Special election distress signals

Democrats upset with their party, combative centrism, strategic independents, Dems' working class disconnect, new polling on immigration and TikTok, religious highly educated parents

No. 355 | March 28th, 2025

🇺🇲 2025

It’s starting to look a lot like 2017 in terms of off-year and special elections.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball has a look at recent off-year election results and how they might spell trouble for the GOP.

Cinyc has broken down the Wisconsin mail ballot returns and finds an electorate somewhere in between the 2024 presidential election (Trump +1) and the 2023 Supreme Court race (Dem-aligned +11). As per usual, high-income suburbs are overperforming on ballot returns.

Nate Cohn is back! The Tilt returns this week and dives into Trump’s second term and the upcoming off-year elections.

I am not sure this will be the most suspenseful year or two of elections. We have already seen enough over the first eight years of the Trump era — including the first special elections of his current term — to be confident that Democrats will fare quite well. We have also seen enough to know that Democrats can fare quite well in these kinds of contests without necessarily having it translate to better chances in a presidential election…

The bottom line: Democrats may face serious questions about their identity and message, but it probably will not stop them from posting big victories over the next few years.

Special elections as a signal have been muddied recently by Democrats becoming an even higher-propensity coalition and performing well in 2022 and 2023 specials only to see that fail to translate to big electoral wins in November. (But still… Democrats are probably doing better in specials now than in the Biden-era specials.)

Some of this is probably the flip side of the multiracial populist coalition: a low propensity coalition may mean secular underperformance in red district specials that get quickly reversed in November. But the GOP is going to feel heartburn over this. Figuring how to get the GOP’s new voters to vote at higher rates should be priority number one, something with application not only for specials but the midterms.

🔵 The Democrats

Democrats are very upset with their party.

Liam Kerr at WelcomeStack pivots off my “combative centrism” frame as a potential way forward for Democrats.

Once again, Democrats look more and more like the Republicans of the Tea Party era. Which also coincided with the GOP running the table downballot — at a time when Democrats were perceived as dominant at the top of the ticket.

One weird trick Dems could use to deal with their structural disadvantage in the Senate are running “strategic independents" in red states. But Split Ticket finds this has a downside: minority voters will actually vote for the (D) and not for progressive indies, so this would probably only work in very white Midwestern and Western states.

Using Echelon data, The Liberal Patriot writes that Democrats will have a hard time connecting with red state working-class voters because they don’t live and work as they do.

🇺🇲 2024

Unlocking a paywalled chart from my Pennsylvania Memo from earlier this week: how the different political regions of Pennsylvania have evolved from 2000 to 2024.

📊 Public Opinion

Republicans and Democrats have drastically different views on immigration and deportation.

Support for a TikTok ban has decreased steadily.

👫 Demographics

Educated parents are filling the pews.