In special elections last night in Connecticut, Democrats easily held on to one of their own state House seats and a state Senate seat as well.
And they came up short in trying to take over a Republican-held seat, leaving the state Senate in a tie that the Democratic lieutenant governor can break. But as in the Delaware special election over the weekend, Democratic turnout was a lot stronger than you would have expected.
The secretary of state doesn’t have the official totals yet. But the unofficial tally confirms the recent surge in Democratic interest in voting and activism. Whereas the Republican candidate in Connecticut Senate District 32 got about one-third of GOP November turnout, the Democrat got more than half of his party’s general election turnout. That allowed the Democrat to lose with a respectable 45 percent of the vote in a district that has gone 60-plus percent for a Republican every election since the current boundaries were first used in 2012.
This difference in turnout suggests a huge enthusiasm gap in the early Trump era, and that should alarm Republicans. The headwind the party will face in the 2018 midterm is already howling, and they need to start doing whatever they can to adjust for it.
In both Delaware and Connecticut, Democrats seem to have had a substantial financial advantage in their campaigns (the official numbers aren’t in yet). When Republican House candidates go before the electorate for special elections in Kansas, Montana, South Carolina and Georgia in coming months, the party would do well to dedicate some resources even in places where they expect to win.
President Trump did himself a lot of good last night by giving what seemed, to all appearances, to be a perfectly normal speech. That’s a good start to calming a restive electorate, but the waters are very choppy right now.
