Special Election 2025: A Tempered Reaction to Democratic Gains
The rot runs deep, and promoters of small-"l" liberalism need to reach out into the depths of "MAGA Country" to ensure a future stable democracy
I much prefer policy to straight-up electoral politics, but nonetheless I wanted to see for myself just how impactful the Democratic gains in the recent special election might be, so I dug into some data a bit.
Without a doubt, the margin of victory shifts for Democrats in the Wisconsin State Supreme Court special election (a win) and even in the Florida congressional seat elections (two losses for Ds but big shifts in their favor), are good. The shifts are spooking Mike Johnson and Trump, as Trump’s former nominee for Representative to the United Nations, Elise Stefanik (R-NY-21), has been ordered to remain in her House seat despite holding what was once thought to be a safe R district.
If those shifts in the margin of victory had been true for the 2024 election, we would have a Democratic House, Senate, and Presidency. So yes, they were big and notable and should be cheered.
Call me a pessimist, but I’m not really in the mood to think about what this special election means for the 2026 midterm. Trump has done a lot of damage already, and while I *think* we’ll still have a democracy worth saving in 2026, I’m more 90/10 than 100% on that. And even if we do, the new Congress will inherit an absolute mess of a severely damaged economy, a decimated Rule of Law, and deeply scarred international relationships.
Instead of focusing on what matters for elections, I’d like to focus on what these results mean for the long-term health of our democracy.
Unfortunately, horse race-style electoral politics matters much less right now than hyper-polarization, hyper-partisanship, and the erosion of small-”l” liberal values across large swaths of the United States. This is because (1) a reinvigoration of liberal values could be projected well before the next election to convince congressional Republicans to stanch the damage; and (2) no liberal gains can be trusted by business or our international partners so long as there is a large base of illiberalism ready to tear down those gains.
2025 Special Election Gains
Two Florida US House districts were up for grabs in this special election. One, FL-1, was formerly held by the infamous Matt Gaetz. The other, FL-6, recently became open when its former holder, Mike Waltz of illustrious Signal chat fame, became Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor.
In 2024, both Gaetz and Waltz won these seats by over 30 points. Their 2025 replacements won by 15 and 14 points, respectively, for an average shift in the margin of victory of 18 points in favor of Democrats. Perhaps even more tellingly, the margin of registered Republican voters was well over that of the Republican win, indicating that many registered Republicans voted for the Democratic candidate.
Quick aside: the margin of victory is simply the difference in the percentage of votes of the losing candidate from the winning. Let’s say R wins 55% of the vote, D wins 40%, and a third party candidate wins 5%. The margin of victory between R and D is 15 points. If the next year, R wins only 50% of the vote and D wins 47%, then we’d say there was a shift in the margin of victory of 12 points in favor of D—even though D lost again.
The Wisconsin election was particularly notable for the influence/interference of Elon Musk. The flagship race was for a WI State Supreme Court seat. Despite Elon’s money, the Democratic candidate won. The county-by-county average shift in the margin of victory in favor of Democrats between the 2024 Presidential election and the 2025 State Supreme Court election was over 10 points.
What does this mean for the 2024 Election Results?
If the 18-point average shift in the margin of victory towards Democrats in the 2025 Florida US House seat special election were applied to the 2024 US House election district-level results, Democrats would currently hold at least 52 more seats, giving them a resounding majority. Again, this is obviously a point of light in these dark times. But, it’s also a reminder that 153 districts voted for their republican candidate with a margin of victory of 19 points or more. That’s huge! And in the 2024 election, the republican candidates hewed very closely to Trump, as they are now doing in DC.
Let’s take a look at the county results from Wisconsin. The county level gives us a view that is a bit more granular, especially in the large areas of the US with a low population density. The average shift in the margin of victory towards Democrats at the county-level (comparing the State Supreme Court election to the 2024 Presidential election results), was ~10.5 points (11 if we stick to whole numbers) in favor of Democrats. If we apply that shift to the 2024 Presidential election results across all US counties, only 182 would have shifted from a Republican/Trump win to a Democratic/Harris win. That’s out of a total of 3113 counties (considering AK as one). That’s just slightly under 6% of counties. My first reaction was, “Hey, that’s not really a lot.” And I still don’t think it is, given that we’re considering a shift in the voting margin that breaks into double-digits.
Here’s a map of the counties that Harris would have won if the 2025 WI county-level margin of victory were applied to the 2024 Presidential election. (On a browser, you should be able to zoom, pan, and hover over each county to see more info.)
Of course, number of counties won is not how we decide presidential elections. The shift would have been applied to all counties, and the resulting increase in the percent of total votes in each state going for Harris would have handed her the election handily. But, the US would still be highly geographically segregated by political philosophy.
In 2024, 2,294 US counties voted for Trump by margin of over 20. That’s almost 70% of US counties.
Again, I understand that votes in a state are what matter in elections, and not counties. I do. But so long as such a huge area of the US is so receptive to MAGA or a MAGA-like message, the US will be susceptible to political instability. I think considering land area and population density is so important at this moment because geographic isolation facilitates isolation from diverse, alternative ideas, a phenomenon that is today compounded by online and other media echo chambers.
The Republican Party as an institution has abdicated its responsibility to “keep out the crazies,” and that responsibility must be picked up by someone. If not, the illiberal rot will fester, waiting for its moment to reappear. Perhaps it is not fair to place this responsibility on the Democratic Party and their allies—certainly the anti-MAGA Republican movement should help out, too—but it may be the only option. Democrats can’t rely on just running up margins on their home turf.
