Republicans have once again picked up a state legislative seat in a district Barack Obama carried, with Republican Chad Anderson defeating Democrat Andrew Carlson 51-49 in a special election for the Minnesota state House on Tuesday night. It's the second time in a row this has happened: Last month, Republicans won a similarly blue seat in the Texas House.
What makes the Minnesota race much worse, though, is that Democrats are fiercely trying to win back the state House, which Republicans now hold by a 73-61 margin. (Democrats control the Senate and are likely to keep it.) And the playing field isn't particularly friendly, either: Even though Obama won 52.7 percent of the statewide vote in Minnesota, he only won 50.7 percent of the seats in the state House, whose lines were drawn by a court.
That may sound like just a small difference, but it means that in order to recapture the majority, Democrats either need a clean sweep of every single Obama district, or they need to win some Republican turf. That's no easy task, so losing a seat where Obama took 57 percent of the vote is particularly painful.
At the same time, though, it bears repeating that special elections like these are almost never harbingers of things to come. Just a month ago, Democrats won a dark-red GOP-held seat in Oklahoma in a massive upset, but then came the Texas and now Minnesota losses. Oklahoma obviously didn't usher in an era of Republican doom, and likewise Minnesota doesn't herald armageddon for Democrats.
But one thing is definitely true: Democrats now have to work extra-hard to retake the Minnesota House, and they'll almost certainly need to defeat Anderson to make it happen.