Photo: Graeme Sloan/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Both parties have plenty of reasons to look forward to next year’s midterm elections. Republicans can test out the MAGA hypothesis that Donald Trump is building a new majority coalition that will last for decades. Democrats will rely on the more plausible historical precedent that the president’s party almost always loses ground in midterms.
But you don’t have to wait until 2026 for some electoral tests of Trump 2.0 and its counterrevolutionary chaos. This year will offer an assortment of special and off-year contests of considerable importance in themselves, which may also provide leading indicators of elections to come. Here’s an overview in chronological order:
Wisconsin Supreme Court
The first cookie on the plate is a big one: an off-year judicial election in the battleground state of Wisconsin (the closest state in the country in 2024; Trump carried it by a margin of 0.86 percent). Whichever side wins this race will have a majority on the seven-judge court, where liberals currently hold a 4-3 majority. Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate and Dane County judge, is facing Brad Schimel, the conservative Waukesha County judge.
Crawford is a former Democratic gubernatorial aid who has been an outspoken defender of abortion rights and critic of Republican voter-ID laws. Schimel has campaigned with Donald Trump Jr. and Charlie Kirk and posed with a huge inflatable image of Jr.’s dad. So there’s no mistaking the contrast, or the potential stakes, including litigation over election rules and possibly a re-redistricting of Wisconsin congressional seats.
But it’s the massive spending surrounding this race that underlines its national significance. The last big Wisconsin Supreme Court race in 2023, won by liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz, smashed national records for judicial contests as total spending reached $51 million. This year’s spending has already topped $90 million and will likely reach $100 million in the last week. While both candidates have received significant outside help via direct and independent contributions (Crawford has gotten indirect donations from Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and global right-wing devil figure George Soros), it has been Schimel’s heavy support from DOGE warlord Elon Musk that has electrified the matchup, as PBS Wisconsin reports:
Two groups funded by Musk have so far spent more than $13 million on the race, according to a tally by the liberal Brennan Center for Justice — with plans to spend around $20 million total.
Musk donated another $2 million to the Wisconsin Republican Party on March 20, the same day the party gave $1.2 million to Schimel’s campaign.
Some of the money is going directly in the pockets of voters: One Musk group is paying Wisconsin voters $100 for signing a petition opposing “judicial activism.”
Team Crawford is delighted with the not-very-popular Musk’s high visibility in Schimel’s campaign, offering voters a chance to “send a message” to Musk and Trump about their ongoing demolition of federal programs and personnel. Increasingly the election is being described as a “referendum on Elon Musk,” an impression Musk himself is promoting by saying the contest “could determine the fate of the country.” Even if it doesn’t, it could help determine the political fate of Musk and DOGE.
Congressional special elections
There are currently four vacant seats in the House of Representatives with a fifth a near-certainty. Special elections will be held in Florida to fill two of them (vacated by onetime attorney-general nominee Matt Gaetz and Trump national security adviser Michael Waltz) on April 1, the same day as the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. While both districts at play are heavily Republican, Democratic candidates are benefiting from massive small-donor contributions, as NBC News reports:
Gay Valimont, a gun-control activist who is running in Florida’s First Congressional District, raised nearly $6.4 million from January 9 to March 12, five times more than Republican Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s chief financial officer, according to new fundraising reports filed Thursday with the Federal Election Commission.
And Josh Weil, a teacher running in the Sixth District, raised $9.3 million, a haul more than 16 times larger than Republican state senator Randy Fine.
Weil, in fact, was within four points of Fine–less than the margin of error–in a survey by St. Pete Polls this week, with Democrats out-performing Republicans in early voting despite a 2-1 disadvantage in registered voters. The possibility of a loss in this race may have had something to do, in fact, with Trump’s decision to cancel Elise Stefanik’s nomination to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations because her vote is needed.
The Democrats don’t need unlikely victories to make a splash, however: Since Trump carried the First District by 37 points last year and the Sixth District by 30 points, a respectable underdog showing would raise both eyebrows and currently depressed grassroots Democratic spirits.
Special elections for the seats of two recently deceased Democrats, Arizona’s Raúl Grijalva and Texas’s Sylvester Turner, will also be held this year. The Arizona election is scheduled for September 23; the Texas election date has yet to be established. Both districts are solidly Democratic but could see significant Republican efforts given recent Trump gains among Latino and Black voters.