To revive liberal democracy, the reputation of the US, and the individual freedom and prosperity those bring, Democrats and allies must proselytize the benefits of liberalism in areas they might never win, simply to keep opposing margins down and stave off the rot. This will be difficult. It will involve honest investments in civic education, both formal and informal. People want slop from their media, but somehow, we need to find a way to feed civics, American history, and intelligent discussion past that slop. It won’t be campaigning. It’ll be demonstrating leadership.
Unfortunately, leadership is something we sorely lack.
Increasing Polarization, rural isolation and border fury
Let’s take a closer look at some of the claims I broached above about increasing polarization and geographic isolation, and if there are any concrete tactics for reaching parts of the US population who might be most receptive to a return to liberal values.
Here’s a map of Trump’s margin of victory at the county-level in 2024:
That’s a lot of deep, dark, red. What’s most concerning is the sheer number of counties that are very, very red (or blue, although there are fewer). In the 2012 US Presidential election in which Obama won over Mitt Romney, there were 551 counties with a margin of victory of over 50 points (considering both Obama and Romney county wins). in 2025, there were 1,269 counties with a margin of victory of over 50 points. That means US localities tend to be much less politically diverse than they were in 2012—and polarization was talked about as a problem even then.
It’s well-known that Republicans do better in rural counties, and indeed that was true in 2024. Here are two scatter plots that show the margin of victory in favor of Trump against the population density of the county. The first is all counties, and the second focuses on counties with a population density of below 200 people per square mile.
With the exception of some Republican strongholds in New York like Staten Island, population-dense counties tend to be overwhelming Democratic while low-population density areas tend to be Republican. Given the increasing margins of victory (discussed above), this means that Trumpism is thriving and amplifying in areas of the country with a populations more susceptible to information siloing.
Democrats can certainly win elections easily with a double-digit shift in margin of victory, like I’ve mentioned above, but illiberalism in the form of Trumpism or whatever comes next will have plenty of areas to linger and stay readily capable of breaching our elections.
There are areas of the country that may be highly unlikely to vote for a Democrat but that are still receptive to a liberal (small-”l”) message. Here’s a map of the change in margin of victory in favor of the Republican candidate between the 2012 US Presidential election and the 2024 US Presidential election.
Obviously, Obama won in 2012, so there was more room for margin growth, so-to-speak, in favor of Trump. And, you can easily see by comparing with map with the one above showing Trump’s 2025 margin of victory that there are plenty of regions that were and remained staunchly republican. They show up red in the first map but white in this one. But there were two things that immediately stood out to me.
The first, and the perhaps more minor, is that the Utah vote swung towards Democrats. Obviously, Harris still lost Utah by a lot in 2025, and in 2012 the Republicans put forth a Mormon Utahn candidate, driving up the 2012 Romney margin of victory in the state. But Utah did not succumb to Trumpism so deeply like the rest of the so-called conservative parts of the country. A bunch has been written about why already—Trump is vile to the hyper-religious, Mormons are concerned about Christian nationalism, etc.—but I think it’s appropriate to, in this moment, look at populations like in Utah and realize that they could be very receptive to reminders about the importance of liberalism (small-”l”). A liberal democracy protects individual freedoms and minority rights—things that have historically been crucial for religious minorities.
Are there other heavily Republican areas of the US with relatively large R-voting populations that might nonetheless be open to reminders of the benefits of liberalism? I’m sure there are if we can get creative with ideas and messaging. Again, the point is not to campaign, but to engage, to discuss, to promote civic involvement in favor of liberal values. Perhaps some historical reminders. A lot of listening.
The second, and perhaps more important point is where the biggest shifts in margin of victory towards Trump occurred: Texas border counties. Seven of the 10 biggest Republican county-level gains were in southern Texas; all seven voted for Obama in 2012 by double-digits yet were deeply for Trump in 2025. Again, a lot has been written about why this happened, but illegal immigration is the obvious reason.
While I’m comfortable proselytizing for liberalism in general just about anywhere, I’m much less comfortable assuming that I—a highly pro-immigration liberal—understand what it has been like to live in a southern border county for the past 5 or so years. After all, the people in these TX counties voted heavily in favor of Obama in 2012; they certainly aren’t reflexive Republicans. Democrats clearly did not offer or demonstrate that they could offer an acceptable response to uncontrolled border crossings. They abdicated the issue to Republicans. Now, we are seeing the horrific, illiberal results of a Trumpist crackdown on immigration.
This might be the fault of the Biden administration neglecting to message efforts or effectively compare their approach to Trump’s. Nonetheless, it’s evidence that there are voters that might be highly receptive to liberalism if it offered them policies that actually solve their problems. Unfortunately, given the choice between a mean, immoral solution and what they must have seen as no solution from Democrats, people chose the mean solution.
The good news is, liberalism does offer real solutions that are not mean or malicious. We now need liberal leaders to teach people about them and to put them into practice.
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Sources:
2025 results reported from the New York Times (based on AP):
Florida results
Florida turnout
Wisconsin results
2024 election data from New York Times (based on AP).
Some county-level results from Dave Leip.
Land area from US Census GEOINFO 2023.
Population data from US Census July 1, 2024 population estimate.