WASHINGTON (AP) — Control of the U.S. House isn’t on the line in Tuesday’s special congressional primaries in Florida, but Republicans are still eager to find replacements for former GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz and Michael Waltz to add some breathing room to their slender majority in the chamber.
President Donald Trump looms large in the race, in both Tuesday’s primary and the special general election on April 1. He’s endorsed candidates in both GOP primaries and easily carried both districts in the November election.
Trump has backed state Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis among a crowded 10-person field in Gaetz’s former 1st Congressional District. In Waltz’s 6th Congressional District, he endorsed state Rep. Randy Fine over two other candidates. Fine represents a Brevard County-based state Senate district located outside the Palm Coast-area seat he hopes to fill.
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Gun control activist Gay Valimont is unopposed for the Democratic nomination in the 1st District. She challenged Gaetz for the seat in November, receiving 34% of the vote. Democrats George Selmont and Josh Weil compete for the nomination in the 6th District. Selmont is an attorney and filmmaker who ran for a neighboring congressional seat in 2018. He received 32% of the vote against GOP Rep. John Rutherford. Weil is a public school educator in Osceola County.
The 1st Congressional District borders Alabama on the Gulf Coast in the westernmost part of the Florida panhandle. It is home to both Naval Air Station Pensacola and Eglin Air Force Base. The district is among the most reliably Republican areas of the state. The four counties that make up the 1st District have voted for Republican presidential candidates almost continually for the past 60 years.
On the other side of the state, the 6th Congressional District sits on the Atlantic Coast and includes Daytona Beach. Republican presidential candidates have carried all six counties in the district for the last four presidential elections. The Republican winning streak in some of the counties stretches back for decades before that. Lake County, for instance, hasn’t supported a Democrat for president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1944.
Trump’s support should carry considerable weight in both districts. His weakest performance in either district in last year’s general election was in Escambia County in the 1st District, where he received 59% of the vote.
In the November general election, Gaetz and Waltz won reelection with 66% and 67% of the vote, respectively. Gaetz resigned after Trump nominated him to be attorney general, but he later withdrew from consideration following ongoing scrutiny over a federal sex trafficking investigation and a House Ethics Committee investigation. Waltz resigned Monday to become White House national security adviser.
The Associated Press does not make projections and will declare a winner only when it’s determined there is no scenario that would allow the trailing candidates to close the gap. If a race has not been called, the AP will continue to cover any newsworthy developments, such as candidate concessions or declarations of victory. In doing so, the AP will make clear that it has not yet declared a winner and explain why.
Machine recounts in Florida are automatic if the vote margin is 0.5% of the total vote or less. If the machine recount results in a vote margin of 0.25% of the total vote or less, a manual recount of overvotes and undervotes is required. The AP may declare a winner in a race that is eligible for a recount if it can determine the lead is too large for a recount or legal challenge to change the outcome.
Here’s a look at what to expect on Tuesday:
Special primary day
The special primaries in Florida’s 1st and 6th Congressional Districts will be held Tuesday. Polls close at 7 p.m. local time, which is 7 p.m. ET in the 6th District and 8 p.m. ET in the 1st District.
What’s on the ballot?
The AP will provide vote results and declare winners in the Republican primary in the 1st Congressional District and the Democratic and Republican primaries in the 6th Congressional District. A Democratic primary will not be held in the 1st District as there is only one candidate.
Who gets to vote?
Florida does not allow voters registered with one political party to vote in another party’s primary. Democrats may not vote in the Republican primary or vice versa. Independent or unaffiliated voters may not participate in either primary.
What do turnout and advance vote look like?
As of October 2024, Florida’s 1st Congressional District had about 301,000 active registered Republicans and about 117,000 active registered Democrats. The 6th District had about 262,000 active registered Republicans and about 138,000 active registered Democrats.
Turnout in the August Republican congressional primaries was about 34% of registered Republicans in the 1st District and about 31% in the 6th District. Democrats did not have competitive primaries in those districts.
As of Thursday morning, more than 11,000 ballots had been cast in the 1st District Republican primary, nearly 15,000 in the 6th District Republican primary and nearly 9,000 in the 6th District Democratic primary.
How long does vote-counting usually take?
In the 2024 general election, the AP first reported results in the 1st Congressional District at 8:01 p.m. ET, or one minute after polls closed. The election night tabulation in the 1st District ended at 1:33 a.m. ET with about 99% of total votes counted. In the 6th Congressional District, the first batch of votes was reported at 7 p.m. ET, just as polls closed. The last vote update of the night was at 11:48 p.m. ET, with about 99% of the vote counted.
