Hey everyone, I'm David Chalian, CNN's Washington Bureau Chief and Political Director, and welcome to the CNN Political Briefing.

Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.

'Earlier this week, liberal judge Susan Crawford celebrated her win in a critical state supreme court race in Wisconsin. For an off-year state judicial election, this race attracted a ton of attention and a lot of money. Elon Musk pumped more than $20 million into the race to back Crawford's opponent, the conservative judge, Brad Schimel. But Musk's money and an endorsement from President Trump were not enough to put the court in conservative hands. In Florida, Trump-backed candidates had success. Two Republicans won their races in special elections there, shoring up their party's narrow majority in the House of Representatives. Here's Republican Randy Fine, crediting the president for his win in Florida's 6th District.

I thank President Donald J. Trump, who asked me to do this and who trusted me all along the way. Mr. President, this win is yours far more than it is mine.

So what do these elections tell us about the national political mood? And have they taught us anything about what to expect in the future? I spoke with party leaders from each state, the Democratic Party Chair for Wisconsin and the Republican Party Chair in Florida, to get their takeaways. What worked for them? What didn't work? And what did they learn about where their parties stand in their home states in this first hundred days of Trump's second administration? First up, Ben Wikler. He is the chair of Wisconsin's Democratic Party. Ben, thanks so much for joining me, appreciate it.

Thanks so much for having me, David.

'Obviously, an enormous victory for you and your team in battleground Wisconsin this week. Any Democrat I talked to in Wisconsin before did not see a 10-point victory, I will say. So what is your takeaway here? What happened? Why such a substantial victory for Crawford this week?

So first, Susan Crawford ran a spectacular campaign. She was the right candidate for this moment. Her focus on protecting people's rights and freedoms on integrity and independence was a massive contrast to a candidate who basically was running as a MAGA henchman and was visibly clearly bought off by the richest person in the world to do whatever he wanted. So that contrast spoke volumes. But the other side of this is that there's this pent up well of rage in the electorate of people furious with the way things are going, with what this administration is doing. Anyone who is an ally of this administration is going to face that wrath of the ballot box. We thought it was gonna be closer because we could see that what Republicans were doing was engaging more Republicans. It was driving up the MAGA base turnout. We thought was probably helping us to turn out our folks just as much. But what we saw was right. You know, the Schimel campaign actually got more votes than Janet Protasiewicz did in 2023 when she won by double digits. It's just that on our side, there was like a geyser, this release of this massive wave of intense pressure that people wanted to find any way to fight back. So Susan Crawford, and I'm just still wrapping my mind around this, she got more votes than every Republican who's ever run for governor in the state of Wisconsin. She got more votes than Scott Walker has ever gotten in the state of Wisconsin, and this was in a spring supreme court election, which is normally low turnout city.

'Right. And that, to me, because one of the pieces of conventional wisdom in American politics right now is that Trump has this ability to dig deep and turn out, and so, in the context in our recent presidential elections when Trump is on the ballot, that large, huge turnout which used to always kind of be seen as something that would benefit the Democrats because of low propensity voters turning out, now is something that benefits Republicans in the Trump era. And reliable voters who vote in like every election tend to be more college-educated now and more friendly to the Democratic party that in special elections or off-year elections, the Democrats can perform better if turnout is a little lower. And it seems like you blew that concept out of the water here.

I think that's right. I think what we saw maps much more cleanly onto the midterm elections than anyone could have anticipated. You know, if you get as many and enough votes to win the 2018 midterms, which Susan Crawford did in a special election, that suggests that a high turnout midterm environment is really good. Now, this is still lower turnout than a presidential election, but we're not going to have a presidential election until 2028, and the organizing and the work, I mean, we saw this happen in 2020, that the huge amount of organizing that happened on the Democratic side and the constant communication, the rage, the protests, all that led to blowout turnout in 2018 and in 2020 and led to Donald Trump's defeat. You know, the Biden coalition was a very high turnout coalition. So I think that this idea that it is also the case that Democrats are stronger when fewer Republicans show up for the polls, but there's really a tide that I think is only going to accelerate now with the tariffs and what is probably a recession that we're going to spin into rapidly of people who are just saying, this is not what we signed up for. This is not acceptable. We need to change. We needs people who actually believe that this should be a country that works for everybody.

