How Democrats found their voters again

High turnout helped Democrats win down-ballot in Wisconsin and elsewhere, even as Republicans hit the sort of numbers that are usually enough to prevail in lower-profile races.

“Their base is ginned up,” Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “They’re over-the-top upset that Donald Trump won, and this is the kind of way they’re lashing out and responding.”

The GOP-backed candidate for state education superintendent, who supports school choice and got cross-party endorsements, won more than a million votes — and lost to the incumbent, Jill Underly, backed by Democrats and teachers unions. Winnebago County executive Jon Doemel, a Republican, was swamped by Democrat Gordon Hintz, as Crawford won the county by 8 points. Last year, Trump carried it by 5.

In Illinois’s nonpartisan Tuesday races, two suburban Republican mayors lost upsets to more liberal challengers. Orland Park’s Keith Pekau ran just slightly behind his total vote from his last reelection, and was beaten by an opponent who won 2,000 more votes. In Aurora, the state’s second-largest city, Democrat John Laesch won a rematch against Mayor Richard Irvin, a moderate Gulf War veteran whose star had dimmed since running unsuccessfully for governor in 2022.

“A good day for Democrats in damned near every election I cared about in Illinois, all the way down to school boards,” said Illinois Rep. Sean Casten, the Democrat who defeated Pekau in a 2022 House race.

The Democratic turnout advantage wasn’t enough for Republicans to lose two Florida House elections in deep red districts. Gay Valimont, the Democrat who’d lost a 2024 race in the 1st District, hit 51% of that vote total; Jimmy Patronis, the Republican who won easily, got just 36% as many votes as ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz, who vacated the seat after beating Valimont. The gap was smaller in the 6th District, where Rep.-elect Randy Fine’s sluggish campaign spooked his party enough to spend in his race.

The current Democratic paradox is that their voters are deeply frustrated with the party, and happy to vote for them in every election. Before the Wisconsin vote, Wikler told me that Republicans would struggle to match their enthusiasm, because Democrats were “on fire” about DOGE layoffs and the threat of cuts to Medicaid.

This was borne out on Tuesday, in Wisconsin and in places that saw less Democratic spending. Republicans did get hundreds of thousands of MAGA voters excited enough to turn out for non-Trump candidates. Turning Point Action, Americans for Prosperity, Musk’s America PAC — there were multi-layered efforts to make these races about supporting Trump.

Right now, that is simply a less powerful motivator than fear of Trump and anger at his agenda. The MAGA voter is both more content with the state of the country and less interested in blow-by-blows of DOGE work. The lower-propensity voters who only turn out for Trump are not matching the higher-propensity news junkies who fill out their ballots with MSNBC or Meidas Touch playing in the background. (Wikler said that on Election Day, he repeatedly found voters at home watching New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s marathon floor speech.)

Republicans turned out more MAGA voters than this in every midterm election since his 2016 win. They narrowly lost the 2018 and 2022 races for governor of Wisconsin, but in both races, their nominees ran stronger than Schimel did this week. That’s a ray of sunshine for GOP groups that have another year and change to turn out Trump’s voters.

They were not yet ready on Tuesday to break down what happened this time. The usual answer, bluntly: Democrats wanted it more. The desire to punish MAGA was, on Tuesday, more powerful than the desire to show up and thank Trump.