There has been considerable consternation and many pixels spilled about the regions of the country where the Democratic margin in the 2016 presidential election fell sharply compared to 2012, including the entire states of Iowa and Ohio. Was this the beginning of a permanent realignment? Was it a new baseline? Or would Democrats be able to recover?
We now have some answers, illustrated in the chart at the top of this post. There have been 10 special elections in districts where the presidential margin shifted 10 points or more toward Donald Trump compared to the 2012 margin. And in all 10 of those, the margin has shifted back toward Democrats in the special election. What’s more, in eight of the them, it has shifted past the 2012 presidential margin, and Democrats have outright won six of them (those where the dark green dot is to the right of the vertical axis).
With just 10 elections in this category, we have to be a little careful, but we can say one thing with certainty: Democrats are not stuck at 2016’s presidential numbers.
What about areas where the 2016 Democratic presidential numbers improved dramatically over 2012? Have they slid backward? Those, and all the rest of this cycle’s special elections, are shown below.
There have been only three special elections in districts where Hillary Clinton did 10 or more points better than Barack Obama in 2012. (Clinton did 9 points better in Oklahoma’s 46th State House District, and boy did the Democrat outperform in the special election there. But a pre-determined cutoff is a pre-determined cutoff.) However, we don’t see the numbers back at the 2012 margin in any of them. With only three districts to go by, it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if we eventually saw another district like this that did jump back to 2012 levels—but it obviously isn’t a universal behavior.
Looking at all the special elections this year so far, the trends are obvious. Democrats are, on average, outperforming both Clinton and Obama.
Here’s a graph that compares the results of all special elections this cycle to Clinton’s performance in those same districts. Points above the diagonal line show where Democratic margins have been better than the 2016 presidential results:
Almost every circle is above the line. That is a lovely bunch of massive Democratic overperformance!
Now, here’s the comparison to 2012 numbers. It looks similar:
This is very, very different from what we’ve seen in recent years. Here’s every special election from 2013 through 2016 compared to Obama’s 2012 margin, for instance:
The vast majority of circles in this case are below the diagonal line, meaning the Democrat did worse than Obama. So 2017 is therefore a completely different political environment compared to what we’ve experienced the last few cycles.
What, exactly, is the significance of this? We’ll look into that in more depth soon, but for now we’ll leave you with this: There are 35 House seats that either Clinton or Obama won that are currently held by Republicans. And there are another 63 that either Clinton or Obama lost by fewer than 10 points.
Republicans currently hold a 24-seat majority in the House. You do the math.
