What House Special Elections Really Tell Us About the Midterms

AMAC Exclusive – By Daniel Berman

Long before there was “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” liberals, the media, and much of the political elite had another nemesis in Sarah Palin. In her folksy manner, perceived lack of knowledge about global affairs, and imperfect family dynamic, they perceived a caricature of the sort of voter they all too casually dismissed in the years after 2008. This in large part explains their jubilation after Sarah Palin was defeated by Democrat Mary Peltola in the special election for Alaska’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives last month. But while the left insists that this outcome and a few other special election results are indicative of a resurgent Democrat Party, there is ample reason to doubt that hasty conclusion.

Peltola’s victory, leaving aside Alaska’s complicated “top four” electoral system, provided not one but two stories for an eager media. The first was the defeat of Sarah Palin, which allowed them to once again paint the former governor as an extremist unrepresentative of the electorate. The second was that the race formed another building block in an already existing narrative that Democrats are on the upswing and may yet emerge victorious in November.

That latter narrative had been built upon the results of five special elections over the course of July and August: one in Nebraska, one in Minnesota, two in New York, and the fifth in Alaska. In all of them, Democrat candidates did better than Joe Biden did in 2020, and the Republican candidates worse than Donald Trump, which the media has seized upon, along with Palin’s defeat, to argue that no Republican wave is coming, and that instead, Democrats might make gains.

It is worth examining each of the special elections in turn to evaluate these theories. That examination will reveal that while there is some evidence that Democrat voters have become more engaged, there is less evidence for a shift among swing voters. While the special elections probably don’t indicate a year as good for the GOP as 2010 or 2014, they point to an environment around or slightly more Republican than 2020, which would still present serious problems for Democrats. Furthermore, these elections occurred in very specific demographic environments. When we dig deeper, we will see that the “Democratic overperformances” were far less impressive than they might superficially have seemed.

Let us first get Alaska out of the way. Despite being the most recent race, it involved unique circumstances, not merely in Palin’s presence as a candidate but in the electoral system used. All candidates, Republican and Democrat, ran in a single preliminary primary, and then the top four went to the general election, in which voters were allowed to list preferences. The secondary preferences of those voters whose first-choice candidates came in third and fourth were then redistributed between the top two candidates. As the third placed candidate dropped out, the general election featured Democrat Mary Peltola and Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich. Peltola won 40% of the vote, Palin 31%, and Begich 29%. Of Begich’s voters, 50% went for Palin as their second choice, 28% for Peltola, and 22% chose not to list any preference. That allowed Peltola to win by 3%.

Republicans have been quick to note the complexity of the system (true), and that Republican candidates combined for nearly 60% of the vote. However, Peltola did receive the most first-round ballots, with 40.2%, and 28% of Begich’s voters chose to vote for Peltola as their second choice over Palin. Palin would have needed to win the spoiled ballots by a margin of over 80%-20% to tie, and it is unclear if she would have won a normal runoff.

We can, with some caveats, conclude that Begich would have won. The Alaska Board of Elections calculated what the results would have been had Begich, not Palin, come second. Their conclusion was that Begich would have won by a little over 5%, 52.6%-47.4%. The 47.4% is close to what the opponent of Don Young, a 50 year incumbent, won in 2018 and 2020 (46.53% and 45.31%). While it still represents a swing from both the 2020 presidential and House results, using the hypothetical Begich-Peltola count cuts any sort of “Democratic swing” by more than half. Begich wins less than a half percentage point less than Donald Trump did in 2020, and only 1.4% less than Don Young.

Furthermore, it is likely that this count understates Begich’s margin as both the dynamics of the race, in which both Begich and Palin discouraged their voters from choosing the other. If Begich remaining the race hurt Palin, the same dynamic hurt Begich in the count.

Nonetheless, the Alaskan “swing” does not stand-out among the July/August special elections, even with the “Palin effect” present. When compared to the presidential results, the swing is on par with that in Nebraska’s first district. Interestingly, both Alaska and Nebraska’s first district showed similar swings between 2016 and 2020. Alaska voted 51%-37% for Trump over Clinton in 2016, and then 53%-43% for Trump over Biden. Nebraska’s first district went from 58%-36% Trump in 2016 to 56%-41% in 2020. Biden gained 6% over Clinton in Alaska, and 5% in the Nebraska seat compared with a popular vote gain of 3% nationally over Clinton. Therefore, both of these seats saw swings above the national average, as did New York’s 23rd. What did they all have in common?

All three are heavily white, with a split between a rural population and one major city anchored by a major college or university. Between 2016 and 2020, those areas swung at a much greater degree than the national average, and Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win Anchorage since LBJ. As the local hub for college-educated white voters in a sea of otherwise rural territory, the main cities in each of these districts attracted a concentration of Democrat partisans.

