68,676 Dem voters who showed up in 2024 but failed to yesterday. That’s only 1 in 3 people.
Hate Trump or hate him more (obviously, those are the only two options), he’s got star power. His cult shows up for him, but really, only him, and then they abandon the down-ballots who are largely considered administrative functionaries.
Dems need a simple, blunt, unifying message, that motivates the base. Most of my time lurking on Kos is looking for this answer. We need The Reason that results in 23,000 apathetic Dem voters showing up in a special election. This is especially true for the midterm 2026 elections which are, without exception, lower turnout affairs compared to presidential election years. Therefore, they behave much more like special elections than general elections. In Dump v1.0, we got 41 seats.
One thing that motivates the Dem base is Trump himself. Given that the FL-1 GOP winner bragged that “Donald Trump in one tweet obliterated millions of dollars from the Left,” it’s interesting to consider that under more scrutiny, considering Wisconsin’s huge Dem success, this may actually be the other way around. President Musk showed up with cheese on his head and goofy-large million dollar vanity checks and the Dem turnout was unprecedented. So being the Cheeto antidote is obviously part of the Big Message and it worked well in 2018. The other half of the message needs to be some kind of hope. I think AOC/Bernie’s tour is sluicing this out now, but the grand unifying theme remains.
Here is the data for FL-6, which is largely similar, but would’ve required about 1 in 2 apathetic Dem voters to return to the polls yesterday:
Clik here to view.
The big story of course is The Shift and what it means for the 2026 election, which is admittedly depressingly far away. A shift of 19% probably won’t hold generically in the midterm election. But a shift of 10% is realistic. That makes a 29 seat pickup very likely on its own, and that at least shuts down the Destruction of America currently ongoing and keeps it to a 2 year bash fest. A 19% shift would obviously be something else entirely. Any GOP with less than 59% of the vote in 2024 would be at risk. I can't find a tabulated list of all 435 House races, but I would like to apply a generic shift to see the number of total pickups. If anyone knows where this data may live, please link in the comments.
Any statements made herein that are not statistical fact are only in my personal opinion.
