While much of the world, let alone Washington, waited to see whether Donald Trump would carry out his pledge to make Iran’s civilization “die” before the president ultimately backed down from his threat, political observers noticed a different but no less earth-shattering storm brewing closer to home this week — one that could impact the Republicans’ hold on both houses of Congress.
Georgia and Wisconsin both held elections on Tuesday evening — while the world was digesting Trump’s latest threats to send Iran “back to the Stone Ages” — that showed that the swing states, both of which voted for him in 2016 and 2024, are trending leftward.
Down south, Republican Clay Fuller won the runoff race to fill Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old seat in Georgia’s 14th congressional district. Trump endorsed Fuller and he inevitably will be much more of a loyalist than was Greene, who broke with the president over the Epstein files and other matters before her resignation.
But that does not tell the full story. In 2024, Greene won the district by 29 points and Trump won it by 37 points. By contrast, Fuller only beat Shawn Harris by about 11.8 percent, meaning that Democrats outperformed by 25 points.
As The Independent wrote last month during the primary, this district spans from the tip of Cobb County, which includes the suburbs of Atlanta, to the Tennessee border and the suburbs of Chattanooga.
Unsurprisingly, Harris did well in Cobb, winning it by 15 points. But in 2024, when Harris ran against Greene, he actually lost it by just 2.72 points, meaning that part of the county swung more than 17 points to the left on Tuesday.
But even in the part of scarlet-red Murray County, which Greene carried with 81.49 percent of the vote in 2024, Fuller only won with 75.88 percent of the vote, a 5.61 percent underperformance.
All of this is good news for Georgia Democrats. Sen. Jon Ossoff is the only Democrat running for reelection in the state, which Trump won, and Democrats hope to flip the governorship for the first time in 24 years as Gov. Brian Kemp exits the stage. If even these deep-red parts of Georgia trend left, Republicans have plenty of reasons to worry.
And Democrats had even better news up in Wisconsin. There, liberal candidate Chris Taylor won with 60 percent of the vote. Nearly every county in Wisconsin shifted to the left in this state including, crucially, the “WOW” counties–Waueksha, Ozaukee and Washington County–which have long been the vote banks for Republicans.
Heavily Hispanic areas on Milwaukee's south side are shifting sharply toward Democrats, with a 56-point swing in one Lincoln Village precinct. Taylor is getting 91% compared to Harris's 64%.
— VoteHub (@VoteHub) April 8, 2026
Milwaukee County overall is running 11 points more Democratic vs. 2024. pic.twitter.com/pVpuD1Kr6V
In fact, Taylor won Ozaukee by four points, a 15-point swing from 2024. And as an extra, Democrat Alicia Halvensleben won the mayor’s race in the city of Waukesha by 454 votes.
The race is ostensibly nonpartisan, but the city’s outgoing Mayor Shawn Reilly was a Republican who endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. The shifts are a sign that the Milwaukee adjacent suburb can no longer be considered reliably Republican.
While it’s unlikely that a future Democratic presidential candidate will win the WOW counties in the near future, even a slight leftward swing is good news for Democrats. Trump only won Wisconsin in 2024 by some 29,000 votes. In 2020 Joe Biden only won it by a little more than 20,000 votes.
Democrats hope to keep the governorship as Tony Evers will not seek reelection and they want to finally flip the legislature, which Republicans have held since the 2010 red wave. They also hope to flip Wisconsin’s 3rd district as Rebecca Cooke narrowly lost to incumbent Rep. Derrick Van Orden in 2024 and she is running in a rematch.
Democrats actually did even better in heavily Hispanic Dalton than in the first round, which was already a massive swing from Kamala’s 2024 performance.
— Jacob Rubashkin (@JacobRubashkin) April 8, 2026
Shawn Harris won these two Hispanic-majority precincts by 73% — +3 from in March and a whopping 51% improvement over 2024. https://t.co/XkI9jnTWQP
Both Wisconsin and Georgia also displayed a trend that has manifested in off-year elections since Trump’s election: the leftward swing of Hispanic voters.
After Trump improved his margins with Hispanic voters despite–or, perhaps, in spite of–his rhetoric about mass deportations, they have revolted and consistently voted for Democrats. Votehub, which tracks election results, flagged how in one heavily Latino precinct in Lincoln Village in Milwaukee’s south side, Taylor won 91 percent of the vote compared to Harris’s 2024 margin of 64 percent.
Inside Elections’ Jacob Rubashkin flagged that a similar trend happened in Georgia’s 14th district in the majority-Hispanic city of Dalton. Shawn Harris won two majority-Hispanic precincts by 73 percent, a 51-point improvement since the 2024 presidential election.
Of course, plenty could happen between now and November. But consistently, special elections, primary elections and off-year races show a trend in the Democratic direction. And it’s not entirely clear that Republicans have any plan to divorce themselves from Trump or create any distance from him. And that could be the first rumblings of a blue wave Republicans did to themselves.
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