Two big gubernatorial races
Regularly scheduled off-year gubernatorial elections are often viewed as bellwethers for future national-political developments. This year’s contests are in New Jersey and Virginia, where the incumbents (Democrat Phil Murphy in the former and Republican Glenn Youngkin in the latter) are term-limited. While these states are considered “blue” (New Jersey last went Republican in a presidential election in 1988, and Virginia last turned red in 2004), Republicans have found reason for optimism in both recently.
In the last New Jersey gubernatorial election in 2021, the heavily favored Murphy got a scare from Republican Jack Ciattarelli. And in 2024, Trump cut his 11.9 percent 2020 deficit in the Garden State to 5.9 percent. So local Republicans are optimistic. Ciattarelli is running again as a Trump loyalist, as is former radio-talk-show host Bill Spadea, while former legislative leader Jon Bramnick has been critical of the president. Democrats have a large field of credible candidates to succeed Murphy, including two members of New Jersey’s congressional delegation (Mikie Sherrill and Josh Gottheimer), two major-city mayors (Ras Baraka of Newark and Steven Fulop of Jersey City), a teachers-union president (Sean Spiller), and a former state legislative leader (Stephen Sweeney). Key factors in the race include how civil or uncivil the Democratic primary race becomes, and whether Trump’s record damages the GOP brand in the state. The primary is in June.
Virginia’s gubernatorial race is less complicated. Former Democratic representative Abigail Spanberger, a nationally prominent centrist from north-central Virginia, is the presumptive nominee for her party. On the Republican side, the front-runner, incumbent Republican lieutenant governor Winsome Earle-Sears, drew relatively late opposition from two rivals who claim she is inadequately conservative; one is media magnet, conspiracy theorist, and former state senator Amanda Chase, who likes to call herself “Trump in high heels.” Earle-Sears is the strong favorite but will have to spend time and money best saved for November.
Republicans are hoping Youngkin’s relatively strong popularity (and upset win in 2021) carries over to his successor, and also note that Trump improved on his 2020 performance in the Commonwealth significantly in 2024 (losing by 5.7 percent as opposed to 10.1 percent in 2020). But Virginia has a long history of electing governors from the party that does not control the White House, and Republicans could also suffer from backlash against Trump-Musk budget and personnel cuts in vote-rich Northern Virginia with its large number of federal employees and contractors.
Mayoral races, including the big one
There are a host of mayoral races in 2025 in cities ranging from Atlanta, Birmingham, Charlotte, and Miami in the South to Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, and St. Louis in the Midwest and Oakland and Seattle on the West Coast. Most major cities are Democratic-run with limited Republican competition, though three holding elections this year do currently have GOP mayors (Fort Worth, Miami, and Omaha). But national politics have a way of influencing local elections in times like these, and that’s definitely true of the mayoral race that will draw the most national attention: New York’s. Perhaps the Big Apple’s Trump-influenced sort-of-Democratic incumbent Eric Adams has little hopes for reelection, but other Democrats will run as potential thorns in the president’s side, and one prominent candidate, former governor Andrew Cuomo, has his own cozy relationships with Republicans (not to mention sexual-harassment complaints and a history of offending voters one at a time) to overcome.
Ballot initiatives
2025 looks to be a quiet year for ballot initiatives, in part because the abortion-rights (and in a few states, abortion ban) measures that convulsed the country after the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022 have reached their likely culmination for a while (mostly because many states with abortion bans and Republican legislatures don’t allow citizen-initiated constitutional amendments). At the moment, only three states have certified statewide ballot measures this year: Wisconsin, where Republican lawmakers put a voter-ID initiative on the ballot for the April 1 Supreme Court election in order to goose conservative turnout; Ohio, which has a bond initiative; and Louisiana, which has four highly technical constitutional amendments.
New measures could be certified later this year, and it’s entirely possible we’ll see more special elections for open congressional or important down-ballot offices. At every step of the way, and right on down to dogcatcher races, the turbulent record of the second Trump administration will be at least a minor, and in many elections a major, factor in the outcome.
