Republicans grow concerned about Trump’s handpicked candidate in Florida special election

By Sarah Ferris, Arit John, David Wright and Steve Contorno, CNN

(CNN) — Top Republicans grew so concerned about the lackluster performance of their own GOP House candidate in an upcoming special election in Florida that President Donald Trump’s team and members of House GOP leadership decided to personally intervene.

A top adviser to Trump reached out directly to state Sen. Randy Fine, with a message that he needed to get his house in order and get on the airwaves, a White House source told CNN. And some Republican leaders were even more blunt. House GOP campaign chief Rep. Richard Hudson and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer each separately told Fine to “get his sh*t together,” according to two GOP sources working closely on the race.

Now, weeks later, Republicans are bracing for a closer-than-expected result Tuesday in Florida’s deep-red 6th Congressional District, where their nominee has been significantly outraised and is at risk of falling far short of the president’s November performance in the district.

Reflecting that concern, Trump called into a pair of tele-rallies Thursday evening to give a boost to Fine, in addition to the GOP candidate in the Florida’s 1st Congressional District, Jimmy Patronis.

“We’re just a few days away from an all-important special election taking place in your state on Tuesday, April 1, and I’m asking you to get out and vote for a true American patriot, somebody that I’ve gotten to know very well, Randy Fine,” Trump said during the tele-rally for Fine.

And the president spoke to the escalating scrutiny on the pair of contests during the other event, for Patronis. “The whole country’s actually watching this one. It’s a very big one,” Trump said.

Both parties agree that Fine remains poised to win the special election for the 6th District seat, which became vacant when the president tapped former Rep. Mike Waltz to be his national security adviser. Waltz won reelection in November by 33 points.

But Democrat Josh Weil, a teacher, has outraised Fine nearly 10-to-1 and run a much more aggressive campaign, tying Fine to the Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency and potential cuts to Medicaid and Social Security.

Hudson, the chair of the House Republicans’ campaign arm, said they had a good candidate in Fine, but acknowledged he could have started airing TV ads sooner.

“I’d rather him have gotten up a few weeks earlier, but we’ve got lots of folks on the ground helping turn out the vote, so I’m confident,” Hudson told CNN.

Fine, reached by phone, declined to comment about his campaign.

Republicans say a win is a win, regardless of the margin. They’ve argued their challenge is a disparity between how motivated — specifically, how angry — voters in the two parties are in the wake of last year’s election.

“Republicans are popping champagne from November, and the Democrats are gathering their pitchforks and knives,” said one senior Republican operative close to the campaign in Florida. “The Democrats are very engaged and want to just have any scalp that they can get.”

Still, the concern for Republicans — and the hope for Democrats — is that a tighter-than-anticipated finish would be viewed as evidence that Republicans’ agenda in Washington doesn’t come with a voter-backed mandate. Democratic strategists say that if Weil can get within 10-15 points of Fine, it will suggest the party’s base is motivated and voters are souring on Trump’s agenda.

“I don’t think that they’re concerned about losing the seat,” Beth Matuga, a Florida-based Democratic strategist, said of Republicans. “I think the concern is that this special election becomes some sort of a bellwether and reinvigorates Democrats in Florida, even in the case of a defeat.”

Republicans are also defending an open seat in Florida’s 1st District, where Democrat Gay Valimont is challenging Patronis for the seat formerly held by Rep. Matt Gaetz.

A candidate-specific issue

Fine, who spent four terms in the state House before being elected to the state Senate in November, has been a polarizing figure in Florida politics. He has called for the expulsion of “non-Americans” who have “advocated for Muslim terror” and backed the Parental Rights in Education Act, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics.

He’s also clashed with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. During the 2024 GOP presidential primary, Fine switched his endorsement from DeSantis to Trump, claiming the Florida governor had done “almost nothing” to address antisemitism. DeSantis dismissed the criticism as “pure politics.”

Asked about the race this week, DeSantis took a jab at Fine, predicting that the state senator’s showing on Tuesday would be a “way underperformance” compared to his margin of victory in the 2022 governor’s race or Trump’s in 2024.

“They’re going to try to lay that at the feet of President Trump,” DeSantis told reporters this week. “That is not a reflection of President Trump; it’s a reflection of the specific candidate running in that race.”

A similar sentiment has been shared on Capitol Hill, where senior House Republicans widely fear that next Tuesday’s race will be closer than it should be but are still confident of victory.

For weeks, GOP leaders have grown increasingly frustrated at Fine. They’ve argued that the Florida Republican failed to mount a serious campaign from the start and has been particularly slow at raising money and getting on the airwaves, according to three people familiar with the conversations.

“Do people wish Randy had taken this seriously from the get-go? Absolutely. But I haven’t even thought about him losing,” one of those people — a senior GOP operative involved in the race — told CNN.

Another senior GOP operative predicted Fine would ultimately win but described his campaign as “a disaster.”

