Issue #237: The Democratic Improvements in the 1st and 6th Specials
Democrats made massive gains, but both districts remain ruby red
On Tuesday, Florida voters cast ballots for the FL01 and FL06 Congressional Special Elections. I covered these races in my two most recent articles. Check those out for more backstory on both races.
Both districts are solid red, voting for Trump by 37% and 30% respectively. Despite being so safe, Republicans began to worry about both seats; especially the 6th district. Concerns around large sums of money raised by Democratic candidates, far stronger Democratic turnout, and growing public disapproval with Donald Trump and Elon Musk, led to national Republicans to fret about both races. While few expected Democrats to be able to flip such GOP-heavy seats, it was widely believed massive Democratic overperformances were likely.
When the results came in on Tuesday, those overperformances came to pass. While Republicans Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine won their races by 14 points; these were far lower than the Trump margins from just several months earlier.
This article will look at some specific data points for both of these races. Right now we don’t have full precinct data for all counties, so I’ll reserve precinct maps for a later time. In the meantime, however, I have much to say about party turnout, expectations, and how much ground Republican' lost. I’m going to look at each district individually, and will then have some thoughts on how both races compare with each-other.
The Results in the 1st Congressional
As Tuesday approached in Florida, everybody agreed that the 1st Congressional was basically safe for Republican Jimmy Patronis. While Democrat Gay Valimont was running an stellar campaign, a Trump +37 seat is just too much to flip. As I highlighted in my first article on the races, the 1st is so Republican that it didn’t back Bill Nelson when he won a landslide re-election in 2006.
The district has long been a steadfast Republican stronghold. Unlike the counties to its east, which were longtime conservative Democrats that often voted Republican, the west end of Florida has been Republican up and down ballot for many years. Republicans make up 55% of the registered voters in the district vs the 21% registered as Democrats. As a result, even with Democrats maintaining a 9 point turnout advantage in this special election, Republicans still outpaced Democrats in share of vote cast by a 29 point margin.
The Democratic turnout advantage was very impressive considering the advantage was reversed back in 2024. The GOP +29 vote cast was rough, but it was far better than the GOP +38 that November saw.
As I discussed in my previews of the race, a GOP +29 vote cast would just be impossible to win for a Democrat. That held true. However, Jimmy Patronis’ final win margin of 14.8% was FAR weaker than most of us expected. Patronis under-performed Trump by a stunning 22 points.
Democrat Gay Valimont put up the strongest Democratic numbers in the 1st district in two decades. Her winning Escambia County is the absolute shock of the night. This marked the first time a Democrat won the county in a federal race since Bill Nelson’s 2006 victory.
Just several months back, Kamala Harris lost the county to Donald Trump by 19 points. In flipping the county, Valimont outperformed Harris across every precinct in the county.
Not only were massive swings made in the suburbs, but the rural communities as well. Even in the already heavily Democrat black community, the margin rose.
I noted on election night that the Escambia shift cannot be attributed just to stronger Democratic turnout. The vote cast in Escambia was 48% GOP and just 37% Democratic. For Valimont to win the county, she needed not only strong NPA support, but a batch of Republican votes. To get a better view of this, I looked at the county-level results in the district while pairing it with the party makeup of votes cast.
The table below shows the “D v R Share of Votes Cast” next to the “D v R Election Results.” The “Valimont Over” tab shows how the party vote compared to results; and it reveals that Valimont’s margin outperformed party makeup across every county.
Those final columns show that Valimont is securing much higher shares of NPA votes than Patronis, as well as taking some chunk of Republicans. If both Patronis and Valimont took 100% of their party voters; and then split evenly the NPA vote, that final column would be 0s. The larger “over” numbers show that Valimont is way outperforming party share of the electorate. That can also been seen Escambia, Okaloosa, and Santa Rosa - where Patronis % does not even reach GOP % of vote cast. Patronis lost a chunk of GOP voters to Valimont in the district.
Note that Walton, which is much more rural than the other three counties, has the weakest overperformance. I’ll get back to that, because it may play into some of the results in the 6th congressional.
The Results in the 6th Congressional
As stated in the lead-up to the special elections, Republicans were far more worried about the 6th district than they were the 1st. Thanks to being less Republican, though still Trump +30, and featuring a very flawed GOP candidate, the race was considered possibly in play. One Florida poll had Republican Randy Fine only up 4 points.
With Fine possibly in trouble, Republicans pulled out all the stops to aid him. A big issue here was working in gin up turnout. Heading into election day, Democrats had a 9% turnout lead and the vote cast was GOP +8. I predicted a GOP election day, as did everyone else. However, the election day figures proved to be even better than Republicans hoped for. A solid 95,000 votes cast on election day, and that electorate was GOP +35. This allowed the electorate to be GOP +21.
