Democrats don’t expect to win the special elections coming up in early 2025. But they see them as a way to rebuild enthusiasm that flushed to zero at the end of 2024 — if they can just get past lingering resignation over Donald Trump’s revival.
“These special elections are happening in ruby red districts, but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to sit around and just let Republicans walk into office unopposed,” Eden Giagnorio, a communications director for the Florida Democratic Party, told NOTUS. “But we see this as kind of playing the long game, you know. We’re going to use these social elections to organize for the future and rebuild.”
Democratic candidates are already vying for a primary win in Florida’s 6th district, where Mike Waltz was tapped as Trump’s national security adviser. In upstate New York’s 21st District, no Democratic primary has officially kicked off, but the seat will be in play if Elise Stefanik is confirmed as Trump’s United Nations ambassador.
Democrats see parallels between the three House races and a slate of special elections in 2017 and 2018, where the party had surprisingly good showings despite few wins. Of the 14 House races where Democrats went up against Republican challengers, three candidates flipped seats and even more tailed their opponents by fewer than 10 percentage points.
The party hopes next year can shape up similarly.
To Sen. Jon Ossoff, who ran in a surprisingly competitive and high-profile House special election in 2017, there’s a similar national energy. Ossoff didn’t win that race, but in Georgia’s 6th District, which a Democrat hadn’t represented since 1979, his 3.6-point loss signaled unprecedented enthusiasm and mobilization from Democrats in the wake of Trump’s first win.
“I think there’s going to be tremendous enthusiasm and huge energy this year and in
the midterm,” Ossoff told NOTUS.
The key to turning that enthusiasm into tangible results for Democrats?
“There’s no substitute for shoe-leather get-out-the-vote work,” Ossoff said.
But there’s a potential issue, according to Conor Lamb, the former Pennsylvania Democratic representative who flipped a seat in a 2018 special election race decided by less than 1 percentage point. Lamb said the 2025 races would happen too close to the start of the second Trump presidency for voters to really turn on him.
“There might not be very much Trump fatigue in their district, which there really clearly was in my district, and I benefited from that. But I do think it gives a Democratic challenger a chance to step forward and make their own unique case about themselves,” Lamb told NOTUS.
There’s also the fact that Democrats are already responding differently to Trump’s win. The start of the Trump era in 2017 and 2018 saw women’s marches, protests for gun control and organized resistance around the country, but those at the helm of those movements have already said they’re not looking to stage anything like that again. It’s created a substantial shift that some former Democratic candidates say doesn’t bode well for a repeat of the party’s resilience.
“I don’t sense from where I’m sitting now the same sort of immediate disdain for Trump that was there before,” said Archie Parnell, the Democratic candidate for South Carolina’s 5th District special election in 2017.
And James Thompson, a Democrat who ran in a House special election for Kansas’ 4th District in 2017, said, “It feels different this time around.”
“I don’t see as big a push anyway, at least coming across my feeds, for people to organize and to get out and resist and those types of things,” Thompson told NOTUS.
Thompson, whose race didn’t receive much national attention until it became close in its last days, lost to his Republican opponent by just over 6 percentage points. The outcome prompted calls from Democratic lawmakers for the national party to invest more in candidates in all 50 states.
In the two Florida districts and the upstate New York district, financial investment won’t necessarily carry Democrats to wins — or even to the small-margin losses that defined their predecessors in 2017 and 2018. Republicans have held Florida’s 1st District since 1995, Florida’s 6th District since 1989 and New York’s 21st District since 2015.
“It won’t even be close,” Joel Rudman, a Republican running in the special election for the seat Gaetz vacated, told NOTUS, adding that Trump’s presidential victory is “the crest of the wave that we hope to kind of ride into victory in late January.”
Democrats see some reason for optimism that they can at least be competitive in the specials. In November, while young voters in the rest of the country shifted right, Democrats saw success in three upstate New York districts near the 21st District largely due to the party’s efforts with college students.
Some congressional hopefuls also say the last few weeks in Washington — including a messy fight over government funding — have already given Democrats enough to campaign around.
Paula Collins — a Democrat who lost to Stefanik in New York’s 21st in November and plans to try her hand at the seat again come 2025 — said Trump’s (and Elon Musk’s) influence before he’s even taken office might embolden voters.
“Things are happening at a rapid pace with this administration,” Collins told NOTUS. “We’re seeing that it’s not like we’re going to have to wait six months or a year into the new administration to say, ‘Oh, you see, this isn’t working.’”
Still, there isn’t a consensus about enthusiasm in the party.
“Democrats are not galvanized the way that they were in 2017 and 2018. It’s a much different environment,” Michael Worley, a Democratic strategist based in Florida, told NOTUS.
Worley pointed to the election postmortem that’s come up time and time again — Democrats lost their grip on working-class voters in the presidential election, and the party is going to need a major overhaul to fix that.
“The only hope for Democrats would be that there ends up being slightly higher than expected Democratic turnout, which gives them a glimmer of hope,” Worley said. “But these seats are so ruby red that it’s really hard, in the most optimistic of views, to assume that Democrats are going to have any success here.”
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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the districts with a Democratic primary in Florida.
Shifra Dayak is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.