Special elections to fill vacancies in Congress are often harbingers of what to expect in the November General Election, and Democrats have been over-performing in special elections this year. Yes, Special Elections Really Are Signaling A Better-Than-Expected Midterm For Democrats.
On Tuesday, a Democrat won the special election in the “swing district” NY-19 that in a normal midterm election year a member of the president’s party would expect to lose.
This is what infuriates me with all these “projection” pollsters like the Cook Political Report, for example, they are all relying on data from previous elections in normal years – there is nothing normal about this year, so their projections are crap!
There has never been an election after one of the major political parties waged a violent insurrection against the U.S. government to overturn an election in order to seize power, and there has never been an election after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the fundamental constitutional rights of one-half of the population. These are wild cards that render pollster projections in this election based upon normal midterm election years in the past totally useless, and the media really needs to stop reporting the projections these pollster organizations put out because their projections are crap and they really don’t have any idea what they are talking about. They are trying to set a narrative to produce a desired outcome.
I would remind you that pollsters have had a terrible track record over several election cycles now. And lazy media villagers love reporting on meaningless polls because it is filler for copy. It is easier than actually going out and doing actual reporting about the candidates and the issues and voters.
I have been arguing for years that we need to hold an election without any reporting on polls to see what actually happens as a test. Poll reporting has an adverse impact on voter turnout and enthusiam. It sets a narrative to produce a desired outcome. This is the real purpose of polls, in my opinion. And it is wrong.
With that said, to NY-19. The Guardian reports, Democrat who campaigned on abortion rights wins in New York special election:
A New York Democrat who campaigned on abortion rights and the future of US democracy has won a special congressional election in a swing district, a victory that Democrats hope could signal a fundamental shift in national voter sentiment ahead of the November midterm elections.
Democrat Pat Ryan defeated Republican Marc Molinaro 51.3% to 48.7%, with 99% of the vote counted, Edison Research said, after a hard-fought contest for an open seat in New York’s 19th congressional District, which spans part of the Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains region and is known as a bellwether.
The election took on outsized national importance and became a testing ground for both parties’ campaign strategies. Ryan made the US supreme court’s decision to overturn abortion rights a centrepiece of his campaign, mobilising Democrats outraged by the ruling. Molinaro focused on crime and soaring inflation that voters say is their most pressing concern.
The district voted for Barack Obama in 2012, Donald Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.
Ryan’s victory, coming after voters preserved abortion protections in Republican-dominated Kansas, will boost Democrats’ hopes that opposition to the Supreme Court ruling could help them to hold on to the House of Representatives and Senate in a tough election year.
Ryan will serve only until January, when the seat will disappear due to state redistricting. Both he and Molinaro are also running for different seats in the November midterms.
[D]emocrats have been widely seen as the underdog party up to now in the midterm elections for House and Senate, with their prospects weighed down by historical trends, inflation, and president Joe Biden’s low job approval numbers.
Republicans are favoured to take control of the House [by projection pollsters setting a narrative], putting them in a position to scupper Biden’s legislative agenda. But their chances of capturing the Senate have been cast into doubt by the weakness of Trump-endorsed candidates in the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
In recent weeks, Biden’s approval rating has recovered somewhat from its low of 36% to reach 41%, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling, as inflation has shown signs of easing and Democrats have celebrated a series of legislative wins in Congress.
The New York special election was the first competitive contest since the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling in June. But other special House elections in conservative districts in Nebraska and Minnesota saw Republicans prevail by much narrower margins than expected.
Here is Pat Ryan’s abortion rights campaign ad which all Democrats running for office should be running a version of in this election. And I want to see those pink “choice is on the ballot” campaign signs (above) popping up all over Maricopa County, especially in the County Attorney special election. All other Democratic candidates should be doing these campaign signs as well. Hell, rent a billboard!
How can we be a free country if the government tries to control women's bodies?
That's not the country I fought to defend.
Freedom includes a woman's right to choose. Period.
Watch our first ad: pic.twitter.com/tWk8GJmErd
— Pat Ryan 🇺🇸 (@PatRyanUC) June 24, 2022
And Democrats should be doing voter registration drives targeted to women voters. In Arizona, you can register to vote online at Service Arizona EZ Voter Registration. If you are not rgistered to vote, do it now! The voter registation deadline for the general election is Tuesday, October 11, 2022.
Representative-elect Pat Ryan spoke with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner about the messaging in his campaign that helped him win the key bellwether special election in New York’s 19th congressional district, and the motivating factor of Donald Trump’s threat to democracy.
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The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake wtites, “Democrats show momentum coming out of special elections”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/24/democrats-special-election-momentum/
[M]ultiple special elections have given Democrats increasing license to believe they can beat the fundamentals.
Democrats again overperformed the 2020 presidential election results in a pair of special elections in New York on Tuesday. That means they’ve now overperformed 2020 in all four special elections decided since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
And that’s not including a fifth special election last week in Alaska, where votes are still being tallied and Democrats have a real shot at picking off a statewide seat where voters favored Donald Trump by 10 points.
Any single race — even a few races — can provide a misleading picture, and we often oversell the results of an individual special election. But special elections are one of the best indicators we have of the current political environment, because they involve actual voters showing up to cast actual ballots. What’s more, the 2022 election cycle has given us an inordinate number of late special elections from which to glean clues.
