Republicans won the special Arizona election. They should be terrified.
Dissect Republican Debbie Lesko’s victory and there is little reason for hope for Republicans. If this is the best the GOP can do now, November is going to be especially ugly.
President Trump carried Arizona’s 8th District by 21 points in the general election. Disgraced Republican Rep. Trent Franks won re-election eight times in the area (it was redistricted in 2012) by as much as 65 percent of the vote. It was a fortified district where Republicans perform, on average, 13 points better than they do nationally.
By all conventional accounts, this should have been an easy win. But around midnight, the Associated Press called the race for Lesko, 53 percent to Hiral Tipirneni’s 47 percent. She barely held on.
Congratulations to Republican Debbie Lesko on her big win in the Special Election for Arizona House seat. Debbie will do a Great Job! Press is so silent.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 25, 2018
Trump must have wondered why Republicans weren’t celebrating Wednesday morning. He tweeted that it was “a big win” and wondered why “the press is so silent.” But if GOP strategists had their way, everyone would forget about what happened in Arizona.
Afraid of another special election disaster, national Republicans airdropped more than a million dollars into the race for Lesko. They got their money’s worth here, but they likely won’t in November. There is no way they have enough cash if districts like this one are becoming squeakers.
“There are 147 GOP-held House seats less Republican than #AZ08,” Dave Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report noted. “It’s time to start rethinking how many of those are truly safe in November.” And Wasserman is right. What should have been an easy layup required a herculean, all-hands on deck effort. It also required a dramatically bad Democratic candidate.
Lucky for Lesko, her opponent was a doctor run out of practice by a lawsuit. Tipirneni failed to give a patient a tetanus shot in 2001, and as a result she contracted tetanus, went into a coma, and eventually died from kidney failure. For whatever reason, in 2018, the Democrat thought it would be wise to draw attention to her former profession by dressing up in scrubs and a lab coat and wrapping a stethoscope around her neck. Republicans took full advantage and turned it into a major campaign issue that she hadn’t seen a patient in over a decade.
But how many Democratic candidates are going to have flaws like that? There aren’t enough medical malpractice lawsuits against Democrats to save the Republican majority. Especially in districts where their opportunities are better, the Democrats will field candidates with relatively clean and competitive records.
By now it should be clear: Trump is not the magical electoral elixir his party had hoped. The president blazed a trail during the general election, sure. But in every subsequent contest, from Arizona to Pennsylvania, as the New York Times observes, “Republicans have lost support in every special election since Trump became president.”
The losses aren’t going to stop before November either. Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott just announced a special election to fill the seat vacated by another disgraced Republican, Rep. Blake Farenthold. Trump carried that district, Republicans held it since 2011, and it’s rated R+13. But none of that seems to matter much.
