House Update

Elise Stefanik represents R+9 NY-21 in New York, a district that went 60/40 Trump in the last election, and 62/38 for Stefanik. It’s the “north country” - encompassing the northern part of the Capitol Region and the Adirondacks. You’ll definitely see a lot of Trump flags in this area.

Still, I’m not overly surprised that Trump pulled her nomination as UN Ambassador in order to keep this seat. This was never going to be a gimme in a special election. Historically, those elections are hard-fought, well-financed and low-turnout. And Gov Kathy Hochul was supposedly going to slow-walk the special election to replace Stefanik. (Hochul herself won a special election to replace good Christian Republican Chris Lee when his shirtless selfies sent to his non-wife were revealed, in a very red district. She lost that seat in the next general election.) The candidate who was going to oppose Stefanik, dairy farmer Blake Gendebein, had already raised $2.5 million, just to show how much money pours into these elections, which sets him up to run a solid challenge against Stefanik next cycle. Also, the Republicans were having a fight over replacing Stefanik.

It is a sweet side-effect of Trump bowing to the obvious — this was only going to be a sure Republican win if he was popular, and he isn’t — is that Stefanik lost her leadership position in the House. She’s really one of the grossest Republican opportunists in Congress, flipping from a somewhat-reasonable Republican to a full MAGA mouthpiece in just a couple of years.

Supposedly the reason that Trump chickened out on Stefanik was the polls in the Florida race to replace National Group Texter Security Advisor Mike Waltz. Waltz held R+14 FL-6, a 64/34 Trump district in 2024. Waltz won that seat by a 67/33 margin. So this one really should be a gimme for Republicans, though some recent polling shows the race within the margin of error on a small-sample poll. Special elections are notoriously hard to poll, since they’re all about hard-to-predict turnout, but that poll clearly has Republicans worried.

The reasons that FL-6 is a problem are classic for a special election. The Democrat’s candidate, Josh Weil, raised $8.8 million, while the Republican candidate has roughly half a million dollars in the bank. And Republicans are already shitting on their candidate, Randy Fine, for running a poor campaign. (The Great Leader Trump couldn’t be to blame, of course.)

While it’s highly unlikely that Dems will flip FL-6, they also have FL-1, Matt Gaetz’ old district on the line in another their April 1 special election. This is an R+19 district, even more red that R+14, and I haven’t heard any rumblings that the Democrat, Gay Valimont, could pull off an upset.

A lot of the links above are from the excellent Downballot blog, which used to be Daily Kos elections. Here’s their Google sheet tallying up the special elections this year, and overall Democrats are out-performing Republicans by a pretty good margin.

Unfortunately, Democrats have some issues of our own with our two special elections for members who died in office. AZ-7, which is Raul Grijalva’s old seat, isn’t going to have its special election until September. It’s a D+15 district so it shouldn’t be an issue when the election finally happens. Grijalva died of lung cancer this month.

The special election for TX-18, which is a D+23 district in Houston, has no election date set yet, because Greg Abbott is Greg Abbotting and holding off on calling the election. This race is to replace Sylvester Turner, who died in office, who in turn replaced Sheila Jackson-Lee, who died in office. (Lee’s daughter finished her mother’s term so the district isn’t completely cursed.)

Both of these specials on the Democratic side were for people who had serious cancer diagnoses and still ran for their seats. Too bad, because right now Republicans are running scared.