The GOP Rout Continues

Special election and run-off race results suggest electoral catastrophe awaits the GOP next year.

Elections in three states on Tuesday told a clear story, and it’sa one we’ve heard repeatedly this year: Democrats and independent voters are pissed, the Republican base is dispirited, and the demographics of the region didn’t matter.

Let’s look at three races in Florida, one in Georgia and one in Iowa. If you’re the Democrats, you have reason to cheer. And if you’re the GOP, well, that retirement option before next year’s midterms is looking better and better.

Florida awakens

For the last few election cycles, Florida has been a major heartbreak for Dems. What was once a big swing state—Obama won it in 2008 and 2012 after all—has felt like an unbreachable GOP stronghold. A lot of this has come from voter suppression by the GOP, but it’s also the result of the hard swing to the right by its Latino population in recent years.

That may be changing. The big news out of Florida was that Democrats won Miami’s mayorship after 30 years of GOP control.

To put this in some perspective, Kamala Harris won the city by just one point in 2024. But Eileen Higgins, a white candidate in this largely Cuban city, won by a whopping 19.

And this was with Trump’s endorsement of her opponent, Emilio Gonzalez, whom Trump said it was his “Great Honor” to back.

Notably, Higgins dominated everywhere in Miami except the far west part of the city with the highest Cuban population.

The GOP has been struggling with the Latino vote, which swung hard to the right in 2024, ever since ICE and CBP began a mass deportation campaign that doesn’t distinguish between undocumented persons with criminal histories and people’s abuelas and children on their way to school.

While this was a low turnout run-off election, the collapse of Latino support for the GOP now appears to extend to the Cuban population, especially now that Trump announced he is banning all legal immigration from that country along with 18 others.

Elsewhere in Florida, Democrats dramatically shifted two state House seat races. In the heavily GOP Villages in SD-11, Republicans held that state Senate seat, but not before the spread shifted blue by a whopping 22 points.

It was the same story in HD-90, which includes Trump’s home of Palm Beach. That district remained in Democratic hands, but it went bluer by around 18 points.

These results together underscore that dissatisfaction for the GOP cuts across ethnic and class lines, from the diverse and heavily Jewish Palm Beach area, to the older Villages community and the white working class and urban/exurban Central Florida, to heavily Cuban Miami. That broad collapse of support will be difficult for the GOP to battle without a major change in economic and current social conditions.

The Peach State is peachy

In Georgia, a Democrat, Eric Gisler (who was endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign, where I co-chair the Public Policy Committee) flipped a red House district seat blue.

The heavily gerrymandered House District 121 was part of a four-pronged Republican gerrymander that had split Athens, Georgia, into four districts and attached three of them to rural red counties to dilute their votes. Here you can see how HD-121 took a “cracked” Athens population from the southeast part of the city and mixed it in with a bunch of red votes—but it wasn’t enough! This Trump +12 district moved 13.8 points bluer, and Gisler won in a close race.

The rest of Athens is similarly, and unfairly, gerrymandered. Here’s a map showing how two other districts have carved up the Athens populace on the western and eastern sides of the city and attached them to heavily GOP counties, while one district has “packed” voters in the center of Athens into a very blue district sink to waste Democratic votes.

Looking at these results from last night, GOP map drawers have cause to worry. Did they unintentionally create a “dummymander” that wrongly assumed there wouldn’t ever be a double-digit shift against the GOP? That assumption just lost them HD-121, and it could lose the neighboring districts as well.

A Hawkeyes surprise

In Iowa, there was a state House contest almost no one paid attention to because the district is so very red. In fact, in 2024 Trump won the district by 51 points.

But even in these “hopeless” contests, we see signs of a Blu Tsu building. In yesterday’s special election, we saw a double digit shift to the left in IA-7 as Democrat Rachel Burns cut a Trump +51 spread in 2024 down to a +40 spread today.

That kind of shift puts many things into play for Iowa, from House races to the Senate and gubernatorial contests next year.

But does this really mean anything for next year’s midterms?

Special elections are, in a word, special. They have lower turnout, there are usually only high propensity voters in the mix, and they only tell you about how things look today. So in a broader sense, we can’t, and shouldn’t, predict the future with 100 percent accuracy based on their results.

But the thing is, midterms share these same characteristics. They are lower turnout elections, only higher propensity voters tend to turn out for them, and approval rates in the first year of a presidential term historically trend even lower in the second term. This means you can draw some decent correlations between special election performance by the party out of power and the midterm election results.

Consider one more factor: The current sour mood of the voters on the economy has not yet factored in the sledgehammer that the GOP took to healthcare. That includes failure to renew ACA premium subsidies for 20+ million Americans and the massive and devastating cuts to Medicaid in their “One Big Beautiful Bill.” It is hard to see how things markedly improve on the economic front for working families given these realities. But this is Trump, and we can’t rule out things becoming even more unstable and unpredictable next year.

Nevertheless, the bottom line is this: In each special election yesterday, we saw a double-digit shift. These results match what we’ve seen all year in special elections, and they confirm the shift we saw in November’s general election.

And while a lot can happen before next November, these numbers will give heartburn today to GOP House members. Many of them are deciding right now whether to run next year, and a good number won’t want to fight against a rising blue tide or serve in the minority defending Trump’s behavior for another two years, even if they win their own races.

It is this often underestimated psychological effect of seeing your own team put up loss after loss that will weigh most heavily on Republicans at this point. An early retirement and a cushy job as a consultant or lobbyist must sound awfully appealing to a lot of their members, especially as they head into the holidays and have serious discussions with their own families about their future plans.

Let’s keep them all in our thoughts and prayers through these difficult times.