Anti-LGBTQ+ Florida state Sen. Randy Fine (R) has been declared the winner of the special election held yesterday for the U.S. House seat in Florida’s Sixth Congressional District, with a significantly smaller margin than the previous Republican won the seat just this past November.

Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis (R) is also projected to win his race for the U.S. House seat representing Florida’s First Congressional District, a seat left open after Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was nominated to be U.S. attorney general.

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Fine was running in the special election because former Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), who won the seat in November, was nominated to be Donald Trump’s national security advisor. Waltz won his election in November with a 33-point margin, but Fine is currently ahead by a 10-point margin over public school teacher Josh Weil with 73% of votes counted, which could either be a sign of increasing Republican unpopularity or just a result of low turnout numbers for special elections.

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Fine delivered a victory speech at his Donald Trump-themed “2A Ranch” in Ormond Beach, where he claimed that election workers yesterday were flown in from all over the country.

“I told them I hoped they enjoyed their stay in Florida and I wished them safe travels home, because this is Trump country,” he said.

He went on to say that he would have accepted all the blame had he lost, and then he immediately said that if that had happened, it would have been a result of “media narratives.”

“If I’d lost, I was going to be the father of the failure. I would have accepted all of the blame to grant all of the criticism I’ve taken and all the media narratives,” he said. “But here’s what people didn’t know: I had Donald Trump on my side.”

Fine, who was called a “MAGA warrior” by Trump, has built a reputation as one of Florida’s most anti-LGBTQ+ politicians. Fine was an architect of his state’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth, filed a bill banning drag performances in the state (which was subsequently blocked by courts), led attacks on Disney after the company opposed the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” laws, and introduced a bill to ban Pride flags from public buildings. He has previously said that the government “ought to” erase the LGBTQ+ community.

Patronis, who is projected to win over Democratic activist Gay Valimont, also has an anti-LGBTQ+ history, picking Russell Weigel to run the Office of Financial Regulation, Florida Politics reported. Weigel identifies himself as an “active supporter of the Christian Family Coalition,” an anti-LGBTQ+ group that supports transphobic bathroom bans and the right to fire employees for being LGBTQ+.

These narrower-than-expected victories could explain why Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) was pressured to back out of her nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Republicans hold a very narrow majority in the House, and Republican leadership has been worried about losing special elections to Democrats, which could jeopardize their current trifecta at the federal level.

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