And the picture across these races is pretty consistent in some key ways. It involves Democrats overperforming Biden’s 2020 numbers by a handful of percentage points and doing so thanks to turnout in more-Democratic-leaning areas.
[In] these four [recent] races, Democrats are overperforming 2020 by an average of more than five points, and that’s compared with an election in which they won the presidency and held on to the House. It’s certainly very unlikely the party would overperform that much in November, especially with the “generic ballot” showing voters pretty evenly split between the two parties. But for Democrats staring down the barrel of a tough election, these are encouraging signs.
Especially when you dig a little deeper.
Tuesday’s marquee race was in New York’s 19th, in large part because it’s such a closely divided district for which both parties actually fought — unlike with most other special elections we’ve analyzed this election cycle. Republicans had high hopes to pick off a district that Biden carried narrowly, with their candidate, Marc Molinaro, leading in every public poll.
The race turned out quite differently, with Democrat Pat Ryan leading by 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent with about 94 percent of expected votes counted.
The reason: Voters turned out at higher rates in the most Democratic-leaning counties.
MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki even calculated that, if relative turnout in each of the district’s counties were the same as in 2020, the current election results show Republicans would have won by very a narrow margin.
Something similar happened in Nebraska and Minnesota, as The Post’s Colby Itkowitz and Lenny Bronner summarized a couple weeks back. Effectively, Democrats overperformed in the biggest and most Democratic-leaning precincts, suggesting they more effectively turned out their base.
We don’t yet have precinct-level data to figure out whether these trends held in New York, but the county-level data suggests that this did, to borrow that tired phrase, come down to turnout.
-Well, duh! ALL elections come down to turnout.
The New York Times’ Nate Cohn writes, “Growing Evidence Against a Republican Wave”, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/upshot/midterms-elections-republicans-analysis.html
[A]s the start of the general election campaign nears, it’s becoming increasingly hard to find any concrete signs of Republican strength.
Tuesday’s strong Democratic showing in a special congressional election in New York’s 19th District is only the latest example. On paper, this classic battleground district in the Hudson Valley and Catskills is exactly where the Republicans would be expected to flip a seat in a so-called wave election. But the Democrat Pat Ryan prevailed over a strong Republican nominee, Marc Molinaro, by around two percentage points, outperforming Mr. Biden’s narrow win in the district two years ago.
The result adds to a growing pile of evidence suggesting that Democrats have rebounded in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in late June to overturn Roe v. Wade. No matter the indicator, it’s hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage.
One special election would be easy to dismiss. But it’s not alone.
There have been five special congressional elections since the court’s Dobbs ruling overturned Roe, and Democrats have outperformed Mr. Biden’s 2020 showing in four of them. In the fifth district, Alaska’s at-large House special, the ranked-choice voting count is not complete, but they appear poised to outperform him there as well.
On average, Republicans carried the four completed districts by 3.7 percentage points, compared with Donald J. Trump’s 7.7-point edge in the same districts two years ago. The results aren’t merely worse than expected for Republicans; they’re straightforwardly poor. Republicans need to fare better than Mr. Trump, who lost the national vote by 4.5 points in 2020, to retake the House — let alone contemplate winning the Senate.
Special congressional elections are idiosyncratic low-turnout affairs, and these races were no exception. They had a relatively higher share of white voters in mostly rural districts that were not representative of the country. The voters who turn out in primary or special elections aren’t representative, either, with highly educated and well-informed voters usually making up an outsize share of the vote. Those two factors probably converged to the advantage of Democrats in all four completed districts. The results showed a superior turnout in highly educated liberal enclaves or college towns, like Ithaca in New York’s 23rd District, while turnout elsewhere in the districts lagged behind.
But strength among high-turnout white voters can get a party pretty far in low-turnout midterm elections, which tend to have a relatively whiter electorate. Perhaps in part for that reason, there is a decent historical relationship between special election results and midterm outcomes. And before Dobbs, Republicans were outrunning Mr. Trump in special congressional elections. Since then, the pattern has reversed.
While there’s plenty of room for debate about exactly what the special election results mean for November, there’s no dispute that the results are plainly positive for Democrats.
Democrats have made steady gains on the generic congressional ballot, a poll question asking voters whether they prefer Democrats or Republicans for Congress.
Overall, Democrats now have the slightest advantage on this measure, according to FiveThirtyEight’s tracker. That represents about a three-point swing toward the Democrats since mid-June, when Republicans led before the Dobbs ruling.
A tight generic ballot represents a real improvement for Democrats. If the polls are right — a big “if” after the last few cycles — it suggests a fairly competitive district-by-district battle for control of the House, rather than the expected Republican rout.
[T]he early state and district polls do look relatively promising for Democrats. That’s especially true in the Senate, where a simple polling average might even show Democrats poised to make gains.
The House polls are consistent with the generic ballot results. On average, Democrats are running about 4.7 points behind Mr. Biden’s performance across 40 nonpartisan House polls taken since the Dobbs decision. That would be consistent with a close national vote.
After the last few cycles of polling misfires, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of state surveys — especially in the relatively white working-class battleground states where the polls seem to have consistently underestimated Republicans.
But here again, the long-awaited “red wave” is nowhere to be found.