Even with the strong election day turnout for Republicans, the final vote cast was not as Republican as last November. Democratic turnout ended up just over 5 points higher than Republicans; lower than the 1st Congressional but also much better than the GOP turnout lead in November. Republican share of the vote cast was near identical to 2024, with the biggest difference being higher Democratic vote share while NPAs fell thanks to low turnout.
While Republicans did a good job of getting their votes out, it did not stop Fine from radically underperforming Donald Trump. Fine won the district by 14 points; representing a 16 point drop from just last November.
Here there was no dramatic flipping of a county. Rather it was alot of red territory just becoming less so. Weil was very close to taking the Volusia portion of the district, but lost it as final election day precinct came in.
Comparing the party vote share of the vote with the results shows that Weil did not over-perform as much as Valimont did in the 1st district. Weil’s 7% over-performance of the partisan vote cast was solid, but not near Valimont’s 14%.
The area where Weil overperformed the most was in St Johns, a suburban and well-educated county. The more working class and rural counties saw Fine likely retain stronger shares of Republican voters - but with Fine losing independents to Weil. The only county where Weil didn’t outperform at all was rural Putnam County. This actually makes sense considering Putnam is one of the rural ancestral Democratic counties that we see in many parts of the state. This is an area where many of the white democrats are very conservative. It is likely that in Putnam Weil lost more Democrats than anywhere else.
This matches with the Walton performance in the 1st. Rural and more culturally conservative areas were less prone to out-perform partisan makeup of the vote. This makes sense, as these Republicans are less your ‘country club’ type and more classic rural conservatives.
The 1st vs 6th Performance
One thing that became apparent the night of the election was that the 1st Congressional race saw the Republican underperform by much more. While Randy Fine did 16% worse than Donald Trump in FL06, it was Patronis who did 22% worse in FL01. This was despite the 6th being viewed as a bigger threat for Republicans.
Culture Differences
So why did the 1st district see so much more Republican backsliding. Overall I think several reasons could exist, all likely having a role. An important point is that the demographics of the 1st, namely military and education rates, made it more prone to reject Trump and Musk. This was predicted by J Miles Coleman of the Center for Politics stated in a preview article
Though FL-1 is, by its partisan lean, a redder district, our thinking at first was that, from a demographic perspective, Democrats would have more room to overperform there. FL-1 has close to a 30% college attainment rate, while FL-6 is several percentage points lower, at 23%. The federal government’s footprint is also larger in FL-1, as the Pensacola area is home to multiple military facilities, which may theoretically make voters there more sensitive to the Trump administration’s recent Elon Musk-induced cuts.
Indeed, the 1st Congressional district is higher educated than the 6th and it is home to a large veteran population. These voters have felt the reckless DOGE “cuts” more than many other communities, and concerns about the Department of Veterans Affairs are very real in the district. The campaign in the 1st saw Gay Valimont focus heavily on veterans issues; especially access to healthcare for vets. This region of Florida has been ancestrally Republican for decades, but that is on the foundation of military and upper-income coastal towns.
The 6th Congressional, meanwhile, is a much more rural and working class district. It includes rural former Democrats; found in Putnam and Marion, and increasingly Republican working class voters; found in Volusia and Flagler. These voters have not felt the brunt of DOGE actions yet (they will feel these tariffs though). In addition, this area is much more of the cultural-MAGA zone that Trump does well in. Chances for Democratic flipping in this district relied HEAVILY on turnout dynamics and winning over some suburban Republicans. We did see Randy Fine underperform across the district, namely in the coastal counties - and especially in St Johns.
Candidate Quality
Another likely issue was candidate quality. Both Randy Fine and Jimmy Patronis did not live in their districts. However, Patronis is far less controversial than Fine. However, Democrat Josh Weil was not as a strong a candidate as Gay Valimont was. Weil, like Fine, did not live in the district, and as I discussed before, has legal troubles in his past that got to be weaponized against him.
Valimont, meanwhile, proved to be a very strong messenger and Patronis instead relied on broad attacks on “the left” and that Valimont would be another Democrat in Congress.
The GOP Efforts in the 6th
Another very likely factor in 6th not seeing as big an underperformance as the 1st is the GOP effort that was put into Randy Fine at the last minute. As the last week or two approached, Republicans began to invest more in the 6th district in order to prevent a Fine shock loss. Ron DeSantis, in an interview attacking Fine, pointed out the GOP had to step in with millions of dollars to help him. These efforts not only included new advertising but also GOTV efforts to ensure Republicans came out on election day. While Republican leaders did keep an eye on the 1st, far less effort or money went into that race.
The effect of Republican GOTV efforts was seen on election day. Yes it was a red voting day, as per usual, but in the 6th, it was notably redder than expected. Below you can see voter makeup of voting methods for the 2024 General and 2025 Special. In the 1st, election day was just as red as 2024. In the 6th, however, election day was record-level RED!
