There are plenty of reasons for voters who are paying attention to send Trump a message and in Wisconsin and Florida they’ll be doing just that. Progressive Democrat Josh Weil is close to winning an unassailable R+14 Florida district formerly represented by Ron DeSantis. And the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin has devolved into a referendum on Elon Musk, who has poured tens of millions of dollars into the race— including directly bribing voters— to capture the seat.
When they’re at the polls today, some voters may be thinking about Goldman Sach’s new projection raising the probability of a Trump recession. Others may be looking at the impending and very serious cuts to Medicaid, food stamps and other programs that may be crucial to their lives. But… over all, the elections today are looking like referenda on how the Trump regime has been doing so far… and that’s bad news for GOP candidates. Worse yet, the races, especially Wisconsin, are coming down to how voters feel about Elon Musk, an increasingly hated figure.
Musk has poured between $20 and $30 million into the Wisconsin race, making it the most expensive judicial race in history— anywhere. Polling has been very tight but 4 March polls— all taken by Republican firms— show Susan Crawford narrowly ahead of Musk’s neo-fascist candidate, while one shows a tie.
SoCal Strategies (March 26)- Crawford ahead by between 8 and 6 points
Tyson Group (March 18)- Crawford ahead by 5
Tyson Group (March 11)- Crawford ahead by 8
On Message (March 10)- 47-47% tie
Tyson Group (March 6)- Crawford ahead by 13
Yesterday, Ernesto Londoño reported that even more than the question of ideological control of the state court, “voters across the state said they had come to see this election to fill a single State Supreme Court seat more as a referendum on the early months of Trump’s second term. Keep in mind that Trump barely won Wisconsin last year— 1,697,626 (49.6%) to 1,668,229 (48.7%)— after having narrowly lost the state 4 years earlier. “[T]he outcome,” wrote Londoño, “will also show how voters in one of the most evenly divided battleground states in the nation are feeling about Trump’s sharp cuts to the federal work force, his crackdown on illegal immigration and the administration’s crusade against diversity initiatives in government programs and higher education… Musk’s backing of Judge Schimel, a former Wisconsin attorney general, has been among the most dominant and divisive issues in the race. A super PAC funded by Musk has spent millions to boost conservative turnout and has offered $100 payments to voters who sign a petition ‘in opposition to activist judges’— a tactic, which some critics say is legally questionable, that he employed in last year’s presidential election to help Trump. His involvement has energized some conservatives but outraged liberals, in part because Musk’s electric vehicle company, Tesla, is suing Wisconsin, challenging a law that bars manufacturers from selling cars directly to consumers.”
As for the FL-06 congressional special to replace Mike Waltz, a potential snoozer “has turned into the unlikely scene of a multimillion-dollar spending brawl— and of pre-election finger-pointing on the right over how the race ever became a race at all… It was not remotely competitive last fall when Waltz coasted to victory by 33 percentage points. Yet Democrats are now pressing to turn this deep-red district around Daytona Beach into— if not an actual victory— a symbol of much-needed momentum by cutting deeply into the district’s typical GOP margin.”
Shane Goldmacher doesn’t have that exactly right. “The Democrats” aren’t doing squat. Every cent of the $14 million Weil raised was raised from small donors despite the DCCC. If anything, DCCC chair Suzan DelBene, a corporate shill and out-of-touch multimillionaire, has undermined Weil… and “the Democrats” who have backed Weil are Bernie and allies like Ro Khanna and Mark Pocan. The only member of Democratic leadership to back Weil was Ted Lieu.
“Some private polls have shown Trump’s pick in the Sixth District race, State Senator Randy Fine, a Republican,” wrote Goldmacher, “facing a real contest against Josh Weil, the 40-year-old Democratic nominee who has been a public-school teacher. Weil has drawn attention for his outsize fund-raising, collecting nearly $9.5 million as of mid-March. To close that cash gap, Mr. Fine donated $600,000 to his campaign in late March. His last cash report showed a paltry $93,000 on hand, compared with $1.3 million for Weil. ‘You never know what happens in a case like that,’ Trump said of the spending disparity.”
Low-turnout special elections are often unpredictable. And over-interpreting what the results mean for future elections, when far more voters will turn out, can be perilous. In recent years, Democrats have fared strongly in these elections, including a Pennsylvania State Senate contest this month, largely because the voters who reliably show up are likelier to be Democrats.
But an especially narrow margin on Tuesday could affect governing in the House and Trump’s agenda if it spooks Republicans who have so far proved unusually aligned with the president and one another.
“They seem to be panicking,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House, said last week at the Capitol, calling it “another sign that the Republicans are on the run.”
