There Are No Lessons in Florida & Tennessee

State Rep. Angie Nixon (D-FL)

The 2026 midterms are not even counted yet (congratulations to Scott Colom & Eileen Laubacher on your victories in the past 24 hours), and people are still trying to figure out lessons from it (and point fingers in terms of what went wrong).  For the Republicans, there's a lot of lessons to be had, from clearly ignoring the struggles of everyday voters to overplaying the winning hand of 2024 (the Republicans' obsession with transgender athletes may have worked when people could afford to drive their car...less so now) to clearly making sincere mistakes with candidate recruitment.  But because the Democrats are forever a party unsatisfied, there are also Democrats pointing fingers in the wake of several key losses, particularly in the state of Florida, where David Jolly & Angie Nixon both lost by single digits, and in Tennessee, where Marsha Blackburn lost by less than 3-points and Democrats saw Republicans get less than 52% of the vote in five seats, and are still leading in the 4th district, the reddest congressional district in the country to have potentially elected a Democratic member of the House.

These fingers tend to come from the Far Left/leftist movement, and most of them seem directed at establishment figures like Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, & the DNC, and it's worth asking the question-were these seats truly winnable?  It's ultimately a question without an answer-we are never able to see how different a race is because time is always moving forward, and we can't see the other possibilities before us.  It's therefore a conversation doomed to madness, as everyone thinks they're right, and there's no way to prove someone else wrong, and you get stuck in your own prejudices.

But I'm going to apply a slight bit of logic here because I think it's unhealthy to profess things with such confidence, particularly given that (in my opinion), Jeffries & Schumer largely made the right moves.  Schumer, for example, was able to parlay funding in states like Kansas, Mississippi, & Iowa into wins that six months ago would've been basically unthinkable, and get the most sizable Senate majority since 2008 for the Democrats.  To insult him this cycle, as some do with great relish on the Left, feels like the burden of proof should be on them to prove that these races were winnable.

Because the reality is that Florida, while it did not get significant national funding, did get press, polling, appearances from leading Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as (yes, indeed) funding from the DSCC.  Angie Nixon, though, did not win, and her 10-point improvement on her loss margin over Kamala Harris was nothing compared to, say, Scott Colom, Annie Andrews, and Adam Hamilton, all of whom doubled that gap.  Nixon had every single advantage save for one-she wasn't a good enough candidate, and she had a less elastic state than some of the others like Iowa & Ohio (the latter something we didn't know going into the night, but it's something we know now).  The DSCC was right not to invest more money here-money cannot guarantee votes (it can only help the cause), and in a cycle where Democrats were wildly popular, over-performing in every state, and Republicans were pumping hundreds of millions dollars with no effect in, say, Texas, the only reason that you can argue that Nixon was special is if you wanted her to be.  Which is fine (believe in the politicians you want), but a brutal fact is: if she was actually special, she would've done what Scott Colom, Annie Andrews, & Adam Hamilton did in redder states-she would've won.

Victoria Broderick, the potential Rep-Elect from TN-4

Tennessee is a different situation than Florida, whom I think national Democrats gave a shot to be competitive, and Nixon didn't have the skills to deliver a win in the end in the bluest environment in over 50 years.  Tennessee got no national attention, money, or polls, and yet we had Blackburn nearly losing, and a half dozen House seats within striking distance for the Democrats.  You could argue money might have made the difference here, but that ignores what comes with money: attention.  Tennessee is an incredibly red state, one that I do not see changing beyond the blue warmth of 2026-it is still socially conservative, and unlikely to change much as Republicans start to return home.  Had the DGA or DCCC put some multi-million dollar buys here, it's probable that the Republicans would've taken it seriously, and invested in GOTV efforts themselves.  Part of the reason that a state like Mississippi didn't deliver was that Republicans waited too long to take it seriously-Tennessee you might've been able to get another House seat if you'd done a last minute ground operation, but you'd have to assume there's a great candidate like Colom ready to deliver (and that the sleeping-on-the-job Republicans would just roll over), and there's no guarantee that's the case.  Marsha Blackburn is someone I actively dislike as a politician, but let's be real-she's been in the public eye for decades and is very-versed in running in a state like Tennessee, more than a first-time Democrat would be.  If she thought she had a race, she'd win it.  Victoria Broderick's win should not be dismissed-it is very impressive, and if I was a Democratic operative I'd be talking to her about what she did, how she approached the campaign, and looking to see what could be replicated.  She got a unicorn victory, and it's probably not repeatable, but she's likely headed to Congress-that's too valuable of a result to just dismiss.  But blaming these losses on establishment Democrats who didn't see the vision is ignoring that a magnified Tennessee probably costs the Democrats a House seat more than gets one back, and also it dismisses the reality that there will always be close races.  You could win them (there's also always more voters), but this is a situation where you're running into the horizon but never going to reach it-at some point, you have to just be thankful with what you got in a wave, and understand a 45-seat House & 9-seat Senate gain is a win you don't need to complicate by second-guessing the men who delivered it.

If there's a race on the map I think the Democrats did potentially drop the ball in, it's not in Tennessee or Florida-if there is one, it's Louisiana.  This was a race the DSCC ignored, but for weeks it was very clear that something was happening here in early voting that was probably worth a second look.  The early vote numbers were signaling that Letlow was in an incredibly tight contest (I usually assume you probably can't flip a seat that's more than 2-points against you on last-minute turnout...but this was under 2-points), and Jamie Davis (a virtual unknown) was getting caught up in the national wave, in particular the unusually strong Black turnout across the South.  A late investment of cash/ads/GOTV in the last three weeks might've been able to get under-the-radar enough against Republicans who were still fighting under the delusion that they were going to be able to carry states like Texas & Michigan (which ended up being extremely decisive) and was probably worth the risk, especially as this is a six-year seat where Davis's win would pay dividends across 2028 and 2030 (as well as help our filibuster math significantly in a hypothetical 2029 trifecta).  If there's a race that got away this cycle, I'd argue it's Louisiana that we missed, though like Broderick, this was likely a unicorn race that we could only have one in this exact circumstance.  But for Florida & Tennessee, I'm sorry-it's not that deep.  No one is to blame for a great over-performance that we simply can't replicate again, and where blood red states came up short.  Sometimes you just lose.