Election Day in the 6th saw Republicans finally turn out to vote. It allowed the Republicans in the 6th to come much closer to their 2024 margin than they did in the 1st. Election Day was good for Republicans in both districts, but I think the campaign had a measurable impact in juicing the 6th far more than would have happened if Fine had been left on his own.
We can see that GOTV effect clearer below. The table shows the two districts with the Democratic turnout lead before election day. In both districts, Democrats had right around a 10% turnout advantage. If we treated the votes cast on election day as the ONLY votes, then the GOP would have had a turnout advantage. However, as you can see, the 6th has a much larger GOP turnout advantage.
Republicans in the 6th came out much stronger, relative to Democrats, than they did in the 1st. The result was the 1st still having a much larger turnout lead for Democrats than the 6th.
The effect of the campaign, as I see it, is felt in how election day went in each respective district. Election Day in the 6th was far redder, relative to the district, than it was in the 1st. That election day vote, in both districts, was also less prone to split tickets. Republicans who cast ballots my mail and early seemed to have been much more willing to vote Democratic than those on election day. That data point, which I am waiting on more data to confirm, will be covered in a future article.
And don’t worry, once the precinct data is available, maps will be coming for both races!
In the meantime, that’s it for me.
Matt -- Terrific analysis, as always.
But I think there was a key "missed opportunity" here that Democrats could have spent far more effort on -- and at far less cost than the barrage of ads and fundraising commissions (!) gobbled up.
Look at the paltry percent of even Democrats who voted with a mailed out ballot in District 1: just 13,000 Ds voted this way out.
As we know that most voters who bother to request a mail ballot -- or sign up for a "semi permanent status for an election cycle -- are pretty motivated, I'm going to guess that this represented roughly a 60-65% return rate of those who received these ballots.
So I'll estimate that 20,000 registered Ds requested such a ballot -- of 118,000 total registered Dss.
Yes, this is about 17% of registered Ds -- and applying the same assumptions to the Rs and the NPAs, it's roughly TRIPLE their rates.
But that also means that among the remaining 100,000 Ds, 65% were no-shows, either for early voting (EIPV) or Election Day Polling Place (EDPP voting).
And even though your analysis shows that in this election NPAs clearly broke for the Ds in both races, their no-show rate (using the same 60% assumption for mail ballot requesters) was closer to 85%.
And here's where the missed opportunity comes in.
Before DeSantis' and the Rs passed the terrible bill to force voters who were on the "permanent absentee ballot" list to sign up again every two years -- the last cycle started over on January 1, 2025 -- probably 35-40% of all voters in these 2 districts would have received mailed out ballots.
It's well known what a huge drop in sign ups has happened in FL, and far more among Rs than Ds who know full well how poorly Trump things about mail ballots.
But that's EXACTLY why the Ds had such a remarkable opportunity here. Specifically, what if they'd seriously tried to get 20 to 30,000 MORE of their voters to apply for mailed out ballot -- and btw, such an application would keep such ballots coming in the mail through November 2026 under the new law.
And if they'd targeted mid to lower propensity registered D and D-leaning NPA voters -- e.g regular presidential or midterm votes who normally might be at risk of "skipping" a special -- wouldn't the odds of those voters actually casting a ballot be 2x or even higher than the odds compared to their having to schlep to a polling place?
Would 60% of 20-30K D ballots -- at a 60% return rate, translating into 12 to 18,000 more votes for Valimont and Weil -- have flipped these seats? No, as both lost by about 25,000 votes. Had the goal been 40-50K more targeted voters to sign up for such ballots -- literally, that would still mean only half of all D votes even without D-leaning NPAs -- and now we'd be in striking range.
There was a genuine opportunity here to have "field tested" a strategy that, had it been well focused and planned -- with a combination of skilled field staff and volunteers to convince voters to "return" to their old ways of voting, and then to follow up to make sure ballots were received and counted -- arguably would have been far more cost-effective than a lot of what was spent in these two races.
Of course, hindsight is always 20/20, and kudos to both candidates, especially Valimont who spectacularly over performed in a 37+ Trump district. I'm observing from a great distance, and I don't want to detract in any way from the amazing hard work of so many volunteers and staff that made both of these races far more competitive than many expected.
But I really do think these races could have been even closer -- and perhaps presents a potential lesson for other special election contests down the road.
And to paraphrase the late Robert F Kennedy SENIOR "Some look at things and ask Why? I look at things that could have been, and say "Why not?"
Matt, as always, I appreciate your analyses. We worked hard here in St Johns and helped out a bit in Northern Flagler. I'm super interested in the Precinct analysis when it's available. Curious, are you considering a futures prediction at all based on Voter Registration trends? And perhaps some educated thoughts on how to address them? Thanks, Geoff