Politics
Live results: Florida special election for Mike Waltz’s seat
Florida voters are heading to the polls to choose a replacement for former Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), the current national security adviser, in what has shaped up to be a major referendum on President Trump’s first few months back in office. Though the district went for Trump and Waltz by around 30 points last year…
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The wave of populist energy propelling progressive Democrats to primary wins across the country reduced Wednesday morning to a ripple, just pushing Abdul El-Sayed to a narrow victory over his more moderate opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens.
Francesca Hong will try to keep the progressive momentum alive in another swing-state test in Wisconsin next week.
But if Hong, the democratic socialist frontrunner to claim her party’s gubernatorial nomination, wins her primary, she’s already recognizing the need to unite a broader coalition to win in November.
“We absolutely need every single vote, and we’ll be fighting to earn every single vote,” Hong said in an exclusive interview with Blue Light News on Wednesday morning.
“I’ve talked to moderates and independents, Republicans, folks who don’t have a political home right now, and they have a lot of concerns about what’s going on in the state. They also have concerns about things I’ve said in the past,” she added. “But what we’re focusing on is how to come together to actually deliver for Wisconsinites, and that’s going to be electing Democrats down and up the ballot this cycle.”
Hong, a state Assembly member and former restaurant owner, this week faced criticism from across the political spectrum about a slew of old social media posts espousing far-left views, from declarations to abolish the police to a call to “cancel Thanksgiving.” And El-Sayed’s knife-edge win right next door is reigniting concerns among some Democrats that a battleground may not be ready for such a lefty leader.
Hong appears to be moderating on — or at least adding context to — some of her more controversial positions. She has walked back her stance on police abolition while emphasizing the need to better tackle the underlying causes of crime. She told Blue Light News many of her old posts were “jokes,” including the one about Thanksgiving, which she said is actually her favorite holiday.
Still, Hong isn’t giving up her democratic socialist bonafides.
“The vision that we have for Wisconsin is one that my local DSA chapter shares,” she said, adding that “we’re fighting to make sure that we’re building the diverse coalition that we need to make sure that we win this for Wisconsinites in November.”
Hong has notched endorsements from several national progressives, including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who rallied alongside her and the progressive podcaster Hasan Piker last weekend.
But she hasn’t been endorsed by the country’s two most prominent democratic socialists and standardbearers of the progressive movement: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Hong told Blue Light News she has not spoken to either and attributed their lack of endorsement to their focus on federal races — though Sanders endorsed Troy Jackson in the Vermont governor’s race before he lost and became the Senate nominee, and both endorsed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last year.
“We have been focusing on winning a Democratic primary and staying above the drama,” Hong said.
Despite a major fundraising disadvantage, Hong has emerged as an unlikely frontrunner. She has led in the polls for months and became the all-but-presumed nominee after her main opponents, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, both dropped out amid simmering scandals that embroiled their campaigns. Hong’s chief primary opponent next week is Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who dropped out of the race then jumped back in last month and has the endorsement of the state’s current Gov. Tony Evers, a moderate Democrat. Whoever wins on Tuesday will face off against the President Donald Trump-endorsed GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany.
Hong believes her lead is due to a grassroots campaign that has excited Democratic primary voters in Wisconsin. “Free child care, fully funding our schools, taxing the billionaires and a moratorium on AI data centers is what the majority of Wisconsinites have been telling us that they want, and we are the campaign that is listening,” she said in the interview.
The Crowley campaign is pointing to the Michigan results as a sign that they can still catch Hong. “There is still a long way to go in this race,” Crowley spokesperson Eddie Vale said. “If you can’t handle an easy BLN interview about Thanksgiving how can you possibly face the full wrath of the Republican attack machine?”
To beat Tiffany in the general, Hong would likely need to pick up support from more moderate Democrats and independents — all while dodging a deluge of Republican attacks digging up her old comments and seeking to paint her as “woke.”
“All Francesca Hong has to offer Wisconsin is bigger government, a plan to make Wisconsin the highest-taxed state in the nation, and a record of calling to abolish the police and prisons,” Tiffany said in a statement to Blue Light News.
“They are trying to get a head start on labeling her ahead of the primary because they don’t see the result changing,” said Winnebago County Executive Gordon Hintz, who was minority leader in the state Assembly when Hong was first elected.
“There’s a very big discussion going on in Wisconsin, much as there was in Michigan, about whether a very progressive candidate can prevail in the primary and in the general election,” said John Nichols, a Madison native who wrote an anti-capitalist manifesto with Sanders. “It goes to a lot of questions about what’s been said in the past and how much people care.”
