A Special Election That Was Supposed to Be a Snoozer Is Suddenly Buzzing

Two special congressional elections on Tuesday in Florida were supposed to have been cakewalks for the Republican Party. Instead, one contest has turned into the unlikely scene of a multimillion-dollar spending brawl — and of pre-election finger-pointing on the right over how the race ever became a race at all.

The seat, in Florida’s Sixth Congressional District, was most recently occupied by Michael Waltz, who resigned to serve as President Trump’s national security adviser and who has found himself in the middle of the Signal-leak episode. It was not remotely competitive last fall when Mr. Waltz coasted to victory by 33 percentage points.

Yet Democrats are now pressing to turn this deep-red district around Daytona Beach into — if not an actual victory — a symbol of much-needed momentum by cutting deeply into the district’s typical G.O.P. margin.

The race’s surprising competitiveness has already affected Mr. Trump’s cabinet. Last week, he announced he was withdrawing his appointment of Representative Elise Stefanik as his United Nations ambassador, saying the move was partly to avoid another special election later this year for her seat, which is less solidly Republican than Mr. Waltz’s old one.

“I didn’t want to take a chance,” Mr. Trump said on Friday in the Oval Office. For now, Republicans have only 218 seats in the House, with four vacancies, two of which are in solidly Democratic districts. It is a razor-thin margin to attempt to pass the president’s agenda.

Some private polls have shown Mr. Trump’s pick in the Sixth District race, State Senator Randy Fine, a Republican, facing a real contest against Josh Weil, the 40-year-old Democratic nominee who has been a public-school teacher.

Mr. Weil has drawn attention for his outsize fund-raising, collecting nearly $9.5 million as of mid-March. To close that cash gap, Mr. Fine donated $600,000 to his campaign in late March. His last cash report showed a paltry $93,000 on hand, compared with $1.3 million for Mr. Weil.

“You never know what happens in a case like that,” Mr. Trump said of the spending disparity.

Low-turnout special elections are often unpredictable. And over-interpreting what the results mean for future elections, when far more voters will turn out, can be perilous. In recent years, Democrats have fared strongly in these elections, including a Pennsylvania State Senate contest this month, largely because the voters who reliably show up are likelier to be Democrats.

But an especially narrow margin on Tuesday could affect governing in the House and Mr. Trump’s agenda if it spooks Republicans who have so far proved unusually aligned with the president and one another.

“They seem to be panicking,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House, said last week at the Capitol, calling it “another sign that the Republicans are on the run.”

The other special election is in Florida’s First Congressional District, for the old seat of Matt Gaetz, the Republican former congressman who was Mr. Trump’s choice to serve as attorney general before withdrawing late last year. That race, which has been viewed as less competitive, features Jimmy Patronis, a Republican who is the state’s chief financial officer, and Gay Valimont, a Democratic gun control activist.

Mr. Gaetz said that his party would win both contests and that splashy fund-raising figures for Democrats were no match for the immutable dynamics of the districts.

“Of course, they’re jazzed about their fund-raising,” he said. “But, honestly, I think that donating to losing candidates is less about winning the election and more about personal therapy.”

So far, more than $5 million has been spent on television advertising in the race, according to data from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.

But despite Mr. Weil’s fund-raising haul, he has actually been outspent on the airwaves nearly four-to-one, thanks to support for Mr. Fine from super PACs, including one tied to the crypto industry. A large share of Mr. Weil’s cash has gone to fund-raising costs and other expenses.

As of Friday, pro-Fine and Republican television spending was set to be around $4.1 million, compared with only $1.3 million in favor of Mr. Weil.

The biggest super PACs for House Republicans and Democrats have so far stayed on the sidelines, and so has Mr. Trump’s super PAC, even though the group has continued to raise cash aggressively since his election, including $1 million-a-head donor dinners at Mar-a-Lago.

Mr. Trump did hold tele-town halls for both Florida races last Thursday, and Elon Musk’s super PAC has started to spend a small sum for Mr. Fine in recent days. Donald Trump Jr. has recorded a radio ad linking Mr. Fine to his father.

A spokesman for Mr. Fine, Bryan Piligra, said the state senator would win “because of the strength of the Trump agenda and the faith the American people have in him.”

Mr. Weil said in a statement that “the success of this campaign is a resounding message to our current administration and unelected oligarch Elon Musk of the people’s feelings regarding the dismantling of essential systems the American people rely on to survive.”

Few Democrats are predicting a victory. But they are hoping to turn the contest into an early example of backlash to Mr. Trump. Over the weekend, Ken Martin, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, traveled to the Sixth District to draw further attention to the race after attending a donor retreat elsewhere in Florida.

For both parties, pre-spinning of the result has been in full force, with some national leaders questioning Mr. Fine’s effectiveness as a campaigner.

Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina, who leads the campaign arm of House Republicans, told reporters at the Capitol last week, “I would have preferred if our candidate had raised money at a faster rate and gotten on TV quicker.”

Mr. Fine had told House Republican leaders early on about the Democratic fund-raising edge but felt the warnings fell on deaf ears, according to a person briefed on the conversations.

And Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican of Florida, who once represented the Sixth District, cast Mr. Fine, without naming him, as the problem, urging observers not to draw broader conclusions about Mr. Trump or the national political climate from the potential closeness of the contest.

“They’re going to try to lay that at the feet of President Trump,” Mr. DeSantis said last week. “That is not a reflection of President Trump. It is a reflection of the specific candidate running in that race.”

(Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Fine have their own history. Mr. Fine switched his endorsement from Mr. DeSantis to Mr. Trump during the 2024 presidential primary, accusing the governor of insufficiently battling antisemitism.)

Still, Mr. DeSantis said it would be “almost impossible with someone with an R by their name to lose that district.”

The ad campaign for Mr. Fine has sought to yoke him to the president as closely as possible.

“President Trump needs Randy Fine in Congress,” says the narrator in one recent pro-Fine ad that focuses almost exclusively on linking the two men. “Florida approved. Trump endorsed. Stand with Trump. Vote Randy Fine.”

One of Mr. Weil’s ads blisters Mr. Fine with a dizzying array of accusations, calling him “violent,” “corrupt,” “radical,” “dangerous,” “unhinged” and “anti-American” — all in 30 seconds.

In a sign of just how solidly Republican the seat has been, neither party’s national congressional campaign arm even conducted polling ahead of the contest, according to people briefed on their operations.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee declined to comment.

“Despite Democrats’ lighting their money on fire, Randy Fine will be a member of Congress,” said Mike Marinella, a spokesman for House Republicans’ campaign arm, the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Everything else is just noise.”

Theodore Schleifer contributed reporting.