April 1 Elections Recap and Predictions Review for Florida and Wisconsin

A postmortem of the Trump 47 administration's first big elections test and what it means moving forward in both Florida and Wisconsin

Apr 02, 2025

Accountability is an important component of overall trustworthiness, especially if those being held accountable are relied upon for accuracy and precision. Today’s post is straightforward and simple and serves as a recap and predictions review for the three key races that culminated last night (Tuesday, April 1, 2025):

· U.S. House Special Election for Florida’s 1^st Congressional District (FL-1)

· Wisconsin Supreme Court Race

Now, straight into the nuts and bolts we go:

Author’s Note: All results are uncertified and are current as of time of publication.

FL-1

Outcome

Patronis +14.6%

Prediction

Patronis by minimum of 16.0%

Recap

No surprise here, and almost right at my minimum margin. Democrat Gay Valimont didn’t get blown out by 32% like she did in November and managed to flip Escambia County in a low turnout special election, but the GOP voter registration edge and Election Day turnout was too much to handle. Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s Chief Financial Officer, will now fill the seat vacated by Matt Gaetz last November.

FL-6

Outcome

Fine +14.0%

Prediction

Fine by minimum of 16.5%

Recap

Congratulations, Randy – I saw you signed up for Captain K’s Corner last week (thank you), so take a victory lap. The polls said one thing, party registration another. I knew you’d have this race handily, especially once Election Day turnout went off the charts. You didn’t quite make the 16.5% minimum I had pegged, but special elections are strange animals.

Fine won every county (or county portions) assigned to FL-6 and like Patronis, took it off the chin on independent voter splits. Again, this is a normal feature for special elections, which are characterized by low turnout and anti-President voting, no matter who the President is. The seat once belonging to Ron DeSantis and Michael Waltz of Signal-Gate notoriety is now filled, and at close to half the margin it was won by in conjunction with a presidential election last November, as expected.

Wisconsin Supreme Court

Outcome

Crawford +10.0%

Prediction

Crawford by minimum of 5.0%

Recap

There’s so much to unpack here that I could roll it all out in its own article. For the sake of tidiness, I’ll give you the most important takeaways in what, at least to me, was never a competitive race. I disclosed info from my sources in Wisconsin in the linked preview article above that roughly one-fifth of suburbanites self-identifying as Trump voters were planning to vote for Crawford. Already facing an off-year election disadvantage with the left riled up to vote, Schimel needed overwhelming margins in Trump territory plus to hold his own in the softer regions of the state, all while not getting annihilated in Dane and Milwaukee Counties. Crawford, although a Dane County judge, fashioned herself as a moderate from small town Chippewa Falls, and in doing so, prevented Schimel from generating huge margins and Trump-sized support where he needed them just to have a shot. These are the very real political problems facing statewide Republicans in Wisconsin.

Then you have the fortified elections to contend with. You may have heard Democrats kicking and screaming about Elon Musk supposedly buying votes for Schimel, but they have little to say about their own get-out-the-vote (ballot harvesting) scams, such as the one they used in 2023 to get Janet Protasiewicz in office, which George Soros funded and Jonathan Cagle and others have thoroughly exposed in highlighting degree of foreign interference present in even state elections like this one.

Here are the key takeaways from the race:

· Schimel had enormous turnout for an off-year race like this one. In fact, he currently is listed as having 1,063,244 votes, or 41,422 more votes than Protasiewicz did in 2023 when she vanquished Daniel Kelly by 11.1%.

· Crawford, however, has nearly as many ballots (1,301,128) as Hillary Clinton did in the 2016 presidential election in a state that isn’t growing much. To put these numbers in perspective, Republicans actually won a 2019 race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court with their candidate having just 606,414 votes. In the previous election (2018), neither candidate exceeded 555,848 votes.

· What this means is that Democrats have mastered mail-in ballot collection over a lengthy early voting period and can accurately forecast how many ballots they will need in order to overcome any Republican performance, ranging from mundane to prodigious. Here, they defeated Schimel by double digits when he posted a vote tally higher than any previous Democrat vote tally in the history of state Supreme Court races.

Ballot tallies by candidate in WI Supreme Court Races since 2018

Furthermore, Dane and Milwaukee Counties produced Crawford margins of 181,746 and 150,033, respectively, in race she won statewide by 237,884. That means Schimel won the state outside of those two counties by 93,895. Some of this problem is owed to the political equation of the college and seat of government county (Dane), and the urban slum voter base of Milwaukee, but also to the GOP’s unwillingness to compete in those counties and dent margins. To further understand the election corruption picture in Wisconsin, read this article written just after the November 2024 election, which outlines the crisis of same-day voter registration and the role Milwaukee has played in spoiling statewide elections.

This is a race I wish I had gotten wrong, but also one I figured could spiral out of control thanks to the reasons listed above. From my article last week predicting the outcome:

Crawford has the edge, and I think she will win by a comfortable margin, perhaps even a high margin once all is said and done.

Conclusion

Captain K Predictions Correct 3 of 3

Closest Margin Hit Patronis +14.6% (called 16.0%)

With Elise Stefanik now returning to Congress, the two Florida races conclude the defense of vacant Republican seats. There are a few long-shot races for Democrat-held House seats still to come, but the first big elections test of the Trump 47 era is behind us. Party registration analysis is still king, but even that doesn’t extend to unique races like ones heavily dependent on local issues like those found in Wisconsin, which runs elections that pale in comparison to those found in most third world nations and are heavily dependent on collecting mail-in ballots rather than motivating people to polls. The Wisconsin loss stings but wasn’t hard to see coming. It should be viewed as the loss of a skirmish on a map of long-term battles. On a positive and quite curious note, Wisconsin voters also passed a ballot measure by 25.6% calling for Voter ID to be added to the state’s Constitution while they were supposedly busy voting Democrat in near-presidential numbers.

Refer a friend

Seth Keshel, MBA, is a former Army Captain of Military Intelligence and Afghanistan veteran. His analytical method of election forecasting and analytics is known worldwide, and he has been commended by President Donald J. Trump for his work in the field.