Are we there yet?
As of Tuesday, there will be 63 days until the special general elections in Florida’s 1st and 6th Congressional Districts.
Republicans in the Florida legislature on Monday delivered a humiliating rebuke to Ron DeSantis by shutting down the governor’s planned crackdown on immigration in the state and moving ahead with their own proposals.
Lawmakers in the Florida House and Senate abruptly “gaveled out” a special legislative session that DeSantis had called to seek their approval for measures he drew up in support of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration agenda.
They included the appointment of a new state “immigration officer” who would be appointed by the governor to liaise with the White House, and report directly to him.
Republican Senate president Ben Albritton accused DeSantis of trying to usurp the legislature’s authority to write laws, and said the chambers would pursue their own immigration bill following the “spirit and letter” of the president’s immigration policies without the governor’s input.
“President Trump is clearly leading from the Oval Office and has everything under control. Sometimes leadership is not about being out in front. It’s about following the leaders you trust, and I trust President Trump,” Albritton said.
Trump previously praised DeSantis for calling the session in a post on Truth Social, but was on his golf course in Miami on Monday morning and had no immediate comment about the day’s developments.
The Miami Herald said the Republican lawmakers’ action amounted to a “kneecapping” for DeSantis, who previously commanded their absolute loyalty until his failed challenge to Trump for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.
Daniel Perez, the Republican House speaker, had previously said that DeSantis’s early summoning of lawmakers to Tallahassee, and demands they approve his proposals ahead of the regular 60-day legislative session that begins next month, was “overreach”.
“We have the opportunity to move both expeditiously and thoughtfully. We do not have to choose between right now and getting it right,” he said on Monday.
Both Florida chambers were planning to come back into session on Monday afternoon to begin debating legislation expected to be introduced by Republican state senator Joe Gruters, who has been a vocal critic of DeSantis in the past.
Under his 75-page bill, there would still be a state immigration officer, but he would report to the legislature, and not to the governor. One name floated to fill the role is Wilton Simpson, the state’s agriculture commissioner, who has been tipped as a possible successor as governor in 2028, and who has had what observers describe as an “icy” relationship with DeSantis.
Among other measures, DeSantis had wanted to make it a state crime for undocumented migrants to enter Florida; sought to pressure local authorities and law enforcement to join in deportation purges; and end in-state university tuition rates for non-citizens.
He also wanted another expansion of his much-maligned unauthorized alien transport program (UATP), an “act of calculated deception” according to critics in which migrants were tricked onto buses and planes with false promises of accommodation and jobs, then dumped in Democratic states.
Immigration advocates criticized the position of both DeSantis and the Florida legislature on Monday.
“UnidosUS is deeply concerned by the state’s focus on immigration policies designed to posture for national political ambitions rather than address the urgent needs of Floridians,” the group’s Florida director Jared Nordlund said in a statement.
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“[They] serve primarily as a platform for advancing extreme immigration enforcement reminiscent of the Trump administration’s policies rather than being laser-focused on lowering the cost of living or increasing wages. DeSantis is choosing to ignore the economic crises he has created and is instead using the state as a testing ground for divisive immigration measures to bolster his political image.”
Over the weekend, a number of raids by federal immigration authorities took place in south Florida, with more than 950 arrested on Sunday, the Miami New Times reported.
In a further act of independence Monday, the Florida legislature voted almost unanimously to override DeSantis’s veto last year of large chunks of the state’s budget, the first such challenge to his financial authority since he took office in 2019. Among DeSantis’s cuts that angered both Democrats and Republicans was the near-wholesale stripping of the state’s arts budget.
In condemning the governor’s veto on Monday, Perez noted that over those six years, the legislature had increased funding for the executive office of the governor by 70%.
“This veto was at best a misunderstanding of the importance of the appropriation, or, at worst, an attempt to threaten the independence of our separate branch of government. Whatever the rationale, this Special Session represents the first opportunity to correct this veto,” Perez said, reported by Politico.
Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party, said in a post on Twitter/X that the abrupt ending of the session and budget rebuke had delivered “a small dose of democracy”.
“The Florida legislature just overrode Ron DeSantis’s veto of millions of dollars from the leg operating budget and gave him the middle finger for his BS special session call,” she wrote.
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On the latest episode of This Week in South Florida, host Glenna Milberg was joined by Florida State Sen. Jason Pizzo, attorney Linda Osberg-Braun, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Rep. Carlos Gimenez.
The full episode can be seen at the top of this page.
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