Democratic voters are turning out in force to dominate local elections this year — putting the lie to gloomy political polls about President Biden’s re-election campaign. The polls say one thing, but voters are doing the opposite.
Democrats Are Still Outperforming This Year
September 25, 2023 by Taegan Goddard. Subscribe to the Political Wire newsletter for only $7 a month.
Although many national polls predicted a “red wave” in the 2022 midterm elections, it never materialized. A better indicator turned out to be the special elections that preceded the midterms.
In five House special elections after the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Democratic candidates outperformed the 2020 election results by an average of 7 percentage points. This was followed up by a big win for abortion rights advocates in a Kansas referendum.
In retrospect, these elections told us quite a bit more about the midterms than the polls.
With national polls currently predicting a deadlocked race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump — and one outlier suggesting Trump is a head by 10 percentage points — it probably makes sense to look again at actual election results.
In 40 congressional and state special elections across the country so far this year, FiveThirtyEight found Democrats outperforming the partisan lean by an average of 10 percentage points. Similarly, the DailyKos tracker finds Democrats outperforming by an average of 7.6 percentage points in 27 special elections this year.
That means that in real elections with actual voters, Democrats are once again outperforming by a similar margin as they did in 2022. If that holds, a 2024 rematch between Biden and Trump won’t be as close as the polls suggest.
Dems overperform in 24 of 30 special elections so far in 2023
Transcript from Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Sept. 21, 2023.
I want to start with some news tonight that is not in the headlines you probably won’t see anywhere else. In fact, it may not even cross your radar screen. While most of the political dialogue has been focused on the national polls and a lot of hand-wringing among Democrats over President Joe Biden’s reelection chances, we actually just had, last night, two elections.
Last night, real people actually voted. They went to polling places and cast their ballots in two different states. And I submit there is a strong case to be made that those results last night tell us way more about the state of our democracy and the political strength of the pro-democracy forces in this country than all of today’s other political headlines put together.
One of those races was in Western Pennsylvania to fill an open state house seat in District 21. Now, this special election was key because it would decide which party controls the narrowly divided Pennsylvania State House. The Democratic candidate, 32-year-old Lindsay Powell, won, as expected, in the heavily Democratic district.
But here’s the thing to pay attention to. Her margin of victory was even better than expected. The district she’s running in, the 21st district, is 17 percentage points more democratic, more or less, than the country as a whole. If last night’s results hold, Lindsey Powell will have won by 30 points. That is what we call an overperformance of 13 points.
Also, last night, there was another special election. This one is in a very different kind of district. This was in New Hampshire. And to me, this is an even more interesting and more representative story. In this district, House District 1, it’s a Republican leaning area, it’s near the capital of Concord.
It narrowly went for Donald Trump in 2020, that’s a Trump district. It leans six points further to the right than the nationwide average. But yesterday, Democrat Hal Rafter defeated an extreme MAGA Republican by 12 points, making for a whopping 18-point swing to the left. Now, to be fair, let’s be clear here.
This is a small sample. It’s a little glimpse into the ginormous landscape of this country. But the really important thing to understand is that this is not an isolated incident.
In fact, it’s part of what continues to be one of the most surprising and reliable political trends of the last few years. And this trend has done a much better job of telling us where the nation’s pulse really is than a lot of polling and political discourse. Remember the context here as I speak to you in the fall of 2023.
Last year, around this time, almost everyone in the political media believed the Democrats were going to be shellacked. The conventional wisdom, again, not crazy, was that Joe Biden and his party were focusing on the wrong things. They were talking too much about abortion and about democracy, not enough on inflation and kitchen table issues.
And voters just had enough. Democrats were going to lose control of the House and the Senate, and it was going to be a red wave. Of course, then election night came and the folks at Fox News and a lot of the political world were shocked.
Instead of a red tsunami, Joe Biden and Democrats pulled off the best midterm performance for an incoming president in a quarter century.
Nobody saw it coming, but I submit that they could have. At least in retrospect, it’s clear there were some real indicators. And one of the most important was looking at how Democrats were doing in special elections. The trend emerged in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
All of a sudden, Democrats were over performing in special election after special election all over the country, in Republican areas and in Democratic areas. It began last September, last summer, with Nebraska, Minnesota, and New York, and the story continued all through this year. The folks at 538 compiled this chart about 30 different special elections so far in 2023. These are all different districts, legislative state districts all over the country. Again, in areas with different profiles, demographically, different politics. When you look through this list, Democrats overperforming their baseline over and over again.
In fact, that is the case in 24 out of these 30 races. Now, in some instances where you see these big Democratic swings, the Republican candidate still won the election, but they won by much less than you would expect.
- In one of the first special elections of the year in Virginia’s 24th House District. The Republican won resoundingly by 25 points, but that was a 14-point underperformance for the party.
- Or look at Pennsylvania’s 35th House District. Democrat won by 49 points, overperforming for the district by 37.
- Even in Kentucky, the Democrats swung Senate District 19 29 points to the left, and we’ve seen it in Georgia and Wisconsin, New York, Louisiana, Maine and Tennessee.
The combined average of all 30 of these races, again, a somewhat random sample of the country, shows Democrats overperforming the baseline margin by 11 points. This is a real phenomenon. It’s really there. It’s not polling. It’s real.
Folks are showing up to register their preference in the only polls that matter. The silent majority showed up in 2020, propelling Joe Biden to victory with a margin of more than 7 million votes. It’s the silent majority that also showed up in contested districts. And contested statewide races across the country to reject extreme Trump aligned candidates like Blake Masters and Kari Lake in Arizona and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.
It’s the same silent majority that showed up last night on a random Tuesday in September where there’s not usually an election. And they showed up in New Hampshire and they showed up in Pennsylvania to vote for center left pro-democracy candidates. That says something robust and inspiring about where we stand at this moment nearing another presidential election year.
Of course, I know we remain a very polarized country. And the threat to democracy in the person of Donald Trump and the faction he represents and the forces he’s channeling is real and terrifying. But if you feel that way, you are not alone. Remember that you are in the majority when you stand in the pro-democracy coalition.
You are with those folks you’ve never met, who don’t write about politics for a living, and who are out there showing up for special elections on a Tuesday night in September to vote in line with those values.