No Fooling

As a historian, I prefer my subjects to be long dead before I start poking them with a stick. It's just safer that way, to be honest.

I'm well aware of how often people make predictions about politics that turn out to be wildly wrong, and I don't imagine I have any greater capacity than any of them did, except of course in my reluctance to make predictions.

And yet.

While there's always a danger in extrapolating too much from a single data point, every now and then we get a constellation of events that seems to spell out a larger trend, and it looks like April Fool's Day might just be one.

First of all, we saw my own Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) break the record for a Senate speech with his 25-hour-long marathon that began Monday evening and stretched all the way to Tuesday night. While some dismissed the performance as, well, a performance, the public enthusiasm for Booker's stand was a reminder that performance actually matters quite a bit in politics.

For too long, Democrats have apparently assumed that if they just handle the details of policy competently, voters would reward them with their support. Of course, it's not that easy, as the last election proved. Politicians actually have to make an affirmative case for themselves and their causes, have to offer a vision and a narrative, and have to, yes, put these on display for the nation.

Booker did that, much to the delight of Democrats everywhere. (Yes, Senate Democrats seemed to step on his big moment by then providing unanimous consent to consider the nomination Booker had been holding up, but given some of their other moves – like Schiff's announcement he'll be blocking the atrocious Ed Martin's nomination for DC USA – it seems they might be learning how to do this.)

Second, there were a pair of special elections for open House seats in Florida yesterday as well.

Both of these seats are in deep, deep red districts. FL-1, the panhandle district that encompasses the "Redneck Riviera" and an amazing amount of military voters, was so committed to the Republican cause that they re-elected a scandal-plagued Matt Gaetz in 2024 by a massive 66-34 margin. FL-6, the district that gave us both current Governor Ron DeSantis and current Signal spokesperson Mike Waltz in recent elections, was just as lopsided last November, with Waltz winning 67-33.

Republicans managed to hang on to both seats yesterday, but with much more narrow margins than ever before. The final tallies aren't in yet, but it's looking like both races saw the Republican edge shrink from 32-33 points last November down to just 13-14 points now.

The GOP is publicly celebrating these wins, but behind the scenes they have got to be sweating hard. A twenty point shift in five months? Christ.

And it's clear that they're seeing this in their internal numbers nationwide. The White House's decision to withdraw the nomination of Rep. Elise Stefanik to be United Nations ambassador showed that they were seriously worried they couldn't retain her seat in upstate New York, even though she had been re-elected last fall by a 62-38 margin.

While these two races mean that Republicans have slightly increased their numbers in the House, I'd have to imagine that their caucus is actually feeling much shakier today than ever before. Speaker Mike Johnson just suffered a fairly humiliating defeat on a rules proposal when nine members of his caucus defected, and now he's going to have 40-50 Republicans who won their last race by a dozen points or less and see a reckoning coming.

The third development of the day was perhaps the biggest.

Elon Musk put all of his credibility and a small fraction of his fortune on the line in the Wisconsin state Supreme Court race yesterday. He insisted "the future of civilization" itself was at stake in the race, and invested heavily in an effort to get the vote out for the Republican candidate. He held rallies in the state, hyped the race endlessly on Xitter, and even gave away two $1 million checks in a blatantly illegal scheme. Thanks to the billionaire's meddling, the race became the most expensive state Supreme Court race in U.S. history.

It didn't work. The liberal judge won handily in a 55-45 victory.

Even better, it looks like Elon Musk's meddling actually hurt his candidate. The attention he brought to the race resulted in a massive surge in turnout, but it looks like that benefited the other candidate. Indeed, a comparison between the votes for Musk's candidate and another statewide Republican race in the state show that Musk's candidate ran about five points behind.

Make no mistake: this is a humiliating defeat for Elon Musk.

It's proof that the involvement of The Boy Nobody Loves in political races is a net negative, and should do a lot to give Republican congressional candidates second thoughts about either asking for his help or, more important, worrying about his threats to primary them if they break with his deeply unpopular DOGE dipshittery.

Again, these are just three points in an ever-changing political process, and we should be careful about extrapolating too much.

That said, there's a lot to cheer Democrats here. Senate Democrats finally seem to be getting their shit together (or at least getting closer to the aforementioned fecal compression) just as House Republicans are getting skittish. And Elon Musk, who's been a wrecking ball for the past few months, got wrecked himself.