So a funny thing happened on Tuesday night in Minnesota, which held a special election for a vacant seat in the state House. This district, known as 32B and located in the Minneapolis exurbs, voted for Donald Trump by an overwhelming 61-32 margin, but Republican Anne Neu beat Democrat Laurie Wagner just 53-47. Put another way, the GOP did 23 points worse on Tuesday than Trump did in November—and it’s hard to see how that’s a positive sign for them.
Now, a win’s still a win, and yeah, we lost. But this isn’t about “moral victories” or “narratives” or anything so gossamer. Rather, the results are interesting because they have us wondering whether we’ll see this kind of turn against Trump in other districts in the near future. Needless to say, if a seat that Trump won by, say, 10 points were to also shift against Republicans by 23 points, they’d be screwed.
This, though, is where the cautious analyst steps in notes that this is just a single data point, and it may not mean much. But as it happens, we actually have more than one data point we can look at. So far, since Trump’s Electoral College win on Nov. 8, there have been five legislative special elections around the country that have featured candidates from both major parties on the ballot (two in Iowa, two in Virginia, and the one in Minnesota). We’ve assembled them all here.
In four of those races, Democrats ran ahead of the 2016 presidential margin—by double digits in three cases. This is still a small sample size, but you’d rather be the party beating your benchmarks than the one falling behind them.
There are two potential explanations for these results, as Nathaniel Rakich explores, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. The one we hope to be the case is that voters are reacting negatively to Trump. This could mean a lot of things: Democrats could be more fired up to strike a blow against Trump by turning out to vote, or Trump voters could be switching sides—or they could just be staying home.
The other possibility is that these districts, which all swung toward Trump in November compared to previous presidential elections (some heavily so), are now reverting to form. That could be, but it’s critical to note that in three of these special elections (the Midwestern ones), Democrats also ran ahead of Barack Obama’s margins, too.
The Minnesota case is instructive. This wasn’t some blue district that shifted to Trump but is now snapping back. Rather, Mitt Romney carried it 55-43 back in 2012, a 12-point margin, yet Wagner, the Democrat, only lost by 6 points. A 6-point swing is not as dramatic as one that’s 23 points, but there’s a further reason to believe that the object in this mirror is indeed larger than it appears.
That’s because Democratic turnout almost always drops in special elections, or really, any election where a presidential race isn’t on the ballot. It’s maddening, and it’s a massive problem for Team Blue, but it’s a fact of life. A rigorous analysis of 170 elections that took place in 2013 showed that Democrats, on average, ran about 12 points behind Obama. In other words, in a seat Romney won by 12 points, like Minnesota House District 32B, you’d typically expect a Democrat in a special election to lose by something like 24 points. Instead, we lost by just 6.
Now, we can’t rule out the possibility that all of this means nothing. Careful observers know that special elections don’t necessarily portend the future. Democrats, for instance, won a string of difficult special elections for the House in the 2010 cycle, only to get pounded in that year’s midterms. On the other hand, they won a series of equally tough specials in 2008 and went on to romp that fall.
So we’ll have to keep close watch on future races and a host of other indicators to see whether 2017 is shaping up like 2008 or 2010, or some other alternative. And as Rakich notes, we have yet to see what happens in a district that swung toward Clinton in 2016. But the good news is, we're about to get a perfect test in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, a seat Romney handily carried 61-37 but where Trump only scraped by with a 48-47 win.
And we can also do something about it: You can donate to Democrat Jon Ossoff, who’s running a vigorous campaign for this open seat and has been endorsed by Reps. John Lewis and Hank Johnson. If there’s a true anti-Trump wave brewing, then we can’t just wait to see how it unfolds. We have to help make it as big as possible. Give today.