Democrats and Republicans are framing Tuesday’s high-stakes special elections in Wisconsin and Florida as referendums on their agendas and on President Donald Trump’s administration.
In Wisconsin — the closest win margin Trump had in 2024 after he carried every swing state — a state Supreme Court seat is up for grabs, which will tilt the ideological majority of the bench liberal or conservative. And in Florida, two heavily Republican congressional districts are seeing unprecedented Democratic spending in the hopes that the current administration is unpopular enough that typically safer seats can flip.
In both states, Democrats are aggressively linking Trump and his ally Elon Musk to the Republican candidates. In Wisconsin, the state Democratic party has put out press release after release after release tieing conservative candidate Brad Schimel to Musk and Trump. It also launched a “People v. Musk” campaign and paid advertisements on the subject. Liberal candidate Susan Crawford has made Musk a theme of her campaign.
“If you had asked me three weeks ago, I would have downplayed interpreting this as any kind of referendum on Trump,” said Charles Franklin, a political science academic who leads the Marquette Law School Poll. But “with the explicit involvement of Musk, and Trump’s endorsement, I think it’s going to be hard to read [the result] as not involving at least a significant amount of judgment of Trump,” Franklin said.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court election has become the most expensive state judicial race in U.S. history, and could clear a staggering $100 million in spending. In addition to Musk’s heavy spending and Trump’s endorsement of Schimel, Crawford has received endorsements from prominent national figures like former President Barack Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
In Florida, Democrats are hoping for upsets — or at least overperformances — in two special House races that voted heavily for Trump in November. The Democratic candidates have outraised their Republican opponents by millions, putting what were expected to be sleeper races into party leaders’ focus.
A poll conducted last week showed Randy Fine, the Republican candidate for Florida’s 6th Congressional District, within the margin of error over his Democratic opponent, Josh Weil. The seat was last held by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who won the district by 33 percentage points in November.
The Florida and Wisconsin races also come during a unique moment of political turmoil for the GOP. White House officials are still reeling from the fallout over Signal-gate, where Waltz inadvertently added a journalist to a Signal chat with high-ranking officials discussing sensitive information. Democrats also won a special election in Pennsylvania last week in a heavily Republican district that shouldn’t have been competitive. Days after that upset, the Trump administration pulled Rep. Elise Stefanik’s nomination for U.N. ambassador to avoid another special House election in a Republican district.
Rep. Richard Hudson, chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, told reporters last week that he’s “not concerned at all” about Florida’s 6th District, but he also said GOP candidate Fine had gotten off to a slow start, which impacted the race.
“I would have preferred if our candidate had raised money at a faster rate and gotten on TV quicker. But he’s doing what he needs to do,” Hudson said.
Republicans are pouring their last-minute efforts largely toward Fine over Jimmy Patronis, the GOP candidate for Florida’s 1st Congressional District, the other special House election on Tuesday Fine has brought in over $90,000 since Thursday in large-dollar donations, according to FEC 48-hour reports. That includes a $5,000 contribution from Mike Huckabee, thousands from Florida Republican Reps. Kat Cammack and Aaron Bean and $2,000 from Waltz’s congressional committee.
National Democrats say they’re bullish on their chances.
“After overperforming in 13 out of the 14 special elections so far in 2025, Democrats have the momentum,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement to NOTUS. “Today, voters in Wisconsin and Florida have a chance to send a message straight to Elon Musk and the Oval Office: our democracy isn’t for sale.”
Republicans too are making the race a referendum on Trump and the party’s agenda. Schimel sought out Trump’s endorsement, advertised on it once he received it, said he would be part of a “support network” for Trump, dressed as Trump for Halloween and posed with a giant Trump inflatable.
Republicans are also leaning into the idea that a continued liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court would be used to redraw Wisconsin’s congressional maps, putting the GOP’s slim House of Representatives majority in jeopardy, as well as its ability to carry out Trump’s agenda. Republicans told NOTUS earlier this month, “We will de facto lose the Republican majority in the House of Representatives on April 1 if people don’t vote for Brad Schimel.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also told reporters the state’s congressional maps are the reason to support Crawford and that Democrats need to come out and vote for her “because there are gerrymandered congressional lines right now in Wisconsin.”
Jeffries also said Democrats are “almost guaranteed” to overperform in both of the Florida races.
The 1st District was previously held by Rep. Matt Gaetz, who resigned after being tapped to be Trump’s attorney general. He quickly withdrew from consideration when it appeared he lacked support in the Senate due to long-standing allegations he had sex with a minor.
Democratic candidate Gay Valimont ran against Gaetz in November and lost by 32 percentage points. Valimont said the race is now competitive both because of the new Republican nominee, Patronis, and because of the actions of the Trump administration. The district has the second-highest number of veterans in the country, and she’s campaigning heavily on the administration’s planned cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“Going there and representing my district is my sole purpose, but for the big picture, which is a little overwhelming and a little heavy right now, these seats can change things,” Valimont told NOTUS in March.
The policy stakes are also high in Wisconsin. The state Supreme Court is likely to rule on issues like Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion law and on a key union case involving collective bargaining. Democrats, looking to preserve the liberal majority on the court they cemented in 2023, are hoping these issues-driven stakes draw voters to the polls.
But Republicans have their own policy-driven concerns they’re messaging to their voters. In 2023, the liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, won, securing a liberal ideological majority on the court for the first time in 15 years. The court, to GOP frustration, then re-adjudicated elections cases recently decided by the prior conservative majority.
Those cases involved the legality of drop boxes and the drawing of state maps. The new decisions paved the way for expanded drop box voting in 2024 and new maps that led to Democrats cracking much closer margins in the state legislature.
Democrats were thrilled by those efforts.
“We saw the results. We ended up flipping four seats in the Senate and 10 in the Assembly,” Jeremy Jansen, political director at the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told NOTUS in late February. “We have a vested interest in [these] other levels of the ballot that have the potential to impact the state legislative landscape.”
Republicans, of course, were not happy, but likewise shared the belief in the importance of the judicial branch in how it can affect state legislative work.
“I mean, in effect, Wisconsin will become like Minnesota or Illinois if they get the Supreme Court majority again, because the current court, with its liberal makeup, has made it clear they don’t care if something is contained in statute,” Rep. Tom Tiffany told NOTUS. “They’ll create the law if necessary, and they did it with ballot drop boxes. So if they’ll do it with ballot drop boxes, what else won’t they do it too? So it’s all at stake.”
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Nuha Dolby and Katherine Swartz are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.