Asked if she planned to change her messaging strategy ahead of the primary, Hong flipped the question back to Tiffany. “When it comes to tailoring messaging, it’s important to recognize that what we have to offer are actual solutions, and what Tom Tiffany is bringing are clearly more Trump tariffs,” she said.
Tiffany, in his statement, hit back. “While she focuses on promoting socialism, defending inflammatory statements, and campaigning alongside terrorist sympathizers, I’ll remain focused on ending the 400-year property tax hike, rooting out fraud, bringing good-paying jobs back to Wisconsin, and making life more affordable after eight years under a Democrat governor,” he said.
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Politics
Anti-Trump conservatives Tucker Carlson, MTG, Massie huddle about launching third-party movement
President Donald Trump’s most vocal opponents on the right were sowing the seeds for a future third-party political organization during a weekend get-together aimed at undercutting the Republican establishment.
The meeting at Tucker Carlson’s compound in Maine with Rep. Thomas Massie, former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and others — captured in a photo posted by Greene on Saturday — served as a launch pad for a possible independent presidential campaign focused on unwinding U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts.
“We said no more foreign wars and we meant it and supported Donald Trump because he made that promise. But he’s betrayed us all,” Greene wrote in the post. “The movement has begun.”
Joe Kent, the former Trump national security official who resigned earlier this year and attended the weekend confab with Carlson, said the group congregated to strategize on how to best organize their shared opposition to the war in Iran.
“There’s a lot more nuts-and-bolts work that needs to be done there,” Kent said in an interview on “The Young Turks,” the progressive talk show. “Running as a third-party candidate is challenging. Not impossible, but it is very challenging. But that’s kind of the consensus that we came to, that the current system just simply doesn’t work, and we have to find something new to save our country.”
Carlson, Greene and Massie all backed Trump ahead of the 2024 election. But each one broke with Trump over the course of his second term as the Trump administration continued to coordinate military operations with Israel in the Middle East. Greene and Massie were also loudly critical of Trump’s opposition to releasing federal investigative documents relating to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, further drawing Trump’s ire.
It’s unclear who would lead the newborn movement. Kent said every attendee at the Maine meeting urged Carlson to run for president in 2028 with their group’s backing but noted that Carlson said he wouldn’t run.
“Hopefully he wakes up one day and Tucker says he’s going to run,” Kent said.
Carlson and Massie did not respond to requests for comment. Greene declined to comment.
The challenges facing third-party and independent presidential candidates are enormous. They must navigate different signature requirements and deadlines in each state just to get on the ballot. Past independent campaigns have been unable to compete financially with the two major parties.
The most recent third-party presidential campaign — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent bid in 2024 — ended months before Election Day when Kennedy endorsed Trump. At the time he dropped out, Kennedy was polling in single digits and fighting lawsuits seeking to block him from the ballot in multiple states.
Kent said the policy platform for the group’s hypothetical third-party campaign in 2028 would ignore most domestic matters and further emphasize their staunch anti-interventionism.
“I think it is having a very, very simple platform, and it’s acknowledging upfront, like, we are going to disagree on a lot of domestic policy and a lot of social issues,” Kent said. “At the end of the day, the president can talk a lot about all those things, but he really doesn’t have a lot of power.”
“We do agree that we don’t want Israel dictating our foreign policy,” he added. “We don’t want any more foreign wars.”
Lisa Kashinsky, Alec Hernandez and Sam Benson contributed to this story.
Abdul El-Sayed has just three months to convince a fractured Democratic Party to unite behind him after a nasty primary.
Even before his narrow win over moderate Rep. Haley Stevens became official Wednesday, El-Sayed had begun the difficult process of trying to patch things up with a moderate wing of the party he’d spent months flaying as corporatist stooges as Republicans launched their first wave of attacks of the general election. He says he looks forward to “building relationships” with Jewish voters. And some top Democrats in Michigan and Washington alike are largely filing behind him in a show of unity ahead of November’s high-stakes election.
“To all of our supporters here tonight, watching on TV, tomorrow we begin to mend fences,” El-Sayed told a crowd of supporters early Wednesday before the race was called, asking them to show “magnanimity in victory.”
“We need to move forward and start bringing this party together,” El-Sayed reiterated on MS NOW’s Morning Joe hours later.
And, in a speech formalizing his victory after it was called at 10 a.m. Eastern, he said: “Whatever differences that we might have had in the primary, they pale in comparison to what unifies us.”
El-Sayed has little time to force a reconciliation before he faces off against Mike Rogers, a Donald Trump-endorsed former representative with the backing of Washington’s GOP Senate apparatus. Michigan is one of the nation’s top battlegrounds, a state Trump has won twice but where Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin narrowly defeated Rogers in 2024.
