Another special election update for readers tonight, this time in video form. Putting this in front of the paywall for now since it’s timely, but reserve the right to gate it later.
Transcript
If there’s one thing Donald Trump knows how to do, it’s make a winning electoral coalition disappear.
A quick video here reacting to the special elections tonight. These are the first real elections since Donald Trump started his war in Iran on February 28th. There are two races: first, the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, and second, a special election to fill Georgia’s 14th Congressional District — the district left open by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who retired earlier this year.
So let’s take a look at the results.
Wisconsin
In the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, Democrat Chris Taylor just absolutely crushed it. And I don’t say that in a boosterish sense — that is the statistical word for winning an election by 20 percentage points. This map from the New York Times shows a 21 percentage point shift to the left since the 2024 presidential election, and in fact a 10-point shift to the left since another Wisconsin Supreme Court race last spring.
We do have a relatively apples-to-apples comparison here. That’s the Supreme Court race that Elon Musk was really invested in last year. And if we look at the shift map, all those counties shaded blue are counties that are fully reporting and that shifted to the left since the last election. Democrats are doing better pretty much everywhere, including some really Republican parts of the state.
Georgia’s 14th
Here are the results in that Georgia race I mentioned. Georgia’s 14th is really even more bullish for Democrats, just mathematically. This is Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old seat. She won it by 29 percentage points in the 2024 election. Donald Trump won it by an even larger margin — 37 points in 2024. Yet today, the Republican nominee and now winner Clay Fuller won it by just 12 points. That’s a 25 percentage point shift toward Democrats based on Trump’s margin, in what is one of the reddest districts in America.
Key Takeaways
A few points here.
First, these aren’t blue districts having a good night just because Democrats are turning out. These are competitive seats with lots of voters in counties that are supposed to be safely Republican. And yet those counties are moving 20 points to the left. That’s a pretty broad-based shift away from the party in power.
Second, the Iran factor. If our theory of politics — painting with a broad brush here — is that voters are mostly moved by things like general economic conditions, maybe gas prices for example, then over the last month and change, many voters have been absolutely inundated with information that is very negative to the party in power. The two swings tonight — 21 points in Wisconsin and 25 points in Georgia — are much larger than the average swing in special elections in 2025 and 2026. According to tracking from The Downballot, the average swing in special elections in those years is just 11 points. So is the dam breaking because of Iran and the cost-of-living crisis?
Third, let’s talk about the polls. Polls in Wisconsin had Chris Taylor winning by just seven points on average, but a large share of people were undecided. If you do the math, she must have won the undecided voters by something like 20 or 30 points. A lot of people out there are wondering: are the polls right now underestimating Democrats in November? Well, if you take that 20-to-30-point margin among undecideds and apply it based on the percent of people who are still undecided for November, then Democrats would win by about the same margin they won by in the 2018 blue wave races.
The Bottom Line
This is what happens when you push public policy dramatically to the right across issue domains, when you start an unpopular war that causes gas prices to spike by 40%, and when your approval rating is 20 points underwater.
But because national polls can seem abstract, I also map them onto the local geographic level: Donald Trump is really unpopular pretty much everywhere, including in 135 GOP-held House and Senate seats. Other special election results Tuesday night showed similarly good results for the Democrats.
A normal political party would be freaking out about these results, with politicians trying to distance themselves from their chaotic, unpredictable, unpopular, incompetent leader. And yet the GOP is not a functional party.
What I see here is voters sending a clear message to the president and the party in power that they don’t support what he’s doing across a broad range of issues. And since it’s an election year, there are a lot more elections coming up soon for voters to make this point again.