So that leads me to my next question, Ben. Can you help me, and I know there aren't exit polls and we don't have a full sense of this, but can you help separate out how much of the voter response and the big Democratic victory this week do you think is attributable to Trump policies and this political environment versus this Elon Musk sort of message you guys ran so hard on that a billionaire was trying to buy the election and, you know, chainsaw Musk responsible for this and that, you know, his numbers are, he's less popular than Donald Trump is. And I'm just wondering if you could separate, I know you made it one package, but do you think, absent Musk, that what is going on in this Trump 2.0 era is still potent for your side?

'Absolutely. It's hideously, hideously unpopular. This was a three-layer cake. So the first layer was candidate versus candidate. If you watched TV through the course of the spring, there were ads about crime and public safety. That was the core Republican message. Susan Crawford got to beat Schimel to a standstill on that front. The second piece of that part of the cake was the argument about abortion. And the abortion ban is still incredibly unpopular and very motivating for Democrats and persuasive to Independents and some Republicans. And the campaign discovered that and zeroed in on that, even though the national conventional wisdom is that abortion has lost its potency. We saw it last year in state legislative elections and Tammy Baldwin's race. We saw it again this spring. The second layer is the biggest one in driving this turnout differential is the overall sense of what Trump and Musk and Republicans in Congress, the whole Republican machine is doing. Disappearing people in the streets, the gutting of social security, the threats to the Veterans Administration, this just sense of precariousness that the country's falling apart, our Constitution's being trampled. The Schimel campaign was advertising about Trump. All their ads were about Trump. I think those energized our voters more than they energized Republican voters. And then the third piece was Musk himself. And Musk, you know, we were communicating about Musk. Musk's ads were all, the ads Musk was financing, first they were about crime, then they were Trump. His flyers that his canvassers were going out and delivering to people were all about Trump, so he was trying to make it about Trump, but Musk himself, in mid-March, there was a poll that found that Trump is underwater by six points in Wisconsin. Musk is underwater by 12 points. Musk coming to Wisconsin, bribing people, handing out giant checks to the head of the college Republicans as though he was giving them out to regular people. The kind of slap-in-the-face insult of grabbing money from people's Social Security with one hand while handing out $100 payments to sign a petition with the other, it did not land well at all. So I think that he was the kind of the maybe the frosting on the cake. I don't know where it is. He definitely helped Democrats more than he helped Republicans. But Crawford would have won even without Elon Musk for sure, and I think even even without the Trump thing, we were constantly modeling an even turnout scenario. And she was going to win not by a lot, but she was gonna win in that scenario, too. Then we had this gigantic hyper gusher of turnout fueled by Trump and Musk and what they're doing, and that led to the kind of blowout that we saw this spring that is going to inspire people to run for office next year.

Which, looking at that blowout, getting a little dorky here county by county, you know, there were 10 counties that Donald Trump won in the presidential just a few months ago in Wisconsin that Crawford flipped, including places that Trump won repeatedly, like Brown County, where Green Bay is. He won three times as a presidential candidate, whether he won statewide or not, Crawford flipped it. But even outside, you know, go a little further out of Green Bay, Winnebago County. Again, Trump won it three times, and it went to Crawford. What is that? Is that something that Democrats, like, will that just revert back to norm in 2026, or you think there is something shifting?

There's a real possibility that those are blue in '26. We, you know, in Winnebago County, I was knocking on doors there with Gordon Hintz, who's the former Democratic assembly leader. He's now the county executive of this presumably reddish county. And I'm sure he'll do a great job there. That is Ron Johnson's hometown, is Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

This is home to Oshkosh, everyone that's listening, yeah.

You know, and the BOW counties, they've been overperforming for us. Like we also won the BOW counties in the spring supreme court race in 2023, and we've gained ground there. If you look election by election by election, there's a shift. And right now, you know, talking to a ton of people there, people are going to protests every single week outside of Republican congressional offices, outside of, you know, any place that has a Tesla logo on it. Like there's a well of energy and fury that could put those counties into play in the statewide races in 2026 in a very real way. The place that swung the most, and this is a real danger sign for Republicans, relative to 2024, the biggest swings were all in western Wisconsin. Southwest Wisconsin, the kind of western rim along the Mississippi, that's the third congressional district. That's a district held by Derrick Van Orden, a far right Republican congressman who was at the insurrection on January 6th. And his number has come up. This is a really, really bad time to be a Republican representing a bright purple district that went bright blue in the Supreme Court race just now, and the level of energy for Democrats in western Wisconsin on the back of this, having had conversations already this morning about it, is through the roof.

