Florida Democrats just picked up a second seat in Tuesday's special elections
Brian Nathan's win is the 30th red-to-blue flip of Trump's second term. The GOP has flipped zero seats in that span.
In the second massive upset of the night for Florida Democrats, Brian Nathan, a Navy veteran and union official, flipped a state Senate seat that became vacant after Gov. Ron DeSantis tapped its previous occupant to serve as his lieutenant governor.
Nathan overcame a huge financial disadvantage to beat Republican state Rep. Josie Tomkow and win the Tampa-area 14th District. Nathan was leading by a margin of 50.2 to 49.8 when Tomkow conceded.
Earlier in the evening, Democrat Emily Gregory won a separate special election for a state House seat in Palm Beach County that includes Donald Trump’s seaside lair of Mar-a-Lago.
DeSantis himself put the 14th District in peril for the GOP when he elevated Sen. Jay Collins to replace his previous second-in-command last August. Though the district had voted for Donald Trump by a 53-46 margin in 2024, four years earlier, it had gone for Joe Biden 51-47. On Tuesday night, it returned to form.
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The governor, however, seemed to understand the risk he’d created for his party. DeSantis refused to call a special election, prompting the ACLU to file a lawsuit to compel him to take action. He finally scheduled the contest in October, 73 days after he picked Collins.
In a fitting twist, while observers speculated that the term-limited DeSantis had wanted Collins to succeed him, the relationship between the two Republicans turned “nuclear bad in the blink of an eye,” as NBC reporter Matt Dixon put it. (Collins did eventually launch a bid for governor but has polled poorly in the GOP primary, often in the single digits.)
Nathan focused on improving public education and addressing soaring property insurance rates, but he also called Tomkow out for allegedly not living in the district—a requirement for sitting lawmakers under the state Constitution.
As in the state House, Florida Republicans hold a two-thirds majority, but with Nathan’s victory, Democrats now need to flip just one more seat to break the GOP’s supermajority in November.
This is now the second state Senate seat Republicans have lost during Trump’s second term after a governor chose an incumbent senator as their new lieutenant governor. The same thing happened in Iowa in January of last year, when Iowa Democrat Mike Zimmer won a deep-red seat held by Chris Cournoyer, who was tapped by Gov. Kim Reynolds to fill a vacancy.
In addition, Nathan’s win represents the 30th legislative seat that has flipped from red to blue since Trump returned to the White House. During that time, Republicans have flipped zero Democratic seats.
This is a huge symbolic victory for Democrats, especially the FL Democratic Party.
It is not just impressive that the Democratic Party has flipped this many seats in the last year-plus, but also the geographic range of the flips. From Fort Worth, Texas, to Palm Beach, Florida. From Little Rock, Arkansas to Athens, Georgia. From Sioux City, Iowa to Lancaster, Pennsylvania.