…But despite Weil’s fund-raising haul, he has actually been outspent on the airwaves nearly four-to-one, thanks to support for Fine from super PACs, including one tied to the crypto industry. A large share of Weil’s cash has gone to fund-raising costs and other expenses.
As of Friday, pro-Fine and Republican television spending was set to be around $4.1 million, compared with only $1.3 million in favor of Weil.
The biggest super PACs for House Republicans and Democrats have so far stayed on the sidelines, and so has Trump’s super PAC, even though the group has continued to raise cash aggressively since his election, including $1 million-a-head donor dinners at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump did hold tele-town halls for both Florida races last Thursday, and Elon Musk’s super PAC has started to spend a small sum for Fine in recent days. Donald Trump Jr. has recorded a radio ad linking Fine to his father.
…Weil said in a statement that “the success of this campaign is a resounding message to our current administration and unelected oligarch Elon Musk of the people’s feelings regarding the dismantling of essential systems the American people rely on to survive.”
…Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican of Florida, who once represented the Sixth District, cast Fine, without naming him, as the problem, urging observers not to draw broader conclusions about Trump or the national political climate from the potential closeness of the contest.
“They’re going to try to lay that at the feet of President Trump,” DeSantis said last week. “That is not a reflection of President Trump. It is a reflection of the specific candidate running in that race.”
(DeSantis and Fine have their own history. Fine switched his endorsement from DeSantis to Trump during the 2024 presidential primary, accusing the governor of insufficiently battling antisemitism.)
Still, DeSantis said it would be “almost impossible with someone with an R by their name to lose that district.”
The ad campaign for Fine has sought to yoke him to the president as closely as possible.
Let’s hope last minute undecided voters in Florida and Wisconsin read Paul Krugman’s latest column, MAGA Is Bad For Business, before they cast their ballots today. “One odd feature of U.S. politics,” he wrote, “is that businesspeople, especially small business owners, always seems to believe that they will do better under Republicans, even though history shows that business does better under Democrats. Small business owners supported Trump in the last election, despite ample evidence that he would be very bad for business. And now they’re getting a rude awakening… [S]teep tariffs on steel and aluminum were the opening salvo in Trump’s trade war, and they are being applied not just to the metals themselves but to anything made from the metals, including screws, nuts and bolts. And foreign producers are not absorbing the tariffs; they are sharply raising prices. This was, of course, predictable and predicted. Tariffs don’t just make foreign goods more expensive to consumers. In a world where many of the goods we import are productive inputs like screws— or auto parts— tariffs directly raise the cost of manufacturing in the United States. Yet Trump’s threats against automakers suggests that he thinks he can control inflation through intimidation. The direct effect of tariff-driven rising costs is, however, just the beginning of the ways Trumpism will be bad for business… [T]here really isn’t a MAGA economic philosophy, just whatever suits Trump’s fragile ego.. Before the election many economists warned that Trump’s policies would be destructive, although the models didn’t really take the sheer craziness into account.”
He concluded that “business owners allowed themselves to be deluded, as usual, but with even less excuse than normal. What they should have realized is that Trump’s lack of concern for ordinary Americans’ lives doesn’t mean that he’s pro-business, and that the election wasn’t about left versus right— it was about rule of law versus autocracy. Now we’re getting a first taste of what life under autocracy is like, and it’s bad for everyone, including businesspeople.”
Yesterday Arlette Saenz and Jeff Simon reported that “Musk has thrust himself into the center of a state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. Democrats are trying to use it to their advantage. In the final stretch of the election, Musk has intensified his involvement in the contest, pouring millions of his personal fortune into the state to boost the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel. On Sunday, the tech billionaire made the trek [illegally using AirForce One] to Wisconsin to directly pitch voters and handed out two $1 million checks to attendees at a town hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin… The liberal candidate, Susan Crawford, and her Democratic allies are using Musk’s involvement to frame the race as a referendum on him, betting it will motivate voters turned off by his big spending on the race or by DOGE efforts to slash the federal government… Crawford and her Democratic allies have run ads trying to tie Musk to Schimel, and she frequently brings up Musk in her campaign speeches, including at one point jokingly referring to the billionaire as ‘my opponent. I don’t think this comes down to, you know, red or blue or Democrat or Republican,’ Crawford told CNN in a recent interview. ‘I think all voters in Wisconsin should be concerned about this, about somebody coming in and trying to buy a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.’”
And some manipulative derangement and anti-Semitism from the ketamine-addicted South African Nazi:
https://prospect.org/economy/2025-01-27-we-found-the-2-trillion-elon-musk-doge/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email