On Tuesday, voters in Arizona’s 8th congressional district will head to the polls to pick a new congressman (their former Congressmen, Trent Franks, resigned after a sexual harassment scandal). This is the most important election since Democrat Conor Lamb and Republican Rick Saccone faced off in Pennsylvania’s 18th District in March. So I’ve put together some data that’ll get you up to speed on the state of the race, give you some insights on the district, and help you interpret the final result.
The Polling—There’s Not Much of it, but the Republican Starts Ahead
There’s not a ton of polling in this race. Currently, RealClearPolitics has three polls from two pollsters in their database. One poll from OH Predictive Insights showed the GOP candidate, Debbie Lesko, ahead by 10 points. Emerson College found the Democratic candidate, Hiral Tipirneni, ahead by 1 point earlier this month, but put Lesko ahead by 6 points in a poll taken over the weekend.
If you average the OHPI poll with the latest Emerson survey, you get an 8 point lead for Lesko. That’s a real advantage, but it’s worth remembering that the true margin of error for individual special election polls is plus or minus 13 points. Moreover, the final poll average in House elections is less accurate than poll averages in presidential and senatorial races, so it’s worth taking this average with a grain of salt.
That being said, these numbers are good for Lesko. It’s always better to be ahead than behind, and these polls suggest that Lesko is the on-odds favorite to win the race.
The District is More GOP-friendly than PA-18
As I noted a few weeks ago, Trump won Arizona’s 8th district by 21.1 points in 2016—making it only slightly redder than Pennsylvania’s 18th District, where Democrat Conor Lamb eked out a win over Republican Rick Saccone in March. But Arizona’s 8th District may be friendlier to the Trump-era GOP than Pennsylvania’s 18th.
I updated my .gif from my previous piece to show why.
This map shows the results of presidential elections from 2000 to 2016 in Maricopa County, Arizona (most of the state and home to much of Phoenix). You’ll notice an outlined area in the center-left portion of the map. That’s the 8th District. Donald Trump didn’t perform especially well in Maricopa County or Arizona as a whole (he won the county and state by 3 and 3.5 points respectively, after Romney scored 9 and 11 point victories in the county and state). But the long-term blue expansion in the center of the city didn’t really touch the 8th District. Trump won it by 21.1 points in 2016, which isn’t so far off from Romney’s 24.8 point margin or McCain’s 22.2 point margin. A lot of the voters in this district are older and white—meaning they’re likely to reliably turn out and vote for the GOP.
These characteristics eliminate one advantage that Democrats had in Pennsylvania’s 18th district—the “ancestral Democrats.” In that race, 46 percentage of the voters were registered Democrats and 38.5 percent of the overall vote went to Hillary Clinton. That, along with the district’s topline historical vote totals, suggested that Pennsylvania’s 18th contained many voters who might have liked Bill Clinton or Al Gore’s version of the Democratic party, but preferred Donald Trump’s or George W. Bush’s versions of the GOP to Barack Obama’s or Hillary Clinton’s Democratic party. Those voters were persuadable, and some of them ended up voting for Lamb.
In Arizona’s 8th District, 24 percent of active voters are registered Democrats and Clinton won 37 percent of the overall vote. Moreover, 41 percent of the district’s voters are registered Republicans. Those are much better numbers for the Republican candidate.
Higher GOP registration is clearly an advantage for Lesko, but it’s hard to know whether it’s a small, medium, or large advantage.
In Utah’s 3rd District, registered Republicans outnumbered registered Democrats by a solid margin and the GOP candidate, John Curtis, outperformed Trump by about 9 points (and most GOP candidates in the Trump Era have underperformed the President’s 2016 result). The Mormon vote (a large, conservative blog of voters that’s been notably resistant to Trump) might explain part of the pattern here, but it’s not the only historically GOP district to hold a special election. Republicans could also make an ancestral claim to Georgia’s 6th District (former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s old seat), and last year’s special election there saw Republican Karen Handel perform about as well as Trump, winning by only 3 points more than he did. And in Kansas’s 4th District, which is mostly Wichita, Republicans made up a plurality of voters, but the GOP candidate underperformed Trump by over 20 points.
It’s possible that Kansas was an outlier because of then-governor Sam Brownback’s unpopularity and Republican registration differentiates GOP holds from Democratic gains. And Republicans posted solid results in Utah’s 3rd district and Georgia’s 6th (though Utah might be a demographic outlier because of the Mormon population). But the overall point here is that the dataset is small and noisy. A GOP registration edge is an advantage—it’s just hard to pinpoint ahead of time exactly how large of an advantage it is.
The GOP is Strongly Favored—But That’s Not the Most Interesting Question Here
As I’ve noted before, special election results are useful for predicting the midterm results if they’re compared to some reasonable baseline (like Trump’s 2016 performance or the state’s partisan lean) and averaged together. So it’s worth comparing tonight’s margin to the right baseline and looking at all the data before rejoicing over the result or tearing your hair out.
Maybe more interestingly, this election could give us some clues as to where Republicans will and won’t be able to defend seats in November. If Lesko performs well compared to Trump’s 2016 showing, that might suggest that GOP registration is a big advantage in upcoming races. Turnout in this race will be high—making it another data point in the continuing arguments about what sort of overall advantage Democrats can or can’t maintain in a high-turnout environment. It’s only one data point, and we shouldn’t over-interpret it. But this election, like the other specials, likely contains some useful information about what we’re going to see in the upcoming midterms and as well as clues as to how Americans feel about the Trump Era.
