April’s Excellent Election Start.
Yesterday’s election result was a fantastic showing for Democrats across the board. Of course the place to start is in the Wisconsin State Supreme Court race, where the Democratic candidate, Susan Crawford, was able to defeat the Republican, Brad Schimel, by about 10%. This is an 11% improvement from the Trump margin over Harris in 2024. What is of particular note is that the electorate reached roughly 70% of the 2024 Turnout. This is a big number for what is traditionally a low turnout election. So Kudos to all our friends in Wisconsin.
This was not the only good result though. We saw two special elections in Florida, and, while Republicans won, as expected, both Republicans won by between 14% and 15% in seats that Trump had won by 37% and 30% respectively. In the Florida 6th it was 14% on a turnout that was 46% of the 2024 turnout, so not as reflective but still not tiny. In Florida 1 it was a 14.6% margin, on a turnout of about 42% of 2024. This is showing a pattern whereby the lower the turnout potentially the higher Democratic over performance. It is an interesting trend and one to watch. But the big point is Democrats are running ahead of 2024 by quite a bit, upwards of 10%. As a result, I am sharing the 29 Districts represented by Republicans where Trump did not win by more than 10%. These are the seats we need to target extremely hard if we want to win back control of the House in 2026. I am willing to look at a few other seats as well, such as the ones Cook has and also a few others. But for starters, these 29 are where we need to push hard. Some on the list are surprising, and some Cook has listed as Solid R. But we should compete in these districts and tune out the noise.
AZ 1
AZ 6
CA 3
CA 22
CA 40
CA 41
CO 3
CO 5
CO 8
IA 1
IA 3
MI 4
MI 7
MI 10
MO 2
NE 2
NC 11
NJ 7
NY 17
OH 10
OH 15
PA 1
PA 7
PA 8
PA 10
VA 1
VA 2
WI 1
WI 3
The good news is that solid candidates have already declared in about half of these seats, and only about a fourth have no candidate declared at all. So we are doing things well, but we still need to push harder. We just did a remarkable job fundraising for the two special elections in Florida. We need that same energy and dollars in all of these 29 seats.