These Numbers Spell Trouble for the GOP

A special election in Ohio stuns election watchers and politicos with its implications.

Forget the polls. We know they were off in all of the last few elections, and in 2022 they seriously overestimated GOP performance, sometimes even on purpose. That vaunted “red wave” never materialized, and the pollsters made lame excuses for why they were wrong. 

Instead, let’s talk special elections. After all, polls don’t vote, people do. And those who vote in special elections are a special kind of voter: the kind especially likely to turn out for the general. 

So despite the caveats I’m obliged to lay out (“special elections are not always predictive of general election behavior,” “special elections measure the behavior of only a small segment of the population’s behavior,” etc.), I still trust actual voting patterns over telephone polls, where a lot of political weirdos answer calls from unknown numbers and I’m-never-voting types still angry about everything get to vent their frustrations.

Flying beneath most people’s radar, and certainly not on the front page of the New York Times, were the results of a special election to replace Republican Bill Johnson in the House. It was held Tuesday in Ohio’s 6th Congressional District on the eastern part of the state near Pittsburgh, PA.

The Republican candidate won, and that’s no surprise. But political observers are frankly shocked that the race was far closer than expected. 

Today, I’ll dig a bit into that race and discuss some numbers to consider. Then I’ll look at how these stack up against other special elections held recently. Bottom line? The results aren’t great for the Republican Party. In fact, they could spell disaster.

The blowout in Ohio that wasn’t 

Ohio continues to surprise us. The statewide votes last year, first to prevent Republicans from raising the threshold to pass constitutional amendments to 60 percent, and second to preserve the right to abortion in the state, showed that Ohio voters are ready to draw the line when it comes to extremist religious or anti-democratic measures. 

But will those numbers carry forward into Election Year 2024? It’s an important question, not because anyone thinks Ohio is going over to the Biden column, but because the balance of power in the Senate may depend on Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown prevailing in his statewide reelection bid.

No doubt the Brown campaign feels a nice tailwind at its back this morning. The race for Ohio Congressional District 6 was supposed to be a blowout. After all, Trump won that district by over 29 percent in 2020. And Rep. Bill Johnson won it two years ago by 35 points. 

That meant it was a reliably red district. And the Democratic challenger was a first-time, unknown candidate named Michael Kripchak, who quit his day job to run against GOP state senator, Michael Rulli. Kripchak is a veteran who spent only around $25K to Rulli’s $700,000, a nearly 30 to 1 cash advantage for the Republican.

In the end, however, Rulli won by only around 8.5 points. That’s a 20 point swing toward the Democrats since 2020, and a 26 point swing since 2022. Importantly, every county moved toward the Democrats.

Turnout was low for the election, as often is the case in Special Elections. But that was largely because Republicans didn’t show up. For example, as Dave Wasserman of Cook Political noted, in Harrison County, which went for Trump by 53 points in 2020, Rulli only got 12 percent of Trump’s 2020 vote while Kripchak received 22 percent of Biden’s 2020 vote. 

The 10 point turnout differential resulted in Rulli only winning the county by 28 points. That’s a swing toward the Democrats of 25 points since the 2020 election.

This isn’t an outlier. It’s part of a pattern.

In a deeply red district in a state won handily by Trump in 2020, Republicans argue that their voters may have felt secure enough not to even bother coming out for a special election. Why go vote when it’s clear their guy is going to win, right?

Two points here. 

First, this argument misses the fact that Democrats also know they are going to lose, so why bother coming out either, right? And yet they did in far higher numbers. That’s because, simply put, they are more motivated this year. And motivation to vote is a big factor in which side wins elections.

Second, if this argument were true—that voters in safely blue or safely red districts don’t bother to come out if their candidate is the safe one—then we would expect to see Republicans overperforming in special elections in districts that are solid blue and where the GOP challenger had no chance.

It turns out, there was exactly this situation, a kind of flip side to OH-6, in a recent special election in NY- 26 in Western New York. The race was held at the end of April, and the Democratic candidate, Timothy Kennedy, trounced his opponent by 28 points after outspending him 47 to 1. 

But was this an overperformance by the GOP candidate relative to prior elections, given how little he spent? And did Democrats fail to show up because it was clear their guy would win? 

Nope. In 2020, Joe Biden won the district with 62 percent of the vote, so the 2024 results reflect a +6 swing to the Democrats in four years, even for a special election that was guaranteed to send a Democrat to Congress. Kennedy even outperformed the Democrat who last ran for the seat in 2022 by around 5 points.

Okay, but what about districts that are swings or toss-ups? It turns out, we have an example of a special election in one of those, too. Remember George Santos? He won his election in 2022 in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, but then was forced out in 2023. In February, the district held a special election to replace him, and that wound up again being a huge win for the Democrats: Tom Suozzi defeated his GOP opponent by nearly 8 points in a highly contested race considered a test of the parties’ strengths going into 2024.

That represented a big swing, too. Santos had won there by almost 7 points in 2022, meaning Suozzi’s win was a 15 point swing toward the Democrats.

Democrats overperforming in Special Elections gives me hope 

As senior advisor to TargetSmart Tom Bonier noted, the “polls don’t predict turnout. They are predicated on the pollster’s prediction of who is going to vote.” He added, “The best predictor of turnout is past turnout. Dems are proving to be motivated in these specials.”

By contrast, Republicans need to pray that their voters will actually show up when Trump is on the ballot in November, even though they didn’t materialize for any of the recent special elections. Trump won the 2016 election in part because lower propensity voters who weren’t captured by the polling at the time turned up to cast their votes for him. Whether they show up or not in November 2024 remains to be seen, but so far this year it’s fair to say they haven’t.

In short, special election after special election have consistently indicated that Democrats remain motivated, while Republicans are not. It’s a big reason I’d rather be the Biden Campaign than the Trump Campaign, even apart from the whole 34 felony convictions of the candidate thing.