Wisconsin and Florida: Bad Signs for GOP

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Alex Isenstadt at  Axios:

The GOP also survived a late scare in a Florida special election. But losing in Wisconsin — letting Democrats keep their 4-3 court majority — has major ramifications for voting and abortion rights, along with future House redistricting.Republicans kept the House seat in Florida formerly held by national security adviser Mike Waltz, with Randy Fine holding off Democrat Josh Weil.

Republicans also held the Florida seat formerly held by Rep. Matt Gaetz before he resigned from Congress in November. Jimmy Patronis defeated Democratic candidate Gay Valimont.

1. 2026 looks scary for MAGA without Trump on the ballot.Republican House candidates in Florida fell far short of Trump's performance in November. The margins of victory for Patronis and Fine were about half of the margins for Waltz and Gaetz.

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Republicans lost in Wisconsin, even with $25 million poured in by Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world and the face of DOGE. Musk campaigned in Wisconsin and cast the race in apocalyptic terms.

2. Democrats are flooding cash into races

In FL-1, Patronis was outraised 3-1.
In FL-6, Fine was outraised by nearly 10-1.
In Wisconsin, Crawford outraised Schimel nearly 2-1.

3. Republicans dodged a bullet in Florida. Last week Republicans were sweating the race for Waltz's seat, where a poll conducted by Trump strategist Tony Fabrizio showed Fine narrowly trailing. But Fine won by 15 points.  Florida defeat would have raised alarms among Republicans about the political impact of Trump's agenda. Speaker Mike Johnson's narrow House majority won't shrink, and there won't be headlines about a special election shocker.

The Great Grovel

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

John F. Harris at Politico:

Prestigious law firms have cowered at his threats to tank their business; Paul, Weiss, which fought against Trump in his first term, pledged $40 million in pro bono legal services to issues Trump has supported. And Skadden Arps, one of the largest law firms in the world, reached a deal with Trump to provide $100 million in free legal work to administration-friendly causes — before Trump had taken any action against them.

One of the country’s most storied news networks, ABC News, settled a defamation lawsuit with Trump for $15 million that will go to his future presidential library, and another, CBS News, appears poised to settle for millions more. The Washington Post and the LA Times, both legacy papers owned by Trump-friendly billionaires, have adjusted the content of their editorial pages in ways that pleased the White House. And Columbia University, alma mater to Alexander Hamilton, agreed to nine policy changes in an effort to unfreeze $400 million in federal funding. Other universities hired Republican lobbyists to stay on the president’s good side.

Partisan Gap in Presidential Approval

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

 Bruce Mehlman:

The gap between approval of U.S. presidents by their own party vs approval by members of the other party has been growing for decades. New Gallup data this week make clear this trend persists, with 91% of Republicans approving Trump's job performance vs 4% of Democrats.

Trump v. Unions

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Rebecca Davis O’Brien at NYT:

Federal worker unions have sought over the past two months to lead the resistance to President Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency, filing lawsuits, organizing protests and signing up new members by the thousands.

This week, Mr. Trump struck back with a potentially crippling blow.

In a sweeping executive order denouncing the unions as “hostile” to his agenda, the president cited national security concerns to remove some one million civil servants across more than a dozen agencies from the reach of organized labor, eliminating the unions’ power to represent those workers at the bargaining table or in court.

A lawsuit accompanying the executive order, filed by the administration in federal court in Texas, asks a judge to give the president permission to rescind collective bargaining agreements, citing national security interests and saying the agreements had “hamstrung” executive authority.

Labor leaders vowed on Friday to challenge the Trump actions in court. But, barring a legal intervention, the moves could kneecap federal unions and protections for many civil service employees just as workers brace for a new round of job cuts across the government.

Pete Hegseth: Security Risk

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Warren P. Strobel,Missy Ryan and Hannah Natanson at WP:

The Yemen attack timeline that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted to a Signal chat group would have been so highly classified, under Pentagon guidelines, that the details should have been restricted to a special, compartmented channel with its own code word and with access tightly limited, according to former Defense Department officials.

Hegseth and other senior Trump administration officials have denied that the data they shared in a Signal group, which included the timing of weapons strikes against Yemen’s Houthis and intelligence information shared by Israel on the whereabouts of a top Houthi operative, was classified.

“These are indeed highly detailed operational plans for war,” said one of the former officials, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. “Twenty-five years, I have never known them not to be classified. And usually this operational level of detail is further restricted to those with a need-to-know.”

