In the Kansas special election on Tuesday to replace former congressman (and current CIA director) Mike Pompeo, the Republican candidate won by seven percentage points (52.5 percent to 45.7 percent, with almost all precincts reporting).
That performance was poor enough compared to November 2016 that some are sounding the alarm about a Democratic tsunami in 2018. Trump won the district in 2016 by 27 points, and Pompeo won by 31 points (61 percent to 30 percent). If a similar swing occurs next fall nationwide, it would certainly wipe out the GOP’s majority in the House.
The argument against panicking is that this particular election was much more about local Kansas politics than Trump or the national GOP. Sam Brownback’s budgets have made him a very unpopular governor, and GOP congressional candidate Ron Estes is closely tied to Brownback as the state’s treasurer. Although Estes ran poorly compared to Trump and Pompeo in 2016, he ran slightly ahead of Brownback and about as well as GOP senator Pat Roberts in 2014. This was just one special election, and upcoming special elections in Georgia and Montana will show if Kansas is part of a trend. Of course, it’s also worth remembering that special elections do not always predict national trends. As Sean Trende wrote on Tuesday: “Special elections in 2004 saw Democrats win deep-red seats such as South Dakota’s At-Large seat and Kentucky’s 6th District, yet the general elections were a disappointment for the party (to say the least). For that matter, if Republicans do well, Democrats shouldn’t panic either; Republicans faced two dispiriting special election losses in New York and one in Pennsylvania before their 2010 landslide wins.”
The case for panicking is perhaps stronger: Trump’s approval rating is already in the low 40s, and the biggest question for the mid-term elections is probably whether or not his rating recovers. If it’s stuck at 40 percent in November 2018, it’s very hard to see the GOP holding on.
