Here we are again! Another major competitive House special election that never should have been on the table. This should have been another ho-hum, dull, unremarked-upon election that quietly slots in the next in a line of Republicans into a longtime GOP-held seat.
But not now. Not this year. We have what looks to be a tight election on our hands in what was assumed to be a safe blood-red district but a few short years ago. And it’s all part of a trend: Democrats are showing up en masse.
We’ve had enough special elections to confidently say that overall, Democrats are doing as well as or better than Clinton this year. (See the data here.) You can see this plotted in the figure above. Districts with blue arrows show where the Democrat in the special election outperformed Hillary Clinton’s margin. Those with red arrows show the opposite.
It’s not just that Democrats are tending to outperform Clinton: they’re also, on average, doing about as well as or better than President Obama in 2012. Below, we’ll show you just why that means Republicans should be feeling queasy about 2018.
First, here’s a similar figure for the comparison to the 2012 election data:
Today, GA-06 will be just one of four special elections we’ll use to update these figures (one more House seat and two state house seats are up in South Carolina). Together, they’ll help clarify the 2017 political environment even further. Given that Romney won GA-06 by 23 points, it’s pretty likely that it will have a nice, long 20+ point blue line on the 2012 figure!
So why exactly should we be so excited about these numbers? Because they are very different from what we’ve been used to over the past few years. Recently, Democrats have generally been sucking rotten eggs when it comes to special elections. Here’s all the 2016, 2015, and 2014 elections plotted against the 2016 presidential data:
That’s … brutal.
Here’s an example: the only House special election from 2016, OH-08. It’s a blood red district, really tough for a Democrat under any circumstances. But the special election? Oof: the Republican won by 56 points.
Compare to the special election in Kansas earlier this year, KS-04. The presidential margins for both districts are in the range of a 20-25 point win for the Republican. But the KS-04 special election? A win of just over 6 points.
In other words, this year, Democrats are competitive where they have no business being competitive. We’ve buried our noses deep into ruby red territory. Take a look at the next figure, which stacks up House seats by rank according to the presidential margin in 2016:
If Democrats can compete in districts like MT-AL and KS-04, well, then there’s fewer than 100 Republican seats that could truly be considered safe! Now, we certainly can’t assume that all R+20 districts will be competitive, but some of them might be.
GA-06 doesn’t look so terribly red from the perspective of the 2016 results—and indeed, that was what first drew our attention to the race here at Daily Kos Elections—but the view changes a bit when you look at the 2012 numbers:
There we go. Almost as favorable toward Romney as KS-04.
From the perspective of gauging the national environment, this is the sort of highly educated, suburban district with an excellent candidate where we need to see Democrats hang on to the gains they made at the presidential level with Trump on the ballot. And that’s what we’ve seen, no matter what the exact final margin: a close and hard-fought election (assuming we don’t end up with a surprise blowout in either direction). That, plus regaining a competitive edge in districts that drifted away from Democrats in 2016 (and we’ve seen this reversal in many special elections now), is what we will need to take back the House in 2018.
But these special House elections are all clearly on Republican turf. It turns out we don’t even need them. There are a total of 226 seats that were won by either Clinton or Obama. If you do venture into Republican territory, and add in the House seats that either Romney or Trump won by less than 10 points, that gets you up to 286 seats.
Now, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that Democrats could pick up large numbers of seats in areas won by Trump or Romney by 10 points. But if we’re competing now where they won by 15-25 points — well, it wouldn’t be out of the question to pick up a seat here or there.
Many, many things can and will happen between now and 2018. Still, the fact that Democrats can be competitive in special elections in deep red seats should be causing constant heartburn for House Republicans.