An interesting thing happened on Tuesday night in a special election for Iowa's 89th state House District: Democrats didn't just win—though they were expected to—they won big. This, suffice it to say, is an outcome Team Blue does not typically see in oddly-timed elections, so here's a little background.
Last month, Democratic state Rep. Jim Lykam won a previous special election for the state Senate, thus setting off a second special election—the political equivalent of musical chairs. Democrats, who nominated retired community college instructor Monica Kurth, were favored to retain Lykam's seat, which is located in the city of Davenport and backed Hillary Clinton by a 52-41 margin.
But you never know with these kinds of races, which so often see turnout among Democratic voters drop disproportionately, compared to elections when there's a presidential contest on the ballot. What's more, Clinton's performance represented a huge drop from four years earlier, when Obama racked up a huge 63-36 win. That falloff seemed to mirror Democrats' misfortune statewide, and should have been cause for concern.
Kurth, however, completely smashed her Republican opponent, police officer Mike Gonzales, winning by a 72-27 margin, and that's certainly a positive sign. At the very least, a lot of Trump voters either didn't show up, and some, perhaps, switched sides.
But before we chalk this up to a surge in Democratic intensity sparked by anti-Trump furor over recent events, we need to note that Lykam won his Senate race last month by an almost identical 73-25 spread, and he even faced the exact same person, Gonzales. That Senate district, the 45th, went 55-38 for Clinton, so not too different—except that the race took place before Trump was sworn in.
Were Democrats already feeling pumped up even before Trump moved into the White House? The evidence is mixed. We also saw post-November runoffs in Louisiana (that Democrats didn't seriously contest) and a state House special election in Virginia (that they did) where the final Democratic margin was worse than Clinton's in 2016, albeit only by a little bit in each case. So we don't have a lot of data yet that supports a "Trump backlash" thesis—in fact, this Iowa state House special election is the first anywhere since the inauguration, so our sample size is as small as can be. But it's certainly not a bad start, and we'll be keeping a close eye to see whether this pattern repeats itself.