Meanwhile, House GOP leaders have worked to temper expectations for next Tuesday’s special within their own jittery conference. At a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise cautioned members that it could be a closer-than-expected race, in part because of the lackluster fundraising on the GOP side, and that no one should expect a massive win, according to a person in attendance.

Rep. Ron Estes, a Kansas Republican who won his own special election in 2017, also spoke up to offer a political reality check for off-year special elections.

Still, the House GOP campaign arm has been mostly hands-off in the race, given its heavily Republican lean. Neither party’s official side has spent money in the race.

“Randy Fine will be a Member of Congress,” Maureen O’Toole, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, told CNN. “Everything else is just noise.”

Senior House Democrats are also closely monitoring the race, with at least one group conducting polling to gauge their party’s support going into the final week, according to a person familiar with the discussions. But there’s zero expectation among high-level leaders that the race will be close.

“If he overperforms by 5, and you apply that to the rest of the battlefield, you win 15 seats,” this person said, while acknowledging that the Democratic candidate, Weil, has his own operational problems — namely high spending on consultants with little money on TV.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued Monday that Democrats would overperform in both Florida special elections because voters are rejecting the Republican Party’s agenda, undercutting the idea that Trump has a mandate. Jeffries pointed to other special elections at the local level where Democratic candidates have won a higher share of the vote than Harris did in November.

“What I can say, almost guarantee, is that the Democratic candidate in both of these Florida special elections will significantly overperform, which will represent another sign that the Republicans are on the run and that Democrats are going to take back control of the House of Representatives next year,” Jeffries said at a press conference Monday.

A wave of spending

At the root of Republican concerns has been the strong fundraising by the Democratic candidates. In the 6th District, Weil has outraised Fine by about $9.5 million to about $1 million, and outspent him by about $8.2 million to just $895,000. Fine reported only $93,000 in cash as of March 13 on his pre-election FEC filing, revealing a severely depleted war chest.

Weil credited his fundraising success to a focus on protecting Social Security and Medicare and lowering costs. “I’m grateful for the hundreds of thousands of Floridians and regular Americans who still believe in a better future,” he said in a statement to CNN.

The two Democrats haven’t received much outside help. The Democratic National Committee has made a small but undisclosed investment in the race, and chairman Ken Martin announced Thursday that he would campaign in the 6th District the weekend before the election.

Weil and Valimont have run joint ads seizing on Musk’s elevated profile in the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, highlighting images of Musk with a chainsaw onstage at a conservative gathering last month as he celebrated steep federal spending cuts. “Elon is shredding our democracy,” one of the digital ads opens.

The campaigns have also faced questions about how they raised, and spent, their massive fundraising hauls. Both Democrats have worked with Key Lime Strategies and Media, a consulting firm that takes a 25% cut of the funds it helps raised. Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and DNC vice chair David Hogg both criticized the firm for using their images in fundraising appeals without their consent.

Fine’s campaign has also knocked Weil for his spending, including money spent on musicians and entertainers and more than $50,000 on a multi-room Airbnb that doubled as an office and living space for Weil, who does not currently live in the district.

Jackson McMillan, the chief executive of Key Lime Strategies and Media and Weil’s finance director, defended his fundraising tactics, noting the company’s fee structure is on its website.

“Randy Fine is trying to discredit our fundraising because he’s been caught sleeping at the wheel, running a weak race and now he’s in trouble,” McMillan said in a statement to CNN.

Wendy Garcia, Weil’s campaign manager, said in a statement to CNN that the rental home allows multiple members of the campaign to “have a presence” in the district and reduce lodging costs and office space.

Fine, meanwhile, has seen an uptick in outside spending on his behalf in the final weeks of the race.

Musk’s super PAC made its first foray into the races this week, disclosing Tuesday that it was spending about $20,000 on texting services split equally between support for both Republican candidates. The Republican Jewish Coalition’s political action committee has spent more than $94,000 on the race, according to recent FEC data.

Ad spending for the 6th District race has ticked up ahead of Election Day. Advertisers have combined to spend more than $7.7 million on ads, and Republicans have outspent Democrats by about $4.4 million to $3.4 million. In the 1st District race, Democrats lead in ad spending, about $3.2 million to $2.1 million, according to AdImpact.

No major outside groups have stepped in to help the two Democrats on the airwaves, but a few GOP groups have targeted the race with seven-figure buys, including Defend American Jobs, funded by several cryptocurrency interests and veteran investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and another group, Conservative Fighters PAC, with more opaque funding.

Both groups have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the closing stretch of the race running TV ads aimed at leveraging Trump’s political influence, alerting voters to his endorsements and in particular looking to give Fine a boost.

“Florida voters, President Donald J. Trump has an urgent message: President Trump needs Randy Fine in Congress,” one of the ads says. “Republicans, President Trump needs you on April 1st! Vote Trump endorsed businessman Randy Fine,” says another.

This story has been updated with new reporting.

CNN’s Manu Raju contributed to this report.

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