Winning isn’t everything, nor is it the only thing for Democrats in special elections this year. Political observers had built up Tuesday’s Alabama Senate vote as yet another put-up-or-shut-up moment for Washington’s minority party, suggesting that a loss by Doug Jones there would be another letdown in a strong anti-Trump environment.
As it turns out, Jones won. That’s meaningful in the short term for the composition of the upper chamber, which will narrow to a two-seat Republican majority once he is seated next month. It’s also meaningful as a simple matter of wins and losses. But had the Democratic underdog fallen a bit short, it would not have erased the bigger picture predicting Congress’s composition next year: that Democrats are significantly outperforming expectations in GOP territory.
As the Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman pointed out on Friday, Democrats have well-surpassed their forecasted baseline—holding all else equal, what a Democrat should net in a given district or state—in six special elections this year.
In six 2017 special elections, Dems have been outperforming their @CookPolitical PVI-suggested share of the vote by an average of 9%: pic.twitter.com/P4qDT7LDGv
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) December 15, 2017
The most-watched contests were in Montana, where Republican Greg Gianforte held on after he assaulted a reporter and made a mess of the stretch run of his campaign; in the Georgia 6th, where progressive proxy Jon Ossoff failed to capture former Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price’s old seat; and Bama. Here’s the thing about each of these places, and even more so in the Kansas 4th, South Carolina 5th, and Utah 3rd: They are solidly Republican areas. The Georgia district is a bit of an outlier—its Cook Partisan Voting Index favors a generic GOP candidate there by “only” eight points—but Price, popular at home, had the suburban Atlanta region locked down for the GOP before moving to the Trump administration.
Why are moral victories—in addition to the actual, yet narrow one in Alabama—relevant to the political outlook in 2018? Easy: Not every Democrat contesting a Republican seat will face such an uphill battle. Republicans have withstood most high-profile challenges in special elections this year, but think of it like the odds-makers would: The Democrats have covered the spreads with ease.
Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight has written about this in greater detail, using some different statistics measuring a district or state’s partisan lean, but arriving at a similar, fleshed out conclusion:
All this goes without mentioning evidence from regularly scheduled programming this election season, like the Virginia House of Delegates races, which were on-cycle. Republicans held a near super-majority, with a 66-34 advantage. They nearly lost it.
If Democrats carry similar margins bettering their expected share of the vote into House and Senate races next year, there’s really no way to put it mildly: The GOP will be in for a drubbing.
