MIAMI — Republicans’ all-hands-on-deck strategy in a tight Florida special election pulled state Sen. Randy Fine into the House on Tuesday, an outcome that slightly increases the margins President Donald Trump will have to work with as he tries to push his agenda through Congress.
According to the Associated Press, Trump-endorsed Fine won in a special election against Democrat Josh Weil, a progressive and a teacher, despite nervousness from national party operatives and closer-than-expected polling. Fine, a bare-knuckle former gambling executive who embraces the nickname the “Hebrew Hammer,” will add another firebrand to Florida’s congressional delegation.
The seat in Florida’s 6th District was up for grabs after former Rep. Mike Waltz joined the Trump administration as national security adviser. National interest in the election surged in recent days, in part because Waltz has been at the center of a political firestorm after accidentally adding The Atlantic’s editor in chief to a sensitive group chat discussing attack plans in Yemen.
Intrigue also percolated two weeks ago as warning signs for Fine emerged. Federal Election Commission reports showed Weil had significantly outfundraised Fine — $10 million to under $1 million — and an internal poll from Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio showed Weil up by 3 percentage points over Fine two weeks before the election.
The late figures and panic mobilized GOP support, given that the White House didn’t want to lose the seat or even let Democrats tighten the race and try to use it as an example of how voters might be souring on Trump’s agenda so early in his second term.
In the closing days of the campaign, Fine got vocal support from conservative commentators, Trump and a political committee associated with Elon Musk. Trump himself held a tele-town hall with voters Thursday and urged the district to back Fine. Also holding a phone event for Fine: GOP Rep. Byron Donalds, the Trump-endorsed 2026 candidate for governor.
Fewer voters tend to turn out in special elections thanks to low awareness. The seat is also so reliably red — having supported Trump by 30 points in November — that GOP voters may have initially taken a win in the seat for granted.
Weil’s campaign brought in major fundraising numbers by leveraging small-dollar donors from outside the state, mostly through social media ads that urged voters to support him so he could stymie Trump’s agenda by further narrowing GOP House margins.
Fine has been a thorn in the side of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for more than a year. The legislator flipped his endorsement from DeSantis to Trump during the 2024 GOP primary, creating a platform for other Republicans to do the same. He continued to clash with the governor afterward.
DeSantis last week publicly blamed Fine during a press conference adjacent to the state senator’s hometown for the closer-than-expected predictions and dismissed any theories that the race was a referendum on Trump. He instead said the forecasts were a “reflection of the specific candidate running in that race” though he predicted Fine would pull through.
While in the Legislature, Fine was the sponsor of multiple pieces of high-profile legislation, including the push to dissolve Walt Disney World’s special tax district and the effort to ban critical race theory from public schools. He also wrote a bill DeSantis signed into law in February that rescinded in-state tuition for undocumented students whose parents brought them to the U.S. as children.
He told POLITICO ahead of the election that he looked forward to “focusing on President Trump’s agenda and making sure Speaker Johnson and President Trump have another soldier on the battlefield to get done what they need to get done.”
“I do think that my style will work well in Washington,” he said. “I mean, I’m an aggressive guy. … I made it my goal to just put my head down and do a good job and do what I thought was right, to say what I think, and not worry about it. And I think that worked.”
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