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During most of the Trump era, most of the special elections followed a fairly predictable scenario: a Republican leaves his post (either to join the Trump administration, or as a result of the election). a scandal), a special election is planned, the Democratic candidate goes far beyond the basic partisanship of the district (sometimes even winning the district) and elected officials get more evidence that the Democrats are on the right track to get good results in the next deadlines.
But Republicans took a break in Saturday's special election in Texas. Republican Michael Cloud won 55% of the vote in District 27 in Texas on Saturday, filling the seat vacated by Blake Farenthold (who settled a sexual harassment complaint using taxpayer dollars). Cloud avoided runoff by getting more than 50 percent against a crowded field of Democrats, Republicans and Independents. His 55 percent is not so far from the 60 percent that Trump won in the district in 2016, and the combined Republican vote share was very close to Trump's overall percentage.
This is a good data point for Republicans. To get an idea of quality, look at this chart.
The basic idea here is to set up a calendar of special election results against a reasonable baseline (skip this paragraph if you are not not interested in the details or have seen an earlier version of this chart). Each point is an election, and the time runs from left to right chronologically. If the Democrats far outperformed Hillary Clinton's margin, the point would be very high above the dotted line, and if the Republican far surpassed Trump, it would be far below. The color indicates the result: dark blue is a democratic gain, light blue is a democratic hold, rose is a republican hold and dark red is GOP. Finally, bigger points indicate that more people voted for the main candidates of the party. Data comes from Daily Kos Elections and Geoff Skelley of Crystal Ball Sabato.
27 th District of Texas is the small pink dot sitting on the dotted line near the end of the graph.
The GOP has done a lot better here than in many other important special elections. In the Montana District, 5 of South Carolina 18 of Pennsylvania 4 of Kansas of Arizona, 8 of the Arizona and Senate of Alabama. the race, many more voters showed up and the Democrats outclassed Clinton by a wide margin (sometimes 20 points). This is not the first time Republicans have had a decent performance (for example, the District of Georgia [6] and Utah 3 count as outperformances, although Trump was much weaker in both districts that Mitt Romney had been in 2012), but it's much better than what they've seen in recent House elections such as 8 Arizona and 18 from 1945 in Pennsylvania.
Republicans should be happy with this result, but they should not interpret it too much. The turnout was extremely low (which is why the point is so small) and we do not know how the result would have changed if it was higher. Perhaps most importantly, special election data is noisy. The chart above shows stratospheric democratic outperformance as well as strong outperformance of GDP. The best approach is to look at the sum of evidence rather than just one data point. And so far, the special elections (especially House promotions) suggest that public opinion strongly favors the Democrats in November.
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