When we dig deeper into the results, it is clear whose votes determined the seats. In all three cases (Alaska, NE-01, and NY-23) turnout in the county hosting the college town and urban areas greatly exceeded that of the rest of the district. In the case of Nebraska’s First Congressional District, Lancaster County, including the state capitol of Lincoln and more importantly the University of Nebraska’s main campus, turned out at 36% compared to 28% for the district as a whole, and went Democrat by a margin of 57%-43%, compared to Biden’s 52%-45% win in the county in 2020. It was the only county Democrats won in the district, but the increased margin, combined with casting nearly two-thirds of the votes in the election, was enough to make the final result 53%-46%, when Biden had lost the seat by 15% in 2020.

New York’s 23rd district is a safely Republican seat, which voted for Donald Trump by 54%-39% in 2016 and 54%-43% in 2020. Yet it includes Tomkins County, the location of Ithaca and Cornell University. In the August special election, Republican Joe Sempolinski won every county but Tomkins, which he lost 86%-14%. Turnout in Tomkins at 24% was almost a third higher than the district’s average of 18%, and that was enough to make the final result 53%-47%.

The other two seats showed slightly different dynamics. While the Democrat candidates improved over Biden’s performance in Minnesota’s First District and New York’s 19th, both have a much more substantial Democrat history down ballot. Minnesota’s First District was held by current Democrat Governor Tim Walz until 2018, when Republicans won it by 1%, increasing that margin to 3% in 2020. The 4% margin in the 2022 special election is the best Republican performance there since 2004.

An even more dramatic gap between the presidential numbers and historic congressional performance can be seen in New York’s 19th district. The district voted for Joe Biden by a 50% to 48% margin in 2020, which makes the 51%-49% victory of Democrat Pat Ryan over Republican Marc Molinaro look like a swing toward Democrats from 2020. That is how it has been widely interpreted. But New York is a parochial state, and the better comparison is likely not Joe Biden’s 2% victory margin, but the 55% to 43% margin former Congressman Anthony Delgado won it by in 2020. In that case Molinaro did 5% better than the 2020 Republican candidate, and Ryan 5% worse.

This points to another factor: an incumbency effect. All but one of these seats had Republican incumbents, and their absence removed any sort of name recognition or personal support factor, especially important in Alaska. That New York’s 19th district, the only seat with a special election which featured a Democrat incumbent also featured a 5% swing to the Republican candidate reinforces the idea that we should expect a similar incumbency effect to have been at play in Alaska and Nebraska, explaining the “disappointing” GOP performance.

When we factor out incumbency, what are we left with? Two safely GOP seats, which trended Democrat not just compared to 2020 House results, but also presidential outcomes, in Nebraska’s 1st and New York’s 23rd. Each featured a departing GOP incumbent and was anchored around a major college town which turned out at a much higher rate than the district as a whole. We have two seats, Minnesota’s 1st and New York’s 19th, which produced results similar to the 2020 presidential results or slightly more Democrat, but showed a swing to the GOP compared to the 2020 House results. This effect was small in Minnesota where there had been a GOP incumbent, but large in the New York seat where the incumbent was a Democrat. Finally, there was Alaska, where if we use the Palin numbers, we get a result akin to Nebraska’s 1st and New York’s 23rd, implying that running Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate is akin to adding a major University town to a district. If, however, we use the Begich hypothetical count, the Alaska results look far more like the Minnesota seats.

What can we conclude? There is evidence that areas which were rapidly trending Democrat, namely white areas with a high percentage of residents holding college degrees, especially college towns, will continue to do so in 2022. In turn, areas which are trending Republican, such as Minnesota’s First District, will also continue to do so. Rather than a new realignment, 2022 seems to be shaping up to be a sequel of 2020.

But the problem for Democrats is that a sequel to 2020 is precisely what they do not want. There are far more formerly swing areas in Florida and the Texas border which are swinging against them than there are safely Republican areas which might drift into being slightly less lopsidedly Republican. Despite their “success,” Democrats still ultimately lost the special elections in Nebraska, Minnesota, and New York-23, indicating that anything short of every possible factor working in their favor will not be enough. Even if they insist on focusing only on the presidential topline numbers, Democrats still did worse in the House vote in Minnesota’s 1st than they did in 2018 and 2020. Doing better in areas they lose won’t help them when they lose additional seats elsewhere and are failing to win back their blue-collar base. In that sense, Republicans should be concerned, but not overly panicked.

Daniel Berman is a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He also writes as Daniel Roman.