As you may know, the midterm election season kicked off last Tuesday with the Texas primaries for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, state legislature, US House, and US Senate. The midterms are always a referendum on the president, and almost uniformly turn against him. This year, with President Trump, it’s no different. However, all of that is for a different article.
Since President Trump has been elected, there have been seven special elections to the 115th Congress: Georgia’s 6th District, in which a vacancy arose due to the appointment of Tom Price (R) to be Secretary of Health and Human Services; California’s 34th District, in which a vacancy arose due to the appointment of Xavier Beccera (D) to be California attorney general; Montana’s At-Large District, in which a vacancy arose due to the appointment of Ryan Zinke (R) as Secretary of the Interior; South Carolina’s 5th District, in which a vacancy arose due to the appointment of Mick Mulvaney (R) as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget; Utah’s 3rd District, in which a vacancy arose due to the resignation of Jason Chaffetz (R) to become a Fox News host; Kansas’s 4th District, in which a vacancy arose due to the appointment of Mike Pompeo (R) as CIA director; and a Class II Senate seat in Alabama, in which a vacancy arose due to the appointment of Jeff Sessions (R) as attorney general.
As per FiveThirtyEight, each one of those congressional seats has moved towards Democrats, based on the change from the past two presidential results in those districts (or for Alabama, the whole state of Alabama) to the results in the special elections. Some changes were small, like the 3-point shift in UT-3, and some were massive, like the colossal 30-point shift in Alabama. On average, a seat in a special congressional election in 2017 moved 16 points towards Democrats, a sign of the anti-Trump sentiment that seems set to sweep the country come November. Even though the only seat flipped so far was in Alabama, double-digit margin shifts all over the country in November would easily flip the House and send many incumbent Republican congressmen packing. Keep in mind that almost every Republican-held congressional district is not as red as Alabama or KS-4, for example.
The special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th District only occurred because of peculiar circumstances: Rep. Tim Murphy (R), known publicly for his pro-life stances, was caught asking his mistress to get an abortion in the event she became pregnant. Controversy ensued, and Murphy resigned in disgrace, meaning Gov. Tom Wolf (D) had to call an election to fill the remainder of Murphy’s term. Last year, Connor Lamb (D) and Rick Saccone (R) won their respective party endorsements. Saccone has become known as a weak fundraiser who relied on national Republican money and a lackluster candidate who generated little enthusiasm; many Republicans, including President Trump, trashed him privately. Saccone, as a state representative, voted against organized labor, leaving ample reason for the unions who backed Murphy to move to Lamb’s camp. Lamb, is exactly the kind of conservative Democrat who represented an earlier incarnation of this district before Murphy’s initial 2002 election: pro-union, pro-gun, and pro-life (although he’s personally pro-life as a Catholic and believes the government should stay out of it). He’s a veteran, served as an Assistant US Attorney, and is anti-Nancy Pelosi to boot.
President Trump is almost certainly the single biggest driver of voters’ decisions. He won this district 59-38 two years ago as Murphy won reëlection unopposed. And yet, the district is in play. Trump’s popularity here has dropped below Lamb’s. Special elections are particularly difficult to poll, but the most recent surveys prior to the election range from Saccone +3 to Lamb +6. A Saccone win would mean that despite thousands of Trump-Murphy voters voting against him in a double-digit margin shift, enough decided to vote Republican again to prevent the seat from changing parties. A Lamb win would mean that some conservative Republicans switched sides, and conservative rural Democrats (who used to be the heart and soul of the party) who voted for Trump and have largely broken with the national party are coming home to roost. Technically, Democrats still have a registration advantage.
The funniest part about this election is that the current iteration of PA-18 won’t even exist after the beginning of the next Congress: the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the congressional map passed in 2011 by state Republicans as gerrymandering that was illegal under the commonwealth’s constitution. Lamb has said that, if elected, he may run in the new 17th District against Rep. Keith Rothfus (R), and Saccone has said that he will run in the new 14th District.
Here are the results: as of this moment, Lamb leads Saccone by 579 votes, with a couple thousand absentee and provisional ballots left to be counted. However, given how those votes are distributed, Saccone is unlikely to win them by a large enough margin to win overall. A recount is likely. But no matter what, the trend of shifting margins continues as the country marches towards the regularly scheduled midterm elections in November. Once more, a congressional district has moved towards Democrats, and this time it may be by all 20 points they need to win. Republicans should be quaking in their boots.