It was not supposed to have been a competitive race. Not in a congressional district the GOP’s Mike Waltz won by 33 points and Donald Trump won by nearly the same margin just five months ago.
But that was five months ago, just before Trump tapped Waltz for his national security adviser.
Democrat Josh Weil, the Orlando teacher, and the GOP’s Sen. Randy Fine of Melbourne, are running so close in the special election for Waltz’s 6th Congressional District seat–which includes all of Flagler County–that even if Weil doesn’t win Tuesday, the race is sending seismic waves through a magaland already jolted by honeymoon-crushing setbacks: the Signal scandal that nearly led to Waltz’s firing; an uptick in inflation; a backlash on tariffs’ effects on prices and elations with neighbors; fury welcoming Republican members of Congress back to their home districts; tumbling stocks and a presidential approval not far behind; a Democrat winning a special election in Pennsylvania last week for a state Senate seat Republicans held for decades, in a district Trump won by 15 points, and another Democrat flipping the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.
“We are outperforming,” Weil told volunteers at his Palm Coast office at City Marketplace early this afternoon. “We are showing up in numbers far beyond what people expected. Independents and NPAs, voters that don’t belong to either party, are showing up in numbers greater than expected. There’s only one group left. They can’t all make up a larger percentage. Percentages don’t work that way. Republicans are not coming out at the numbers they expected.”
Republicans know it.
President Trump, who endorsed Fine, expressed private and public worries about the race: he pulled the nomination of Elise Stefanik as UN ambassador to not risk another special election in a district she won by a narrower margin (24 points) that Waltz did his own.
“We have a candidate that I don’t think is winning. That’s an issue,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, said of Fine on his podcast a week ago. Gov. Ron DeSantis, who won the district by 17 points in 2016, blames Fine for his under-performance, though he’s sending help.
The fundraising gap tells its own story. Weil had raised $9 million by mid-March to Fine’s less than $1 million, and had more than $1 million going into the final days of the campaign, to Fine’s less than $100,000, though Elon Musk was steering a few thousand dollars his way.
Fine, it appeared, had taken his win for granted in a race nationalized since its beginning, as the already-razor-thin GOP majority of four seats in the House of Representatives could be in jeopardy. Two seats are vacant and are in heavily Democratic districts. Republicans on Tuesday cannot afford to lose what they’d considered safe seats if Trump’s agenda is to make it through Congress.
“We’re doing great, we’re at R plus nine, and Republicans are going to vote tomorrow,” Fine, his usual in-your-face bluster rather blanched, told ABC News today under a maga hat. “Support for President Trump is not waning in this district. We just need those who support him to get out and vote tomorrow, and if we do, we’re going to have a big win.” (He also claimed, against evidence, that tariffs would not raise costs for consumers.)
Democrats have unquestionably outperformed Republicans in Flagler County, with 34 percent of registered Democrats turning out by the end of early voting, or voting by mail, to just 23 percent of registered Republicans. That was nowhere near the case during the general election last November, though a surge of Republican voters is expected on Election day and disillusion has been local Democrats’ day-after hangover election after election.
On Tuesday, Weil was speaking as the front-runner. “We have an incredible lead right now,” he said. “You have not had a representative in the US Congress during two months of some of the most tumultuous and impactful times–issues, edicts coming out of our federal government. Social Security has been put under threat. The Veterans Administration has faced severe cuts that impacting our veterans in this community, immediately, right? We’re seeing threats to Medicaid, to Medicare, to our public schools, to all of our federal offices, all of our federal agencies, services that we rely on.”
Weil played on the Fine compulsion to refer to Trump at every turn, as if he were Trump’s representative rather than a representative for constituents: “You all deserve a representative who is here for you, to represent you in Congress, not party leadership, not some president’s platform, not something else, but to represent the people of this district,” Weil said. And you all responded, and I’m incredibly grateful.”
Agnes Lightfoot, president of Democratic Women’s Club of Flagler County, was among those listening to Weil. “I just feel this one, and I can see the numbers are there,” she said. “And I’ve been out there beating the pavement.”
Two special elections for Congress culminate Tuesday in Florida, the other featuring Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis, a Republican, and Democrat Gay Valimont, in the First Congressional District previously held by Matt Gaetz, whom Trump tapped as his attorney general before Gaetz’s unsavory past undid his nomination. The Patronis-Valimont race is not as competitive as Weil-Fine, though Patronis, too, was sounding alarms this week, according to Florida Politics.
Weil had no illusions even in front of his volunteers. He spoke of the 12 hours of polling left, and of the possible “surge” ahead as he asked his volunteers to continue to seek out “every last Democratic voter we can find” to get them to the polls–a ground game that was once a Democratic strength, but not in recent elections. “We are going to have our own surge tomorrow. We are going to hold this lead,” he said.
Janet Sullivan, who heads the local Democratic Party, summed up the Republican panic this way: “I don’t know if there’s a surge in [Weil’s] favor or if there is a decrease in Trump’s favor,” Sullivan said. “Democrats are good voters and we are voting. But Republicans are good voters, and they are not voting.”
