Democrats saw signs of life in their party on Tuesday, even if they didn’t clinch the night’s biggest prize.
Off-year elections are typically a referendum on the party in power — in this case, especially so, given the unified control of both houses of Congress, the White House and even Supreme Court by conservatives.
But Tuesday’s elections took on an even greater significance. The races in Wisconsin and Florida were the first to go to voters since Kamala Harris’s devastating defeat in November, a swing-state sweep which saw the Democrats lose ground in every battleground state and even reliable blue strongholds.
Despite being an “off year,” many voters (especially on the left) have remained active and engaged over the first three months of Donald Trump’s presidency. The all-out assault on federal agencies led by Musk’s DOGE effort made headlines on election day Tuesday with the firing of 10,000 employees under the Department of Health and Human Services, including sub-agencies like the Food and Drug Administration.
For weeks, Americans have been bombarded with headlines about the staggering scope and effects of DOGE’s cuts in a relatively short time frame. Reports of seniors unable to reach human beings when contacting the Social Security Administration and similar issues faced by veterans have left Republicans in a politically vulnerable spot. Many in Congress have chosen to avoid in-person events in response.
But there’s one man tied to DOGE who didn’t get that memo: Elon Musk himself. The Twitter, Tesla, SpaceX and now DOGE baron flew out to campaign personally for Brad Schimel, the conservative candidate, and pulled out all the stops. In a move that was criticized by Democrats as a blatant effort at vote-buying, Musk handed out cash prizes to supporters of his thinly-veiled petition against “activist” judges. The effort was allowed to continue after the state Supreme Court refused to intervene.
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Tuesday’s results were a clear breath of fresh air for the left. Susan Crawford won a decisive victory in the key swing state of Wisconsin, where a pair of Elon Musk-backed PACs were pouring millions into electing her opponent. Brad Schimel was an avowed opponent of abortion rights and a vocal supporter of Donald Trump. Crawford’s margin of victory over him was 10 percentage points and represented a rejection of Trump and, more likely, Musk — who was centered in Democratic messaging and accused of trying to buy the election.
“Elon Musk made this a referendum on himself. [Brad] Schimel tried to make it a referendum on Donald Trump,” declared a triumphant Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, after the results came in.
Wikler, along with Florida Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried, was set to host a press conference Wednesday afternoon touting the results alongside the Democrats’ new national chair, Ken Martin.
“The voters’ verdict sends a resounding message: Wisconsin’s supreme court election demonstrates Musk and Trump have gone too far, and any politician allied with them could swiftly face the end of their political career,” he added.
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Neighboring Minnesota’s governor Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate in November, was jubilant in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes later in the evening.
“A 10-point win in Wisconsin is an absolute massacre,” Walz said. “[It] was a referendum on Elon Musk, and by extension Donald Trump.”
In Florida, Democrats failed to win either special election for two congressional seats once held by Republicans. Matt Gaetz, who resigned from Congress last fall, did so as part of an ill-fated bid to become the next U.S. attorney general — all the while hoping that his resignation would thwart the imminent publication of an Ethics committee report into his alleged sexual encounters with minors. Michael Waltz’s bid to become national security adviser to President Trump fared better, though he is now embroiled in an embarrassing scandal after mistakenly adding the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to a Signal group chat where plans for an imminent airstrike on Yemen were being debated.
Even in defeat, Democrats can take a silver lining from the Florida special elections: their party’s candidates overperformed past election cycles in both races, halving the Trump-Harris margin in the first and sixth congressional districts. Gay Valimont, running against Jimmy Patronis, flipped one Florida county which had supported Trump by nearly 20 points in November. Josh Weil came within two points of state Senator Randy Fine, the victorious Republican candidate, in Volusia County where Harris suffered a blowout 21-point defeat to Trump in November.
The impact of Tuesday night’s results were immediate in Trumpworld, where Musk quickly began spinning a new narrative: “I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for a positional gain.”
With the majority on the state supreme court now firmly in the left’s hands for at least a year, it’s hard to see what “positional gain” Musk is talking about in Wisconsin, where a Democrat also flipped a key county executive seat.
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In a subsequent Twitter post, Musk pointed to a ballot initiative victory as the real prize of the night, though it merely enshrined an existing state law into the state’s constitution.
Given Trump’s tendency to dump those who become political liabilities for him and the broader GOP, Elon Musk’s own position as a White House insider could be at risk. It’s possible that the DOGE chief will hang on thanks largely to the financial support he and his PACs are able to lend the party.
As more congressional reelection campaigns wait on the horizon, Trump could come under increased pressure to rein in Musk over the months ahead. The president already hinted that DOGE’s role could diminish in the days ahead as Cabinet secretaries assert control over their departments. A Politico report on Wednesday confirmed this, revealing that Trump was promising close aides and advisers that both he and Musk mutually agreed it was time for the latter to return to the private sector.
Democrats, emboldened by Tuesday night, will likely continue to make Musk a boogeyman ahead of 2026’s midterm season. If the Tesla chief is still an ever-present force in the White House by that time, the president could be facing more than just Democrats demanding he show Musk the door.
