Democrats this week achieved their biggest gains to date in the second Trump era, winning a fiercely contested State Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, while also landing relatively strong showings despite losing two Florida special elections.
Maybe, just maybe, it’s a start.
The results on Tuesday do not erase the long list of harsh realities for Democrats, who remain locked out of power in President Trump’s Washington and severely limited in their efforts to constrain him.
Their party’s popularity is at a generational low, activists are furious with their leaders, and, as Democrats have learned the hard way, victories in obscure and off-year races do not always translate into national success.
But winning is better than losing, and Democrats have indeed been doing some significant winning.
At minimum, the Wisconsin results are a stinging rebuke to Elon Musk, the billionaire and top Trump adviser who spent millions in Wisconsin in support of the conservative candidate. The outcomes made clear that a once-demoralized Democratic base is animated again, on the same night that Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey delighted the party by completing the longest Senate speech on record, a 25-hour tirade and cri de coeur against the president and his administration.
And a substantial victory for the liberal candidate in Wisconsin — a state Mr. Trump won in November, where races are often nail-biters — instantly reverberated nationally.
“When Democrats are outperforming or winning, it’s a big psychological boost in a time when Democrats are feeling pretty low,” said John Anzalone, a veteran Democratic pollster, noting that Tuesday’s results would be closely watched in Virginia, home to a marquee governor’s race later this year.
“They’re going to be dealing with the political environment that Trump has created, which is not good right now for Republicans,” he added.
Democrats recently flipped Republican-held state legislative seats in special elections in Iowa and Pennsylvania. In Louisiana on Saturday, voters rejected four proposed constitutional amendments backed by the Republican governor, Jeff Landry.
Last week Mr. Trump announced he was withdrawing his appointment of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York as his United Nations ambassador, saying the move was partly done to avoid a special election for her seat, which she had won by 24 percentage points in November.
And on Tuesday, House contests in Florida helped explain that Republican uneasiness.
In the state’s conservative Sixth District, State Senator Randy Fine, a Republican, had won by 14 percentage points as of early Wednesday. In November, when turnout was much higher, then-Representative Michael Waltz — now the embattled national security adviser — won the same seat by more than 30 points.
And in the First District, a Democratic House candidate appeared to have won a county that Mr. Trump had carried last fall by 19 percentage points, though she lost the seat overall.
The results were striking.
But the bigger question is whether there is a real backlash brewing beyond the highly engaged, highly motivated and in many cases highly educated voters who reliably turn out for Democrats in races big and small — but who are not numerous enough to win a national election, as November’s results showed.
“What this election is about is turnout, and so while Democrats are a very small percentage of this area, they’re really, really, really mad,” Mr. Fine of Florida said in an interview on Tuesday morning.
His campaign, he said, had “to try to create the same level of intensity there than what Democrats are feeling. But if you survey everybody, I think they’re where they were in November.”
Democrats, however, are betting that broader momentum is building, as the Trump administration, led by Mr. Musk, moves to gut the federal government, slashing programs and creating chaos that Americans across the political spectrum are experiencing and feeling personally.
“They are watching how Donald Trump is empowering a billionaire who is unelected to cut their veterans’ services programs, and yet their representatives, these Republican congressional members, aren’t showing up,” said Sarah Godlewski, the Wisconsin secretary of state. “So they’re like, I can make my voice heard in this Supreme Court election.”
In Wisconsin, the race effectively became a referendum on Mr. Musk, who spent heavily and campaigned for the conservative judicial candidate, Brad Schimel, who lost to the liberal candidate, Susan Crawford.
“We didn’t want to go looking for a fight with the richest man in the world, but when the fight comes to you, you don’t back down. That’s also a big lesson,” said Patrick Guarasci, a senior adviser to Ms. Crawford’s campaign. “People need to hear that. There’s so much wilting going on around the country and I think Susan has shown people that you can stand up and fight back and win.”
Democrats are taking the outcome as evidence of the unpopularity of Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Musk’s platform, and a sign that their Musk-focused message is effective.
“The amount of money there for a Supreme Court race there was astounding, and the fact that people spoke loudly — this wasn’t a close race,” said Representative Suzan DelBene of Washington, who chairs the House Democratic campaign arm. For Republicans, she went on, “The Trump-Musk agenda is a liability for them. They’re hurting the American people, and people across the country are speaking out.”
How Mr. Musk may respond and proceed is uncertain. And of course, in a political environment in which upheavals seem to come every hour, it is far too early to know what the voter mood on Tuesday will mean for the next round of national elections in which Democrats could reclaim some power: the midterms.
“It’s indisputably good for Democrats to win special elections, and those results are clear indicators, they’re like the barometric pressure in a midterm environment,” said former Representative Steve Israel of New York, who led the House Democratic campaign arm roughly a decade ago. “They are not necessarily dispositive.”
Still, such outcomes can be meaningful for fund-raising and momentum. And sometimes they are harbingers of where the national environment is headed.
In 2017, Jon Ossoff, now a Georgia senator, ultimately lost what was then the most expensive House race ever. But he established himself as a powerhouse fund-raiser and his race was an early signifier of rising Democratic energy.
A year later, the Democrat Conor Lamb won a stunning upset in a special House election in Pennsylvania, a moment that Republicans later saw as the beginning of the end of their House majority in 2018.
“The anxiety and concern on our side is very real, and people are looking for ways to translate that into action,” Mr. Lamb said in an interview this week. “The potential for a strong 2026 is there to be actualized, but it still has to be organized and channeled in the right direction. We can’t take it for granted.”
Mr. Anzalone, the pollster, noted that Democrats had become skilled at capitalizing on frustration.
But that, he said, is no substitution for an affirmative, economic-focused message and other efforts to connect with working-class voters.
“Anytime that we’ve been winning is because they’ve been losing,” he said. “Republicans screwing up is not a Democratic strategy.”
Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Madison, Wis., Emily Cochrane from Daytona Beach, Fla., and Dan Simmons from Milwaukee.
