This is an ordinary special election for a vacant House seat:
This is a special election on Trump:
Any questions? 🍳
The top figure shows what we typically expect in special elections: a terrible performance by the Democrat. It was the only special election for a House seat in 2016, the race to replace none other than former House Speaker John Boehner in Ohio’s 8th Congressional District. Democrats fared a little better (relatively speaking) in the three specials that took place in 2015: They “only” performed 7 to 10 points worse than the margin in 2016’s presidential race.
But something different is going on this year, which is what you see happening in the second chart, from Georgia. However, it’s not just the Peach State. Here’s the corresponding graph for last week’s special election in Kansas:
Nor is it just House seats, either. We’ve seen a handful of special elections for state legislative districts since Election Day, but we are not seeing Democrats underperforming Hillary Clinton by large amounts. In fact, they are mostly overperforming Clinton—all the dots above the diagonal line:
Most, in fact, are doing about the same as Obama did in 2012, when he won nationally by 4 percent:
But again, this is not the normal state of things. Here are all of last year’s legislative and House special elections compared to Obama’s 2012 margins in those same districts:
With the exception of the seats in the “Demosaur” areas of Kentucky and Oklahoma, Democratic performance was pretty much crap across the board in 2016 special elections. Compared to last year, this year’s elections are going splendidly.
Another way we can see this is in how motivated Democratic voters are to vote early. Take a look at the Georgia 6th election data from the 2014 midterms, when turnout was about the same as 2017’s special election. Democrats cast absentee votes and in-person early votes in almost the same proportion as they voted on Election Day itself:
There’s not too much difference in the Democratic vote share between the different types of voting.
But this year? An entirely different story:
Democrats just couldn’t wait to cast a ballot. And while that makes for a dramatic evening of counting votes, it also most definitely bodes well for Democratic electoral strength in the future.