Early voting begins in five weeks.
Already prominent Michigan Democrats like Slotkin and Rep. Debbie Dingell are working to consolidate support behind El-Sayed, showing efforts from both the moderate and progressive flanks after a bitter primary that put tensions over Israel and campaign finance in the spotlight.
“We do have to unite,” Dingell said in an interview. “Abdul’s got to figure out how he’s going to bring people that were part of Haley’s coalition and have them know that he cares about the values that they have, which I know he does, but he’s got to talk to them. This coalition has got to be a very broad coalition.”
Michigan Democrats plan to hold their so-called post-primary “unity breakfast” Thursday morning in Southfield, where they will rally behind party nominees. The contest was separated by less than a percentage point when the AP called the race Wednesday morning. Stevens immediately conceded and called for unity. And state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who dropped her U.S. Senate bid a month before the primary, had already endorsed El-Sayed, saying she wanted to enter November “as a unified party” after “a brutal primary.”
“We must elect Democrats up and down the ballot,” Stevens said in a statement Wednesday, promising her support to El-Sayed after calling her primary with him “a thorough and rigorous campaign that brought out the full span of views within the Democratic Party.”
The primary was animated by charges of sexism, racism and religious bigotry. Splits over Israel played prominently in the race: El-Sayed attacked Stevens incessantly for relying on outside spending from groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which spent a record $32 million on her behalf. In the race’s final days, Stevens and her allies accused El-Sayed of antisemitism and sexism, and El-Sayed’s allies accused Stevens of Islamophobia.
Outgoing Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), who had endorsed Stevens, said he spoke with El-Sayed Wednesday morning and congratulated him. He said he will “work hard to make sure” Democrats coalesce behind El-Sayed.
“The party has to all come together right now,” he told Blue Light News. “We don’t have a lot of time, but everybody has to come together and understand that as Democrats, whatever differences we have between us as Democrats are minor compared to the differences between our Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate.”
Republicans are already plastering the airwaves with their preferred attack: Painting El-Sayed as “radical” and “dangerous” while emphasizing the full name of the American-born son of Egyptian immigrants.
“Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, the most radical Senate candidate in America,” a new National Republican Senatorial Committee ad says.
“Abdul El-Sayed: Dangerously radical,” says a new Senate Leadership Fund ad.
In a statement Wednesday morning, Rogers called El-Sayed an “extremist” who “campaigns with people who refuse to condemn terrorism” — likely a reference to comments made by his ally, far-left streamer Hasan Piker, which Piker has since said he regretted. “I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice,” said Rogers, a former FBI special agent. “Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.”
Cullen Schwarz, a longtime Democratic strategist in Michigan, said Democrats need to portray Rogers as the extreme one if they’re going to emerge victorious in the must-win Senate race.
“As Democrats move forward, I hope we remember that in politics, the real battle is over moving the Overton window,” he said. “The Republicans are going to try to paint progressives across the country as extreme. It’s extreme to support Donald Trump.”
If that is the frame, Schwarz said, he doesn’t think Democrats will have any issues reunifying. “Democrats will immediately remember the fight we’re facing in the fall,” he said. “There’s been no force more unifying for Democrats than Donald Trump,”
El-Sayed could have the most work to do in rural, working-class areas and among Black voters. He won just 34 percent of the vote in Detroit, according to unofficial returns. And Stevens won a majority of votes across counties where less than 30 percent of adults have a college degree, according to a POLITICO analysis.
Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), said Democrats — from Michigan to Washington — need to line up behind El-Sayed.
“Frankly, the Democratic establishment needs to very quickly consolidate around him — all of them,” said Duss, executive vice president at Center for International Policy. “If they believe what they say about needing to take Michigan for Democrats in the Senate, they can show us by getting all in behind El-Sayed right now.”
El-Sayed’s emergence from the contentious primary — which saw record levels of outside spending in one of the nation’s key battlegrounds — will require some Washington Democrats who previously kept him at arm’s length to now embrace him. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). said he preferred Stevens in the primary, but he released a statement Wednesday saying he and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Kirsten Gillibrand “look forward to working with Abdul and Democrats across Michigan to win this seat in November.”
And the narrow result is forcing progressives who had been expecting a dominant, double-digit victory to recalibrate their expectations as their attention shifts to the general.
“Tough result for Democrats,” said Adrian Hemond, founder of a Michigan-based bipartisan advocacy and outreach firm. “The promised populist wave was a dud… If you think the primary was nasty, just wait until next week. General election voters are less college educated and less ideological, so they have to find a way to sell ideology to normal people.”
Jessica Piper, Adam Wren, Ali Bianco and Mia McCarthy contributed reporting.
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