As Republicans sift through the wreckage of a devastating election night that handed Democrats control of both chambers of Congress by large margins, one Florida Republican who bucked the national trend says the GOP fundamentally misread the electorate.
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, â who expanded his own winning margin by five points despite the national backlash â offered a candid assessment of his party’s shortcomings and warned that Republicans must now prepare for an “ugly two years” battling Democrats over immigration and other contentious issues.
While Republicans held their ground in Florida, winning the , the Senate race, and maintaining their 20-8 edge in the US House, nationally the GOP got crushed under the weight of a blue tsunami.
Congressman Fine presents no easy answer to the GOP’s divergence in fortunes between Florida and the rest of the country:
“You know, I think that’s a hard question to answer. What I would say, I can speak to my race, and I’m actually one of the few Republicans in the country whose margin increased from my last election. I won my special election after having $14 million spent against me. I won it by 14 points. I won last night by 19 points. And so what I can tell you is what worked for me.
“My constituents want a fighter, someone who says what they believe. They know it’s not driven by polls or anything else and fights for them, whether it’s fighting for their constituent service issue or fighting on illegal immigration or fighting to bring money to the district. And that’s why I went up so much. I took my race seriously because I knew the winds were against us.
“And so, Florida, I think just people know how good we have it and they don’t want to screw up the state. I think that’s why we won all 20 of these races.”
Fine refuses to single out anyone in GOP leadership for the electoral outcome, and believes the Republicans must approach each election cycle as a unified team:
“Well, look, I’m not a finger pointer, but what I would say is this. We’re a team and the team lost. And so then the whole team bears responsibility and that includes me. I mean, while I did well, my team lost, and I’m not going to be here pointing the fingers at anybody.
“I think that what we did is we failed to understand what the American people wanted. I think we failed to make them think we cared about them. Now, I didn’t fail in my district, but I think nationally people came to believe that we weren’t interested in them and that’s wrong.
“We were, but we failed to communicate it, and maybe that’s part of my special sauce is I know how to communicate better than many of these people.”
With Democrats firmly in control of both chambers of Congress, Fine anticipates two years of playing defense, and a continuous fight to explain why Democrats’ policies will be harmful to the country:
“I don’t know that we’re going to push the agenda. I think what we’re going to be is we’re going to be on defense. We’re going to have to fight back. And you know, as my father told me this morning, he goes, ‘Randy, you’ve been a fighter your whole life. You were built for the fight.’
“So we’re going to be having to fight against stupid policies that they will be pushing. And it’s going to be an ugly two years, but we’re gonna have to explain why all of the things that they said they would do during the campaign are so bad. We obviously didn’t succeed in doing that. But as they put those policies forward, we’re going to have to make the argument for why they would damage America.”
Immigration is the single issue that Fine identifies as having the greatest potential to harm the country:
“I think they will seek to reopen the border and . I think they will seek mass amnesty, rewarding all of the illegals that are here. And I think they will stop any requirement for people who come to this country to assimilate. They believe in the th
