It’s autumn! Leaves turning! Harvests! Pumpkin flavored everything! Elections!
...wait there are always elections.
In fact, there were four just this past Tuesday.
- Democrats won three of this week’s special elections, and two of those wins were red-to-blue flips, bringing the total number of Democratic pickups this cycle to eight. Meanwhile, Republicans have yet to flip a single seat in a contested election.
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Eight is great!
So, yeah, it’s been a great cycle for Democrats.
How great? Glad you asked!
- Out of all the contested congressional and state legislative special elections held to date, Democrats have over-performed the 2016 Hillary Clinton margin by more than 10 points in 25 of them. Republicans, on the other hand have over-performed by more than 10 points in just four—but one of those was actually a Democratic flip! On average, Democrats are doing about 13 points better than Clinton.
Courtesy of one of my brilliant colleagues, here’s a fun graph demonstrating these numbers below.
Oooooooh look at all that blue. Pretty.
So over-performing is great, but winning is better.
- Democrats have now won seats from the GOP eight times in just 27 chances—almost 30 percent of all contested special elections in Republican-held seats in the Trump era.
- What’s more, the playing field has been very hostile to Democrats: Trump won these 27 districts by an average of 19 points.
But think for sec what this could mean for 2018 U.S. House elections. If Democrats flip 30 percent of the House seats currently held by Republicans, that adds 72 new members to the Democratic caucus in the next Congress.
That’s… a lot.
- The two Democratic pickups on Tuesday night were BFDs in their own right, especially the Florida seat. Not to give short shrift to the Granite State win; Kari Lerner’s victory in a deep and historically Republican New Hampshire House district that backed Donald Trump by a 59-36 margin in 2016 and voted 60-39 for Mitt Romney in 2012 was no mean feat. Lerner won this seat by 50-48, improving on Clinton’s performance here last fall by 25 points.
But Annette Taddeo’s victory in Florida Senate District 40 was remarkable for a number of reasons. Democrats’ past performance in the seat was not one of them, however; this district gave Clinton almost 58 percent of the vote in 2016.
- But the things that made this win so remarkable for the Democrat are that she won despite the fact that:
Okay, that’s enough about Tuesday.
Gone ‘til November: The election season is in full swing in Virginia, and at least one GOP candidate is going all in on being a terrible human.
Oh, wait. It’s Del. Bob Marshall. He’s always going all in on being a terrible human.
This time, Bob Marshall is Bob Marshalling as hard as he can in response to a new video from Danica Roem in which Marshall’s opponent highlights her transgender identity.
- Marshall refuses to acknowledge that Roem is a woman, using male pronouns when talking about her and just generally being as disrespectful and transphobic as possible.
- Check out these gems from recent interviews with the Washington Post and the Prince William Times:
- “Why do you call Danica a female? Did Danica’s DNA change?”
- “He’s making up stories all over the place, including about his sexual identity.”
Et cetera.
Marshall is also refusing to debate Roem or appear with her at candidate forums.
Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground Game: Shady GOP antics are afoot in Nevada.
- Silver State Republicans were, understandably, less than thrilled about losing what had been a slim 11-10 majority to the Democrats in the 2016 elections.
- The loss of Senate control coincided with a dramatic power shift toward Democrats in the state Assembly, where Republicans went from a 24-17 majority (plus one Libertarian) to a 15-27 minority overnight last fall.
- And one senator added insult to the GOP’s new minority-status injury by leaving the Republican caucus a few days after the election, declaring herself an independent and caucusing with Democrats, giving them an effective 12-9 majority in the state Senate.
- Only GOP Gov. Brian Sandoval stands between Republicans and relative political irrelevance in the state.
And prospects for a Senate comeback for the Nevada GOP don’t look very rosy going into 2018.
Next fall, the half of the state Senate that wasn’t on the ballot last fall is up for election.
- Unfortunately for the GOP, however, the 10 Senate seats going before voters next year include only three districts currently held by Democrats, all of whom survived the rather difficult 2014 cycle with strong performances.
- The most viable pickup “opportunity” for Republicans is to replace party-switcher Patricia Farley in a seat where Clinton edged Trump 48-47.
- But that only matters if they can successfully play defense, because one Republican incumbent on the ballot next fall currently occupies a seat Clinton carried easily (52-43), giving Democrats an opportunity to further expand their majority.
Faced with a tough election cycle, Republicans could attempt to do things like
- Recruit great candidates
- Raise a ton of money, or
- Resign themselves to working cooperatively with their Democratic colleagues for the next three years to advance policies that move Nevada forward.
lol nope.
- Instead, Republicans are trying to trigger election do-overs in three districts: two in seats they lost last fall and one in a competitive district they worry they can’t win in a general election.
Being in a legislative minority is no fun, and Republicans reasonably expect to be stuck there through the next election cycle.
- But triggering new elections just to undo the results of the most recent election just because you don’t like them is a lousy way to do democracy, and it effectively demonstrates why Republicans deserve their minority status.
They can’t sell their candidates or their ideas to the electorate, so they’re attempting to trigger (historically) lower-turnout special elections in the hope it will give them more control over who shows up at the ballot box (although recent special election results suggest Republicans are screwed in that regard, too).
National organizations are working to block the GOP’s shameful attempt to overturn the results of last fall’s elections.
- The DNC is reportedly planning to send a “six-figure chunk of money” to the state party to support a “decline to sign” effort, which seeks to block the recalls by discouraging voters from signing recalls petitions, denying recall organizers the signatures needed (25 percent of a district’s voters in the most recent election).
- The DLCC is supporting Our Votes, Our Voice, a group that’s spearheading the decline to sign effort, which is receiving a $50,000 cash infusion from the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
This is smart spending. A successful effort to stop the recalls is much less expensive than defending these three seats in recall elections, which can reasonably be expected to cost Democrats $3-4 million.
The Republican recall effort is pathetic, cowardly, and hypocritical enough on its own. But check out this mailer which is both designed to stoke racist fears and distorts Democratic Sen. Nicole Cannizzaro.
We’ll learn the fate of the GOP’s attempt to overturn the last election via recall elections by the end of November.
Autumn Almanac of Politics: This week’s data interlude features three fresh new states for which we’ve finished calculating the 2016 presidential results in all legislative districts. Check out Delaware, Nebraska, and South Dakota, and you can find our master list of states right here.
Time to go jump in some leaf piles. Until next week!