During the first few days of August, while on vacation back East, I was sitting in our hotel room late one Tuesday night and decided to check in on a small spate of special elections being conducted for legislative seats in two midwestern states: Missouri and Iowa.
Privately, I assumed it could be a long night for the Democrats. The two Missouri seats (one in their state Senate, the other in their state House) were both seats held by Republicans in districts where Donald Trump led Hillary Clinton by at least 20 points. The Iowa House seat was even more bleak: a Democratic-held open seat in a rural district that Hillary Clinton lost 58-37 last November.
Instead, the Democrats overachieved on a solid level. The Missouri Senate seat was a rout for the GOP, but in a district that Donald Trump won 76-20, the Democrat managed a very respectable 32 percent of the vote. In the House seat, Republican Sara Walsh held onto HD-50 for the GOP, but in a district that Trump carried 58-37, she only managed to cling to a 52-48 win over Democrat Michela Skelton.
Then, there was Iowa. And in one of those districts that have received breathless media attention for shifting hard to Trump last year (a 50-48 Obama seat that lurched to a 58-37 Trump victory), Democrat Phil Miller managed a solid 54-44 victory over his Republican rival, Travis Harris.
As I sat on Twitter discussing these results while they emerged, the general tone of the replies I received from progressive souls was, to say the least, far from triumphant:
“So tired of moral victories”
“Being the first place loser is unacceptable. Win.”
“Unless they (the GOP) actually start losing some of those seats close doesn't really matter.”
Let’s explore the genesis of that frustration—plus the reasons why in the long view, it’s potentially misplaced.
One of the phrases that has popped up a lot this year for Democratic followers of elections is the term “moral victories.”
This, of course, is almost certainly owed to the highest-profile race thus far in 2017: the battle to replace Trump Health and Human Services Sec. Tom Price in Georgia’s 6th district.
Nothing, for those of us who are avid followers of electoral politics, is more frustrating and painful than when a contest feels eminently winnable and doesn’t quite fall your way when the votes are counted. And at the time, far too many people on the center-left were seduced by the variety of factors that made this race in nominally Republican turf so competitive:
- The district, like many suburban districts, had shifted hard away from the GOP, as a district Mitt Romney carried with ease became a Trump +1 district.
- The Democrats had a young and exciting candidate in Jon Ossoff, who had raised money at a clip that no one had ever seen before for a novice candidate not wedded to self-funding.
- Donald Trump had managed to bungle his way through a honeymoon-free start to his presidency. As a result, his approval rating by the time of the special election was languishing nationally in the lower 40s.
- Pre-election polling looked awfully favorable for Ossoff, with the Democrat leading or tied in 12 of the 15 polls taken between the first round open primary and the June 20th general election. What’s more: pre-primary polling, if anything, had underestimated Ossoff’s first-round margin.
Given all these factors, it was very tough in the wake of Ossoff’s narrow defeat to make the argument that, in fact, this was a positive development. It was hard to explain that this was a district, presidential shift aside, which routinely elected Republicans, often by outsized margins. Or that Ossoff’s loss was nearly 20 points closer than the previous House result in the district, just eight months earlier. Or that outside Republican money flooded into the district to tune of eight figures, and there was no way the GOP could replicate that in every marginal district in 2018.
Compounding the wound was the fact that there had been a trio of other special elections in the U.S. House where the GOP held onto their turf by tantalizingly close margins. In fact, on the same night the Ossoff-Handel race was garnering the lion’s share of our attention, about 250 miles to the northeast, Democrat Archie Parnell actually came incrementally closer (51-48) to what would’ve been an immense upset in a solidly GOP district in upstate South Carolina. That race, coupled with narrow defeats earlier in Kansas and Montana, added to Democratic angst.
Hence the less-than-triumphant response when I took to Twitter on Aug. 8 to celebrate a 52-48 loss in a ruby-red chunk of central Missouri. Hell, on one level, it’s entirely understandable. Democrats have had their fill, and then some, of “it’s great we came so close!” stories.
Fair enough. But let’s talk about why they matter.
point #1: they haven’t all been “moral victories”
Our tendency to focus on Congress is certainly a driving factor in that angst. There have been five Congressional specials in 2017—the four aforementioned close losses in GOP territory, and a Democratic wipeout in a deep-blue Los Angeles district (CA-34) where the lone Republican aspirant logged a mighty 3.7 percent of the vote in the opening round of the special.
But if you look downballot you can see real victories, and some of them in places that would seem like steep terrain for Democratic candidates. Just last month, the Democrats picked up a pair of GOP-held districts in Oklahoma, for crying out loud. They have also picked up a pair of other districts, one in New Hampshire’s ginormous House of Representatives, the other in New York’s state Assembly.
The latter race in that pairing is particularly notable. NY-AD-09 is a slice of Long Island where Democrats had long been the underdogs. The prior GOP incumbent, Joseph Saladino, had won by no less than 32 points in his eight successful Assembly bids.
What’s more: it was a district that seemed to be one of the many which saw a legitimate shift to the GOP in the era of Trump. Whereas Mitt Romney carried the seat by 12 points, Trump carried it in November by 23. All that said, when a special election was held in May to replace Saladino (who left the Assembly to become town supervisor of Oyster Bay), Democrat Christine Pellegrino not only won the seat, but did so with ease, beating Thomas Gargiulo by a 59-41 margin.
