There’s a lot of talk today about what last night’s Kansas special election means for the parties. Republican Ron Estes won comfortably in the race to replace former Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., but Democrats are taking heart in the fact that it really shouldn’t have been a seven-point race. It gives them optimism for 2018, and rightly so.
There were all kinds of local factors involved in this race that probably make it different from the other ones coming up. For example, Estes is currently the incumbent State Treasurer in a state where a deeply unpopular Republican governor is blamed for ruining the state’s finances. Republicans generally agree that Estes ran a miserable low-energy campaign. President Trump’s election, whatever his approval rating is in that district, has definitely shifted all of the energy and enthusiasm toward his opponents. All of this suggests that in a low-turnout race, Democrats are going to do better here than usual, and also better than they might in other parts of the nation.
By the same token, it wouldn’t have been sensible to expect Estes to win by 30 points, roughly the margin by which both Trump and Pompeo won the district in November. An open seat is different from an incumbent re-election, and the electorate that shows up in a special election is simply different from that of a general election.
However, in many instances since Trump won, partisan Democrats have demonstrated a level of enthusiasm above and beyond that of Republican partisans. This includes not just every special election, but also all of those town halls that left-wing activists keep packing so that they can shriek at their members of congress (in deep red districts, often) about “patriarchal privilege” and other concerns that perfectly normal people in Utah’s third congressional district think about every day.
In special elections, and in midterms, the most active party tends to win, because turnout is simply lower than in presidential general elections. So Republicans have every reason to be alarmed by last night’s outcome. They should be thinking about better ways to reach and mobilize their own voters more effectively.
Here’s why: There will be a drop-off between the turnout in 2016 and the turnout in the coming (I think now three) competitive 2017 special House elections and the 2018 midterms. In last night’s election, Republican turnout in Kansas-4 dropped off by 61 percent — which is to say, the number who voted for Estes was only 39 percent of the number who had voted for Pompeo in November. The Democrats, on the other hand, turned out a number of voters just over 70 percent of those who had voted for Daniel Giroux, Pompeo’s opponent.
I ran a crude simulation with these numbers using Dave Wasserman’s publicly available spreadsheet of the 2016 results. If turnout across all 435 districts followed this same pattern of partisan participation, then Democrats would win a 314-seat majority in the 435-seat House of Representatives next year.
Is that a realistic outcome? No, of course it isn’t. But Democrats only need 218 seats to win the House majority, a pickup of 24. If Republicans keep doing what they’ve been doing, (fumbling on healthcare reform is a good example of what they’ve been doing) and fail to give their regular voters a reason to turn out and support them, then they’re going to get a big enough shellacking that we might see a return to Speaker Pelosi in 2019.