Well, it's interesting because, as you said, you think the lessons from this week may be more applicable to a midterm election than a presidential election, obviously. And I'm intrigued to see how that plays out because, you know, we saw in '23, Protasiewicz, you know, big victory and then, you know, a year and a half later on the presidential level Trump comes in and wins the state. So it is not obviously necessarily predictive, but you make the argument it may be more applicable to the midterms.

'I think that's right. I mean, the presidential elections, more than any other election, are connected to everything about the state of the world. That, you know, if there's a massive recession, which seems like Trump is just really determined to create, and the country is failing working people who vote their pocketbook, don't really pay attention to politics right now, then it'll be a Democratic year, almost regardless of what either of the campaigns or candidates due. If, miracle of miracles, lightning strikes, and maybe there's an AI breakthrough, and suddenly Grok is powering a giant explosive moment of GOP-led abundance, which I find unlikely, but, you know, this is a crazy world we live in. Then maybe Republicans are suddenly getting all the credit, and people who, again, don't think about politics much turn out in the other direction. It seems like this administration's doing everything it can to disadvantage working people. They're attacking things that people have relied on. They're gutting labor protections. They're gutting things that keep our air and water clean and attacking Social Security and healthcare. They're planning to give this multi-trillion dollar tax cut to the ultra wealthy. All those things kind of set you up for a 2006, 2008-type scenario, and I think, you know, for people that are thinking about their own political futures across the country, like, this really is the time to dig in and get involved. I think candidate recruitment could be just extraordinary. I think the senators like Gary Peters and Jeanne Shaheen and Tina Smith that are kind of passing the torch in '26, they're doing that knowing that those seats are very likely to be blue. Honestly, this might be, you know, knock on wood, but it's not just the House majority that might be in play in 2026. If you look at 2010 and Senate seats that Republicans won, including Scott Brown in Massachusetts in that special, it feels to me like there's that kind of wave, and it's driven by people, definitely Democrats, but also Independents and some Republicans, who feel, as I personally do, that we're in a moment of deep crisis, of profound crisis as a country, people who want to figure out anything they can do to try to make a difference in changing that. And that kind of energy can fuel outcomes in midterm elections that go beyond the normal sloshing back and forth in American politics.

Well, Chairman Wikler, I'm sure we will be in touch over the next year and a half to see if some of those predictions come true. Thank you for your time, really appreciate it.

Thanks so much, David.

We're going to take a quick break, when we come back we'll hear from Evan Power, the Republican Party Chairman of the state of Florida. We're here with Evan Power, the chair of the Florida Republican Party. The GOP secured two key victories in special elections this week. Republicans Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine both secured seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Chairman Power, thanks so much for joining me, appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

Obviously there were two big consequential special elections in two different Florida congressional districts, and you guys were successful at adding to the Republican majority in the House, padding that very thin majority that Speaker Johnson and Donald Trump are needing to navigate as they try to get through the president's agenda. So, congratulations on that. What do you make of the takeaways? Because, obviously, you guys won these races, but you won them by far smaller margins than Trump did in these districts or the members running just a few months ago in November. Why do you think that was?

Well, if you look at the history of special elections in Florida, they're always close. In the past, we usually have not been successful in specials, but we are this time, and we were seeing great turnout on election day of people who were sending the message, and they told our candidates at the polling places while they're waiting to vote that they were there to send a strong message that they wanted to support President Trump. So I think double digit wins are a big win in a special election in Florida.

'So you see no, there's nothing to learn from a Trump plus-30 or Trump plus-37 district having that margin sliced in half or more?

'I don't think there's any long range, it's just the nature of being the party in power versus the party out of power, and Florida's special elections, and there's also some election law dynamics with vote by mail and other things that factored into those races. But I think, you know, double-digit wins are a solid sign that our people are happy with what the president's doing and want it to continue.

And, correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of the advertising I saw from your candidates and the outside groups supporting them featured Donald Trump. They were running as full Trump allies in these heavily Republican districts.

'They were. And I think, you know, that was the message. The president did two tele-town halls, one in each district. And, I think the other thing about these races that was interesting is just the Democrats pumped so much money in. We were outspent 9-to-1 or 10-to-1, depending on the district, and the president's help led to record election day turnout. We actually turned out more Republicans on election day than we were expecting, and that led to a big win.

