Democrats on Tuesday won a special election for a state House seat in South Carolina by an eye-popping margin, signaling yet again that the 2026 midterms could be a very good year for the Democratic Party.
Twenty-four-year-old Democratic nominee Keishan Scott defeated Republican William Oden in a special election for South Carolina’s 50th state House District, garnering 70.6% of the vote to Oden's 29.3%
That 41-percentage-point victory is far higher than the 5 points by which Vice President Kamala Harris carried the same district in last year’s presidential election. And it marks the second-biggest shift toward Democrats in any special election that has been held since November.
The result means that Democrats in special elections have now overperformed Harris’ result in those districts by 16.4 points, according to data from The Downballot. For context, the Democratic special election overperformance in the 2018 midterm cycle—when Democrats won back control of the U.S. House for the first time in nearly a decade—was 10.6 points.
Ultimately, history shows that special election results are a good indicator of what the political environment will look like in an upcoming election. So the fact that Democrats are doing markedly better than their presidential nominee did in 2024 is a sign that next November could be a very good year for Democrats.
“Republicans can try to dismiss each election outcome individually by blaming candidate quality or unique circumstances. Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, a former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, utilized the trope, ‘Special elections are special,’ in a Tuesday morning CNN interview to get ahead of potentially embarrassing results,” elections analyst Nathan Gonzales of Inside Elections wrote in early April, after Democrats beat expectations in two special elections in U.S. House seats in Florida. “But taken together, the recent election results paint a picture of a political landscape that has shifted, at least temporarily, away from the GOP.
Democrats flipped state Senate seats in Iowa and Pennsylvania where Donald Trump won last year. And Democrats' performances were so strong that Trump pulled New York Rep. Elise Stefanik's nomination to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, fearing that the GOP could lose her House seat, which Trump carried by nearly 21 points in 2024.
Polling also suggests next November will be good for Democrats. They currently lead the generic congressional ballot—where voters are asked which party they want to see control Congress—by an average of 2.5 points, according to RealClearPolitics.
A lot can change between now and next November. But as of today, Democrats look like they are in a good position to do very well in the midterms.
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