Tomorrow there will be a special election to fill the sole U.S. House seat from Montana, and it’s closer than most people anticipated with a Democratic win not out of the question. Meanwhile, Roll Call has changed its rating on 19 separate House races, all in the Democrats’ direction. And, last night, the Democrats unexpectedly won two state legislative special elections in deep red districts that Trump carried in November by large margins.
The seat in New Hampshire was a major upset, but the seat on Long Island was an earthquake:
In New Hampshire, Democrat Edie DesMarais defeated Republican Matthew Plache by a 52-48 margin in the state House’s 6th Carroll District, a seat Donald Trump won 51-44 last fall. Meanwhile, in the New York Assembly’s 9th District, Democrat Christine Pellegrino beat Republican Thomas Gargiulo 58-42, even though Trump romped to a 60-37 victory there in November.
This means that DesMarais moved the needle 11 points in the Democratic direction while Pellegrino did the same by an astounding 39 points. And while these are the first two seats to actually change hands since Trump’s election, Democrats have consistently outperformed the 2016 presidential results in special elections across the country.
Pellegrino actually referred to her victory as “a thunderbolt of resistance.” She’s an interesting story because she didn’t win by running to the middle. She was actually a Sanders delegate at the Democratic National Convention, and her campaign was heavily supported by New York’s progressive Working Families Party. She may have found some common cause with a segment of conservatives by being a high-profile member of that anti-Common Core “Opt Out” movement. Her opponent never saw his defeat coming, “We worked hard. I don’t know what happened,” he said.
It’s only one poll, but SurveyUSA now shows Jon Ossoff leading by seven points in his bid to win the special election in Newt Gingrich and Tom Price’s old 6th district in Georgia.
Without counting any chickens before they hatch, this is all good news for the Democrats. But it should be noted that it’s natural for their partisans to be more energized when they’re completely shut out of power. This can work to the left’s favor in our current environment and in low turnout special elections, but that doesn’t mean they’ve found some magic formula to change the nature and shape of the general electorate.
I’m seriously not trying to be a wet blanket because I’m ecstatic about all this positive news. I just want to keep things in perspective. Winning these seats will be nice but not worth much if they are given right back when there are better turnout elections. If there are messages that are resonating, that information needs to be shared broadly, but people shouldn’t assume victories now will translate to victories when they really matter, which is going to be in the November after next.
A good caution. Iowa is not gerrymandered but Democrats are dead there. Shocking to me as I lived there 10 years ago when they had a solid grip on power.
As you pointed out dems are fired up. Republicans naturally experience an ebb as they get complacent because they have all the power. That can apply in the midterms as well as one off elections so the seats might not be given back right away. But at best its a time buying tactic to hone messages and candidates.
Not sure why the caution. The signs are clearly pointing in the direction of a wave election. We certainly need more data to know for sure, and if that’s why you are urging caution, then OK. But it’s pretty clear that Dems are gonna win a shit-ton of House seats, especially after the AHCA vote. The only question is if it will be more than 23, and if so, how much more.
Signs also pointed to 2014 and 2016 being a wave election in many places as well and we all know how that turned out.
As I’ve said before, the only poll that counts is the one on election day. I forgot that last year because I was moderately optimistic and stupidly believed that the polls couldn’t be that wrong and that Americans couldn’t be that fucking stupid. Well they could and they were.
A warning against complacency and for continued activism is entirely appropriate.
As of yet, we haven’t gotten any big swings in a contested Congressional election. Pellegrino’s result is encouraging, but special elections for state legislative seats are below the radar for most voters. We’ve gotten a lot of other big swings in lightly contested Congressional seat and other state legislative elections, but those are also below the radar. The real test is in the Montana and GA-6 special elections. If we win both of those then there’s real reason for confidence. But we haven’t won either yet, and the polls are for us only in GA-6.
If we win GA-6 but not Montana there’s good reason for hope but not a lot for confidence yet. Trump only won GA-6 by about 1 point so a win there doesn’t indicate a big swing from the 2016 Presidential results, and those still yield a Republican House, albeit with a somewhat narrower result than the actual Congressional results.
The Cook Report has their own take on the special elections. I always like to err on the side of caution if at all possible. That said, we should be looking at how candidates usually do in each district and how our candidates do in these special elections. Are the overperforming or underperforming? Right now, Dems are overperforming, which bodes well for next year (with the usual caveat that a lot can happen between now and November 2018).
The problem is the existing GOP House seats are very protected. Only 16 members had margins of less than 10 points.
The thing to watch is GOP retirements: one sign of a wave year is incumbents jumping ship before the election.
