The Thin Blue Trend Line
Trump and Biden are tied nationally. But in special elections across the country, one party has consistently overperformed.
Whenever I look at polling for 2024, I despair:
Yes, we’re still over a year away. But the fact that it’s this close at all, given everything we know about Donald Trump and having already (barely) made it through four years of his Presidency, is unbelievably depressing.
That said, whenever I look at actual election results since 2020, I feel hopeful. Democrats held the Senate in 2022 - thanks in no small part to Republicans pissing away winnable races on celebrity and/or wingnut candidates - and limited the GOP to a very small margin of victory in the House.
And at the state level, the trend is clear:
Democrats just scored a big win in an election on Tuesday: Democrat Hal Rafter defeated Republican James Guzofski 56 percent to 44 percent in a special election to fill a Republican-held seat in the New Hampshire state House. Assuming Democrats win another special election in November in a solidly blue seat, Rafter’s win means the New Hampshire state House will be tied at 198 Republicans and 198 Democrats (with two independents and two seats still vacant). On paper, that will end full Republican control of New Hampshire state government. (In practice, whoever controls the House could change by the day depending on legislator absences.)
It’s also the latest example of Democrats outperforming in a special election, a trend that could be a harbinger of a very good year for Democrats in 2024. This New Hampshire district is 6 percentage points more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole, according to a weighted average of the 2020 and 2016 presidential results in the district.* Yet Rafter won by 12 points — an 18-point Democratic overperformance above their partisan baseline.
“Hang on,” you might be saying. “Only 2,800 people voted in this election.” (New Hampshire House districts are really tiny.) “Does that really mean anything?” On its own, no — any single special election can be influenced by any number of factors, including candidate quality or parochial issues. But Democrats have been posting special-election overperformances of that magnitude all year long, in all kinds of districts. And on average, they have won by margins 11 points higher than the weighted relative partisanship of their districts.
I haven’t paid much attention to New Hampshire politics since that time Larry, Darryl and Darryl ran for mayor1 and obviously the state has its own quirks which won’t necessarily apply to the whole country. (Indeed, a recent CNN poll has Trump below 40% in the New Hampshire GOP primary and Chris Freaking Christie in a statistical dead heat for second.) The same goes for every other state.
But when the same thing is happening across the country, in deep-red and deep-blue states alike, it seems like we can draw some tentative conclusions. And lo and behold, look which Republican candidate might very well have cost his party the hilariously large New Hampshire State House:
It’s almost like wacky election-denier candidates don’t have much appeal outside of the hardcore MAGA cult. Though it won’t stop them from trying again and again.
For those of us who want to keep Donald Trump or one of his acolytes out of the White House, there are two things we have to avoid.
The first is assuming Trump can’t possibly win again. 2016 should have taught us that.
The second is assuming Trump is destined to win again.
He’s competitive with Biden in polls. But in the polls that actually matter, Republicans have been consistently losing ground. If that continues over the next fourteen months, we may find ourselves on November 6, 2024 wondering why we were ever worried in the first place.
(I just jinxed it, didn’t I?)
Or was that Vermont? I always get these two mixed up.
As Jonathan Capehart put it last Sunday, "for Democrats, the glass is always half-full and the part that's gone is used for bedwetting."