\u201cThat said,\u201d the Governor cautioned, \u201ca swing of this magnitude is not something that can be dismissed. Republicans should be clear-eyed about the political environment heading into the Midterm.\u201d<\/p>\n
Florida Democrats boasted about how they narrowed the margins of two strong GOP-performing congressional districts in special elections held last April. Those candidates were boosted by financial contributions from around the country in races that took place just a few months into Trump 2.0.<\/p>\n Even with Democrat Josh Weil outspending Republican Randy Fine in Congressional District 6 by a 10-1 ratio, however, Fine ended up winning the seat by 14 percentage points \u2014 a seat Republican incumbent Mike Waltz had won by 30 points just six months earlier.<\/p>\n Democrats hope to seize on the public backlash to Trump\u2019s mass deportations and specifically the hard-line enforcement against undocumented immigrants and even American citizens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.<\/p>\n Nearly two-thirds of Americans (65%) say ICE has gone too far, according to an NPR\/PBS\/Marist poll<\/a> released Thursday.<\/p>\n The place where Florida Democrats presumably might hope to exploit those fissures is in South Florida, where Miami Republicans like U.S. Rep. Maria Salazar<\/a> and state Sen. Ileana Garcia<\/a> have been warning that such actions could backfire on the GOP this Fall.<\/p>\n But will South Florida Hispanic voters turn on the Trump administration and vote Democratic?<\/p>\n \u201cHere in Miami, the immigration issue is not so clear-cut,\u201d says Florida International University Political Science Professor Eduardo Gamarra.<\/p>\n \u200bIn a survey<\/a> of 408 Venezuelans living in Florida, which he helped conduct last May, Gamarra found that 50% of Trump voters said they would vote for the President again, and 22% said they regretted their votes.<\/p>\n While many of those voters are thrilled the U.S. military extracted President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro from power last month, Gamarra said, they remain upset about the Trump administration deporting hundreds of Venezuelans every week after the Department of Homeland Security announced termination of the 2021 designation of Venezuela for temporary protected status and urged them to \u201cself-deport.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re going to have a significant segment of the Venezuelan voter who voted for Trump who will not vote for a Republican candidate,\u201d he said. \u201cNow, how large that\u2019s going to be is anyone\u2019s guess.\u201d<\/p>\n The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has listed three Republican congressional districts<\/a> in Florida as \u201cin play\u201d this Fall: Cory Mills\u2019 Congressional District 7; Anna Paulina Luna\u2019s Congressional District 13, and Salazar\u2019s Congressional District 27, a district that Trump won by more than 14 points in 2024.<\/p>\n Of the GOP members of Congress from South Florida, Salazar is the most vulnerable, Gamarra said.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not a Cuban-only district,\u201d he said about CD 27. \u201cIt has Haitians. African-Americans. Wealthy Latin Americans on Key Biscayne. It goes through downtown Miami and Little Havana, which is no longer Cuban. It\u2019s mainly Honduran, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan \u2026 so it\u2019s a very complex district, and that\u2019s why she has trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n Fried argues the immigration issue will backfire on the Republicans. \u201cIt\u2019s disrupting communities. It\u2019s putting fear into our immigrant communities. Everybody in Miami is walking around with visas and passports \u2014 that\u2019s not how you build community, and I think that there\u2019s going to be a complete rejection of what is happening on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n Fried\u2019s counterpart, Republican Party of Florida Chairman Evan Power, now a candidate himself for Florida\u2019s CD 2, says \u201cabsolutely not\u201d to the chance for a blue wave, noting that a Republican beat a Democrat in an Alabama state House race<\/a> this past week by 60 percentage points, 28 points higher than Trump\u2019s victory there in 2024<\/p>\n \u201cThis is like a bad re-run of Democrats using special elections to claim Florida in play,\u201d he said. \u201cFlorida will remain red, and we will have victories up and down the ballot because Florida voters have rejected the radical agenda of the Florida Democrats.\u201d<\/p>\n GOP political consultant Anthony Pedicini says Republicans in Florida are insulated from national trends because of their huge voter registration advantage, now more than 1.46 million. \u201cAs political operatives, we always watch the trends, and history shows us the party in power often doesn\u2019t fare well, but I\u2019d rather be us than them here in the free state of Florida,\u201d he said in an email.<\/p>\n A coming Special Election that could indicate how November might play out takes place next month in western Hillsborough County in the state Senate District 14 seat that has been vacant since Jay Collins left it to serve as Lieutenant Governor on Aug. 12.<\/p>\n Polk County Republican state Rep. Josie Tomkow is taking on Democrat Brian Nathan, a union leader and Navy veteran, in a seat that Collins won by 10 points in 2022.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the reasons why Democrats have over-performed in special elections is because they have more engaged voters in smaller elections,\u201d Tampa Bay Area political consultant Barry Edwards said, noting the spending in the two special congressional elections last year. \u201cIn this race, that\u2019s not going to be the case,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Tomkow has approximately $239,000 in her regular campaign account and more than $3.3 million in her political committee account, while Nathan has raised around $50,000.<\/p>\n Brad Coker, the longtime pollster with Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy, believes Democrats \u201ccould be some pickups at the county or state legislative level,\u201d referring to the Eileen Higgins victory in the Miami mayoral race in December.<\/p>\n \u201cAs far as the gubernatorial race and the U.S. Senate race, at the moment I don\u2019t see any of the Democrats seriously contending in a statewide General Election contest,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n Mitch Perry reporting via Florida Phoenix<\/a>, part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501 (c) (3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: [email\u00a0protected]<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas, on Jan. 31, a Democratic candidate named Taylor Rehmet won a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148467,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8861,54860,71785,59253,27211,69729,3951,71786,71787,6204,409,71788,3674,51922,28,9085,30,2846,29,57076,11611,71789,5187,71790,27213,71791,71792,71793,71794,44361,54492,4389,11298,71795,71796,71797,9217,71798,32373,412,71799,71800,71801,71802],"class_list":["post-148466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-anna-paulina-luna","tag-anthony-pedicini","tag-barry-edwards","tag-brad-coker","tag-brian-nathan","tag-congressional-races","tag-cory-mills","tag-democratic-congressional-campaign-committee","tag-democratic-strategy","tag-department-of-homeland-security","tag-donald-trump","tag-eduardo-gamarra","tag-eileen-higgins","tag-evan-power","tag-florida","tag-florida-democratic-party","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-international-university","tag-florida-news","tag-ileana-garcia","tag-immigration-and-customs-enforcement","tag-immigration-politics","tag-jay-collins","tag-josh-weil","tag-josie-tomkow","tag-lorida-politics","tag-maria-salazar","tag-marist-poll","tag-mason-dixon-polling-strategy","tag-midterm-elections","tag-mike-waltz","tag-nicolas-maduro","tag-nikki-fried","tag-npr","tag-pbs","tag-political-polling","tag-randy-fine","tag-republican-dominance","tag-republican-party-of-florida","tag-ron-desantis","tag-south-florida-voters","tag-taylor-rehmet","tag-texas-special-election","tag-voter-trends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Jacksonville_728x90.jpg\")
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