But some of those high margins are because they faced weak, and sometimes no, challengers from the Democratic party. 52 Republican representatives sit in districts that are R+5 or less according to the Cook Partisan Lean and would be vulnerable to a 10 point national swing if the Democrats are taking advantage of it. (R+5 means D-5, so expected to win by 10).
Cook Lean doesn’t consider the power of incumbency.
Yes, but the point is the actual number of seats at risk is quite a bit more than 16. Some of that incumbency advantage is weaker challengers and even beyond that incumbency fades in wave elections. Crudely, if we see a 10 point swing the Republicans will lose more than 16 seats and less than 52.
Last night’s news is of course encouraging. But I grew up on Long Island and, trust me, it’s not the Deep South or the Midwest. We have every reason to hope for a wave election but we’ll need to work hard and earn it. Definitely no time for chicken counting.
OT but a bombshell to me http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/this-is-huge-astonishing
But the new report from the Post that James Comey’s decision to announce the Clinton “no charges” decision on his own in July 2016 may itself have been the product of a successful Russian disinformation campaign is simply remarkable.
I just saw that as well. Fricken amazing if true, because that memo looks like something right out of an alt wingnut’s delusions. However because it came from the Russians and was supposed to be SigInt it was believed and acted upon before the dumb fucks running the FBI even bothered to investigate and authenticate.
I’m concerned about whatever Active Measures the Kremlin is working on, if Trump isn’t impeached by the 2018 election. Facebook continues to be a huge problem, FoxNews less and less so.
Kind of interesting about Wolfsboro – which is basically a summer resort town. Household income is below the NH average: this was the townie vote. Downscale and lesser educated.
good to hear
There is video out there….the Pope is standing next to the donald yapping away and it looks like the Pope is quietly praying. It’s like he senses some kind of evil and he got to pray for protection.
or praying to convert him re: climate change, evidently gave him a copy of his Encyclical on Climate – actually that’s the sense I get from what I’ve seen, the Pope is trying to convince T of importance of climate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XriXDtfqCg
Trump et cie look like their attending a funeral.
Oops. I meant they’re
With the addition of a white wimple, Melania could pass for a nun.
“Dress for the job you want.”
She’s still channeling Jacqui O for appropriate attire. Never mind that there have been huge changes, even among Roman Catholics, since 1962. (Mrs. Kennedy did popularize black lace mantillas as an alternative to hats for American Catholic women, but head coverings became optional shortly thereafter with Vatican II. Somehow it’s stuck with non-Catholic women such as Laura Bush, Condi Rice, and Michelle Obama, that black lace mantillas is a show of respect when meeting a pope. It’s not.)
In other news, Melania came out today as Catholic. Odd that she was able to keep that under wraps and has never left any tracks as to her religious affiliation.
Don’t know what Ivanka’s excuse is for her retro 1950s cocktail party look.
Although her parents were card-carrying Communists, religion was not discouraged in the Slovenian part of Yugoslavia and Slovenia is a majority Catholic country so not surprising she would be Catholic too.
So what? Did I make any assertion about her possible childhood religious affiliation? Has she?
For a middle-aged person to state that “I’m a Catholic” means practicing the faith as an adult. Even at the most rudimentary level, that would have been seen before her announcement this week. I haven’t considered myself a Catholic since I was eighteen, but that doesn’t mean I’ve never attended mass since then.
An open question for the Democratic Party has been whether it would do better in general elections going in a Sanders direction – less friendly to wall street, more progressive on social programs, less emphasis on identity politics. The polls consistently showed Sanders doing better than Clinton against Trump, and the final results proved Clinton weaker against Trump than people realized.
Pellegrino’s spectacular victory is another data point in favor of the thesis that Sanders’ politics is the way to go. It is hard to see how any conventional politics moves the needle that far in that short of time. It takes something unconventional.
You spelled ‘throw women, LBGQT, and black people under the bus’ wrong.
Don’t be snippy.
“How do the democrats cater to people who look just like me?” is the most important question facing the country right now.
You can tell because it gets asked over and over…….and over and over.
.
The overemphasis on identity politics was made clear in the debate where Clinton maintained she was by definition not part of the establishment because she was a woman. That’s absurd and is a trap the Democrats fell into by overemphasizing the importance of her gender.
Trump didn’t engage in identity politics??????????
Holy smokes, I’d suggest he was able to gain the Presidency by the narrowest margins while running the bitterest identity politics campaign in the modern era, bitterer than Nixon and Reagan combined.
I never suggested Trump did not engage in identity politics. He certainly did. And when we do it, we legitimize the approach, and it is necessary to do it in some contexts, but we have overplayed the card.