POINT #2: democrats are holding seats that seemed lost to them
One of the most intense debates in election junkie circles this year has been about the corners of the country that veered sharply to Trump last year (and, to a lesser extent, the suburban corners that veered to Clinton). Speculation has abounded as to whether Trump has ushered in a permanent realignment among white working-class districts around the nation.
It is, admittedly, a small sample size, but there is some evidence to suggest that “Trump territory” in 2016 has not morphed into GOP territory.
Last week was a classic example. Iowa’s HD-82 is a rural corner of southeastern Iowa, held by Democrat Curt Hanson from his victory in a 2009 special election until his death in June. HD-82 was long a swing district, a district that Barack Obama carried in 2012. Like the state at-large, it began a rightward lurch in 2014 (Republican Sen. Joni Ernst carried the district 51-44, nearly mirroring her statewide margin of victory). In 2016, Donald Trump destroyed Hillary Clinton in the district, carrying the 82nd district by a 58-37 margin.
Last week, not only did Democrat Phil Miller win the district, he did so rather easily in a 54-44 win. In other words, the district performed a hell of a lot more like it did in 2012 than it did in 2016, suggesting that Trump’s meteoric rise in the rural district was not transferable, at least in this case.
In a similar example (though the outcome in this race was never in doubt), Democrats held onto another legislative seat in Iowa (centered around Davenport) in January despite it diving from an Obama +27 district down to a Clinton +11 district. The Democratic candidate (Monica Kurth) won by a 73-27 margin.
Contrast that with the much-discussed Georgia 6th. That district lurched hard in the other direction, with a Romney +23 district transformed into a Trump +1 district. The GOP held onto this one, but by less than four points. So, consider the difference: in one of the districts where Trump eroded the traditional GOP edge, the district performed more like it did in 2016 than it did in 2012.
If the GOP surge of 2016 doesn’t hold in those working-class enclaves, but the Democratic surge of 2016 does hold in those handful of suburban GOP seats, that is a recipe for real peril for the Republicans in 2017 and 2018.
POINT #3: margins matter, even in losses
Beating the point spread is real.
The reason is simple. Many of the close races of 2017, thus far, have been on historically Republican turf. This is particularly true of the four close U.S. House races. Aside from GA-06, the other three districts up for grabs went to the Republicans by margins ranging from 3 to 6 points. But last November, Trump carried them by margins ranging from 18 to 27 points. The least amount of erosion for the GOP came in Montana’s at-large district, where the Democratic overperformance on the margin was 14 points.
Even if you include the sole “underperformance” relative to Trump’s 2016 margins (GA-06), the average Democratic overperformance in the four GOP-held House special elections comes out to 12 percent.
So even though the Democrats went 0 for 4 in that quartet of GOP-held specials, on the margin they ran 12 points ahead of the Trump-Clinton margin just a handful of months ago. Why does that matter? Because there are exactly 75 Republican-held seats in the House which Donald Trump carried by 12 percentage points or less. The Democrats need 25 seats to claim an outright majority in the House.
At the state legislative level? The number of seats put into play with a uniform swing of that magnitude numbers in the hundreds. Such a swing would put multiple GOP-held state chambers in play.
As you can see on the right, during the 2017 cycle, Democrats have “beaten the spread” far more often than not (roughly 75 percent of the time). If you take the raw numbers, the Democratic overperformance is 13 points. Note, also, that the most recent elections (in yellow) were all fairly large overperformances.
It’s also worth noting that one of the notable Democratic weak spots this year (by 20+ points) happened in a Democratic stronghold. Blowouts are tougher to use in this metric, because you have to consider the chance that the out-party will make little effort to win a district dominated by the other party.
If the analysis is limited only to this districts where either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump carried the district by 25 points or less, the average Democratic overperformance actually stretches out to nearly 15 points (14.67 percent).
Now, it should go without saying that there are caveats all over the place with this kind of analysis. First of all, large and consistent Democratic overperformances now does not guarantee they will be there come November (or next November, for that matter). Also, candidates matter. As we have written about in the past, one of the real costs of Republican gerrymandering of chambers around the nation is that even nominally competitive districts often go unchallenged, because good Democratic candidates don’t want to sign up for life in the legislative minority. However, as has been reported extensively, Democratic recruiting for 2018 is unusually strong. And, also to buttress that point, let’s remember that Virginia Democrats had an enormous recruiting year, fielding candidates in nearly ninety percent of the available seats for November’s elections.
Indeed, the climate seems unusually favorable for Democratic candidates, a fact that has been masked by the fact that most of the high-profile contests thus far in 2017 have been on adverse turf for Democrats.
That will change soon. Democrats have a real shot at chipping away at the GOP edge in the Florida state Senate in a September special election in FL-SD-40, and then the lower houses of both the Virginia and New Jersey state legislatures will be in play come November. The sample size will grow immensely over the next three months, and we will have a much clearer picture of where the Democrats stand going into the critical 2018 midterms.