'I know in the 6th Congressional District, to replace Waltz, I know the Democratic candidate out-raised your Republican candidate 10-to-1, but actually Republicans outspent overall when you look at the total ad spending, outspent the Democrat. And that was because there was some concern that now Congressman-elect Randy Fine, or Congressman Randy Fine, I guess he's been ceremonially sworn in at least, was not performing at the level that was making the party feel totally confident that this was going to go as it needed to go and sort of came in with a rescue operation. What did you make of what Fine was not doing that he needed to do?

Well, that's an interesting district, and so the polling didn't look great, and neither candidate running in that race was actually originally from the district. So there was a factor there. And then beyond that, a lot of those people vote on election day. So our turnout at the very beginning was lower because we didn't do extremely well in vote by mail, which we didn't anticipate. But there was a feeling that we needed to rush there to make sure that we turned out all our people on election day, and in the end we did.

Now in the 1st congressional district where the vacancy was left by Matt Gaetz, the Democrats overall did outspend your team on this. A, why, if you are the incumbent party, would the opposition be in a position to outspend? So why don't we start there?

Well, I think a lot of it has to do with ActBlue. I think there's an investigation into ActBlue going on and how they leverage donations, and I just think that there's a small group of Democrat activists who are donating money, and they really just want to win whatever they can. And the Florida Democratic Party sells this hope every couple of years that they can win a seat, and every time we end up embarrassing them by not allowing them to do that.

'Particularly of interest to me, in the Florida 1st Congressional District as an observer of elections, again, this is the one that was more pro-Trump. He won it by 37 points, and it is an even more Republican district than the 6th is: Escambia County. We saw a 22-point swing. I think Trump won that county by 19 points in 2024. And, actually, the Democratic candidate here in the special won Escambia. What happened in that county, and is that, do you see that there is some sort of trend that you need to be aware of to guard against going forward?

'I think that was a candidate-specific thing. The Democrat candidate there is from Escambia, and she had worked very hard. She ran against Matt Gaetz just a couple of months ago. She was able to qualify for this special by petition within like two or three weeks of announcing the special election. So she had some infrastructure there. Our candidate was a statewide elected official but hadn't spent that much time there. So I think this is a candidate-specific, election-specific result. I'm not worried about Escambia County in the midterm at all.

But I bet you got a lot of incoming about that Escambia result this week. Did you have to calm nervous jitters in your party?

'There's people who are concerned, and we look at everything, and I think, by and large, we spend the off year trying to rebuild the vote-by-mail file because it empties out every two years. So, we're going to spend some effort there, making sure that we have the resources in place going forward.

You know, you're talking about specials in general, but obviously, we've seen a pattern over time, and this applies to sort of both parties. When you are the party out of power, you could thrive a bit more on motivation, opposition to what is going on. Do you think, even though, again, you were totally successful here at winning these seats, as you said, by double digits, do you think that you are seeing in the fundraising, in some of the turnout numbers that we're talking about, that the Democrats right now are just more energized than the Republicans are in Florida?

I think there is a group of Democrats that are more energized, because they're upset, and they're making their irrational arguments on why they're upset. It's also, we won so big, we had record turnout in Florida in November where we won by 13 points the most since 1988. And it's hard to motivate those people to go out and vote, especially on the short timetable that we had. And I think once we were able to get that message through, we were to turn out our voters like we did at the last minute in CD6.

'And so is there anything that you watched and observed on Tuesday night that you are putting sort of on a to-do list for you as chairman of the party to ensure that Florida stays as red as it has been in recent years and doesn't shift back into a more purple competitive state?

'For us, it is continuing what we've been doing, which is registering Republicans, out-raising the Democrats and outworking them. And if you look at what we're done voter registration-wise, even since the election, we've added another 100,000 Republican voters since the election. So we're gonna continue to work on that and continue to register, to out-register, out-raise and outwork the Democrats.

Florida Republican Chairman, Evan Power. Thank you for your time, sir. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

That's it for this week's edition of the CNN Political Briefing. Remember, you can reach out to us with your questions about Trump's new administration. Our contact information is in the show notes. CNN Political Briefing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Emily Williams. Our senior producer is Felicia Patinkin. Dan Dzula is our Technical Director, and Steve Lickteig is the Executive Producer of CNN Audio. Support from Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. We'll be back with a new episode next Friday. Thanks so much for listening.