Katherine Long et al. at WSJ:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is facing scrutiny over his handling of details of a military strike, brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed, according to multiple people who were present or had knowledge of the discussions.

One of the meetings, a high-level discussion at the Pentagon on March 6 between Hegseth and U.K. Secretary of Defense John Healey, took place at a sensitive moment for the trans-Atlantic alliance, one day after the U.S. said it had cut off military intelligence sharing with Ukraine. The group that met at the Pentagon, which included Adm. Tony Radakin, the head of the U.K.’s armed forces, discussed the U.S. rationale behind that decision, as well as future military collaboration between the two allies, according to people familiar with the meeting.

A secretary can invite anyone to meetings with visiting counterparts, but attendee lists are usually carefully limited to those who need to be there and attendees are typically expected to possess security clearances given the delicate nature of the discussions, according to defense officials and people familiar with the meeting. There is often security near the meeting space to keep away uninvited attendees.

Kristi, She-Wolf of the DHS

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark:

Some of the individuals who have been apprehended under the Alien Enemies Act have been rendered to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison. Yesterday, Kristi Noem, America’s secretary of homeland security, toured this facility and then staged a photo-op and interview in front of a cell containing dozens of what we can only assume are prisoners of the supposed “war”1 we are fighting with Tren de Aragua.2

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The use of prisoners for propaganda purposes is as old as war itself. But there are a few recent examples you may recall. ISIS made extensive use of videos and pictures of imprisonment and execution. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese alternated their approach. Sometimes they used American POWs as props to suggest that all was well in their camps and that prisoners were being treated properly. (They were not.) Other times, they used images of American prisoners as tools to spread fear. They would parade captured American soldiers before mobs and display them at press conferences.

The goal is always the same, though: To use prisoners’ bodies as weapons of political war and to do so against their will.

This is what evil, illiberal regimes do.

Liberal regimes have standards for the treatment of prisoners. These standards are codified under the Geneva Conventions, which the United States has signed and ratified.

Among the standards dictated by the Geneva Conventions is this: Prisoners may not be publicly exploited for purposes of propaganda.3

Another standard of liberal governments is that people who present themselves through legal pathways as refugees fleeing oppression are vetted and provided due process, not disappeared into foreign gulags.

And yet here we are.

A high-ranking American official visits a prison on foreign soil which we are using to warehouse enemies of her regime. She appears in a fitted long-sleeve tee and active-wear slacks. There is a ballcap on her head and a pound of makeup smeared across her plasticized face. A gold Rolex Daytona—worth more than some of these men will make in their entire lives—sits proudly on her dainty wrist. Every piece of this visual is carefully engineered.

She visits the prison armory and shakes her head approvingly while inspecting the rifles. Then she pauses in front of a cage where human beings have been posed to her liking so that she can speak to the cameras in front of a powerful visual. She is sending a message on behalf of her country.

The message is this:

America is no longer a shining city on a hill. It is no longer the leader of the free world. It no longer stands on the side of liberty as a beacon for those who yearn to breathe free.

Trump Doublecrosses Stefanik

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Hans Nichols at Axios:

President Trump's dramatic rug pull of Rep. Elise Stefanik's (R-N.Y.) UN ambassador nomination has given House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) a new series of headaches.

Why it matters: Johnson has to reassure GOP lawmakers after their president said he's nervous about a Trump +20 district.He also must reintegrate Stefanik, who was planning to bolt town next week, into a leadership lineup that's full.

Stefanik was crushed and scrambled to reverse Trump's decision before he announced it on Truth Social, according to people familiar with the matter.

But for Trump, the margins were too close for comfort.

Driving the news: In explaining his decision, Trump undercut the NRCC line that there was no risk of the GOP losing any special elections this year."With a very tight Majority, I don't want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise's seat," Trump said on Truth Social.
Republicans are "afraid they will lose the special election to replace her," Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Thursday.

What we're hearing: Stefanik's congressional staff has mostly resigned. She surrendered her slot on the House Intelligence Committee and had one foot out of Washington. Her Instagram was a showcase of that extended goodbye.She'll have to slink back to the House and reintegrate herself into Johnson's leadership structure, even as Trump dangled the possibility of joining his administration down the line.

Inside the White House, there's a view that under Trump there isn't necessarily a need for an ambassador to the United Nations, according to a person familiar with the matter.