Florida’s two US House races offer early verdict on Trump agenda
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Patrik Jonsson Staff writer
| Silver Springs, Fla.
Dressed in jeans, a suit jacket, and spit-polished black shoes, Josh Weil has the cool and familiar air required of his job as a public school math teacher.
Mr. Weil, who prides himself on breaking down complex concepts so 12-year-olds can understand them, is in an unexpected spot as he attempts to win one of two special congressional elections in Florida on Tuesday.
While most Florida Democrats run as centrists, Mr. Weil – a transplanted New Yorker – has embraced a progressive label. He plays up his role as a hockey dad who makes his two young boys’ school lunches. In December, as the race began, the Weil family picked up a “campaign cat” from a rescue shelter. They dubbed it “Chatterbox.” One campaign sign at the town hall is of Mr. Weil holding Chatterbox.
Why We Wrote This
Some voters are responding to the Trump administration’s funding cuts with calls for accountability. Two House elections this week suggest a nation looking for less chaos and more moderation.
To date, Mr. Weil’s bid is the longest of long shots in a district where Republicans outnumber Democrats 2-to-1 and President Donald Trump won by over 30% in November. Yet recent polling suggests that Mr. Weil is making a race of it against State Sen. Randy Fine, a Republican whose endorsement from Mr. Trump is his main calling card. The election is to fill the vacancy left when Mike Waltz resigned to become White House national security adviser.
Another close race that has tightened is in District 1, near Pensacola, where Republican Jimmy Patronis is fending off Democrat Gay Valimont to fill a seat vacated by Matt Gaetz, who resigned his House seat in 2024 in a failed foray at a Trump Cabinet post.
Already, the energy around the two elections suggests that the Trump administration’s aggressive launch, marked by a rapid overhaul of the federal government, could be damaging the Republican Party’s electoral prospects. Democrats are clamoring to make a statement deep in Trump country that President Trump and his team are hurting the nation, and Republicans are determined to protect the president’s legislative leverage and agenda.
“You’re going to hear a lot about ‘Jihad Josh’ from my opponent,” says Mr. Weil. Senator Fine has suggested that Mr. Weil’s conversion to Islam in 2011 makes him unfit for office. Mr. Weil has said that his conversion came as he and his now-ex-wife, who is Muslim, were looking for a mosque for her, and that he found a supportive community there. But in Mr. Weil’s view, such biased statements only underscore the existential political struggle at play.
“Our Constitution is being crushed – that’s not hyperbole,” Mr. Weil says. “Now, America gets a chance to speak. Now, Silver Springs gets a chance to take it all back.”
For many concerned Floridians – including those who attended a town hall at a Silver Springs community center last week – the election is an opportunity not just to push for a check on the Trump administration, but also to craft winning messages for other races. That it’s happening in Florida – the epicenter of Republican Party power and funding – only adds to the drama.
“When there’s not much on the menu, people are going to gobble up anything that is there,” says Christopher Cooper, a Southern politics expert at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. “The question [that the elections can help answer] is, does what appears to be growing discontent lead to any sort of electoral change?”
A win in either district, Professor Cooper adds, “would probably be the biggest upset in a congressional election in the last decade, certainly. I can’t think of anything that would challenge that.”
Rudderless after last year’s presidential loss, Democrats managed to flip a state Senate seat in a Pennsylvania special election last week and may be able to tack well enough to add a liberal judge to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in a vote tomorrow, despite a massive infusion of money on the other side from Elon Musk.
In an interview with the Monitor, Mr. Weil says that the 6th District – a grapefruit-shaped lump in east-central Florida comprised of national forest, cattle ranches, and bits of suburbs from the larger cities of Orlando, Ocala, and St. Augustine – is an opportunity because “it has been neglected.”
In Mr. Weil’s view, that neglect fits a trend of Republicans “trashing the basic infrastructure of our nation – everything that makes America great.
“Our goal right now is to put the fear of God in them that no seat is safe,” he says.
Mr. Weil has raised over $10 million compared with Mr. Fine’s $600,000. Senator Fine, a casino operator, has injected another $600,000 of his own money. On Thursday, as Republicans fretted over the Florida races, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik agreed to remain in her seat, bowing out as the administration’s nominee for United Nations ambassador in order to protect Republicans’ razor-thin House majority.
The campaign has gotten nasty, with Mr. Fine two weeks ago demanding that police arrest his opponent after one of Mr. Weil’s canvassers was arrested on a stolen bicycle. (Mr. Weil was not arrested.)
“What I am going to do is I am going to stand with President Trump,” Mr. Fine told The Daytona Beach News-Journal recently. “The Trump agenda is on the line in this election.” (His campaign did not return emails from the Monitor requesting comment.)
As of a week ago, Democrats held a slight advantage over Republicans in early voting with 46,377 votes cast. That makes the race far tighter than previous contests here at that stage.
“Just the fact that Democrats can say that Republicans are having to work hard is something,” says J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ political newsletter. “The mentality [of Democrats] is being able to beat the spread.”
In an interview, Mr. Weil says he hopes that a win by a new Democrat would weaken the power of a Trump endorsement, allowing moderate Republicans to join Democrats in boosting oversight of the Trump White House.
Here in Silver Springs, the recent Weil campaign event drew a crowd of mostly older, white residents, dotted with military veterans.
As Mr. Weil finished his stump speech, people lined up to ask questions. One presented herself as a retired Veterans Administration nurse whose retirement checks suddenly stopped coming. Another, a public school bus driver, said she had seen recent funding cuts affect the special education students she ferries to and from classes. Worries about the future of Social Security abound in this gathering. Florida ranks second after Maine among states with the highest percentage of residents over 65.
“There is a lot of energy in the district right now,” says recent Connecticut transplant Hilary Platen, who has canvassed the district for Mr. Weil. “People are looking for someone they can relate to and help end the chaos.”
The only person other than Mr. Weil wearing a suit jacket was a middle-aged man from Marion County, who says he is active in Republican politics. He asked to remain anonymous in an interview “so they won’t kick me out.”
“I disagree with Josh on some things, and I’m sure I’ll disagree with him if he gets elected,” the Republican said. “But we need a government where it’s up to Democrats and Republicans to hash things out together. That’s not where we are now. In my view, that’s what a vote for Josh could accomplish.”