Interesting development in MT election; the candidate body slammed and yelled at a reporter who evidently asked about his investments in Russia. audio’s pretty intense. Hope Oagua is out the GOTV
correction: wasn’t investments in Russia was question about health care bill which candidate had spoken well of previously before score released
Yes, the audio is intense, and the GOP candidate came completely unglued at a politely and calmly phrased question. The fucker needs to be in jail for assault.
It is an obvious point out that this is the natural progression of what Donald Trump started in his campaign. I am sure the President would approve.
Accurate assessment IMO:
speculation over at TPM – under the influence of alcohol ? in house polling? (he does have Russian investments evidently). audio on Chris Hayes
I always remember that Montana gave us Brooklyn-born Mike Mansfield at a critical time in US foreign policy. A guy who actually worked in the mines, by the way.
elected to national office (House of Reps).
One of 50 Reps to vote against WWI war declaration resolution.
Only Congresscritter to vote against U.S. entry into WWII after Pearl Harbor.
Okay… Maybe it’s just me, but voting against a war that has already started because another Nation State, not terrorists, had just killed over two thousand Military Personal and sank or rendered inoperable over a dozen of your Navy’s ships in an attack that came just before a declaration of war from the other attacking Nation State does not seem like something to laud someone over.
If fact it seems like the kind of thing you’d send someone to therapy over.
Her statue is one of the MT statues in Capitol Rotunda
https://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/national-statuary-hall-collection/nsh-location
And I worry that too many folks think Rahm Emmanuel has a good grasp of what it takes to win an election. Lotta of short-term thinking.
BTW, here in Illinois I’m seeing a lot of Pritzker ads. Not about policy, but what a wonderful human Pritzker is. I think he’s trying to buy the election. I still know nothing about Chris Kennedy. I would have voted for his father in a shot, but I also think about Andrew Cuomo and how different he is from his father.
JB has a tax problem he’s trying to filibuster
Thanks, Jim!
Turns out that the journalist (Ben Jacobs) who got body-slammed by GOP candidate Gianforte was the same journalist who wrote the expose on Gianforte’s ties to US-sanctioned Russian companies. Wonder if Gianforte was holding a bit of a grudge. In rare form, FauxNews actually was “fair and balanced” in its coverage of the incident, if for no other reason than its own reporters on the scene were witness to it. I love this quote in particular:
As has been noted in so many other places, Gianforte should be cruising to a victory in this special election, and yet he is barely holding on by single digits according to what little polling is available. He’s been saddled with the baggage of the zombie “healthcare” bill that passed the House not too long ago, and cannot bring himself to make a definitive statement on the record regarding the bill’s merits now that the CBO score is available. Any reporter asking inconvenient questions to Gianforte is dealing with a cornered critter. Whether this has any effect on the final voting tally is anyone’s guess.
And Greg Gianforte has been cited with misdemeanor assault.
And now the Missoulian, which had endorsed Gianforte a few weeks ago, has withdrawn its endorsement. What impact that has at this late date is hard to know. The majority of the votes cast are by mail and were sent in before this incident occurred.
Add to that lost of un-endoresements the Billings Gazette. Again, perhaps too little, too late. Let’s hope there are enough mobilized voters for the Democratic side to flip a seat that should not have been flippable.
At this point having him hung around the GOP’s neck is almost as good as beating him. He really embodies the Republican zeitgeist around free speech and the press; inarguably toxic and violent.
The Trump constituency remains a persistent and corrosive threat to American culture.
No doubt about that. Toxic and violent pretty well describes the GOP zeitgeist around so much these days.
Why? He’s just a NJ guy that got rich in the tech industry, is an anti-science, creationist religious nutcase, and has never held public office. Lost his first run for public office last year for governor in a state that Trump carried by twenty points. Former governor Brian Schweitzer, who remains respected in MT, endorsed Quist. As has Bernie Sanders who won the 6/7/16 Democratic primary.
Bernie endorsed Quist, but he lost to the billionaire jornalist-assaulter. Hmph.
What are we to make of that?
I think it’s not just from behavior at T rallys, it’s from T admin “rule of thug” concept of “governing” a combination of T villainizing the press plus T’s thuggish behavior – major example: re Comey – asking for “loyalty” over dinner, sending bodyguard to fire him in the middle of Comey’s presentation
And speaking of thuggish, they’re doing shakedowns of every strata of society
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/magazine/jared-kushners-other-real-estate-empire.html?_r=0
wonder what Kushner’s concept of ME peace [peach] would look like