Special Election megathread (4/30: NY-26)

[Progressive Pessimist]

Happy birthday, Rep-elect Peltola.

Wow! I didn't realize that! This thread has become a gold mine of fun trivia.

[Crumpets]

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1565144375545430019

[Progressive Pessimist]

First it was the Kansas amendment, then it was Pat Ryan winning, and now Sarah Palin going through yet another humiliating election defeat. I have been in a nonstop high for nearly a month now.

Dark Brandon August, ladies and gentlemen.

Let's hope he can keep it up through September, October, November, and onward.

[GALeftist]

I look forward to those dumb "red country with blue dots" maps displaying AK-AL to scale and demonstrating that actually hundreds of thousands of square miles of ice are Ridin with Biden, which is a far more useful metric than people.

[Holmes]

There’s a lot of cope and big pundit brain going on saying Peltola won despite the national environment. I don’t think that’s true. Maybe people are forgetting how vicious 2010 and 2014 were for Dems, and if the environment today were anything like those two midterms, literally anyone with an R beside their name would have won in a blowout here. Same for NY-19.

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

I was just imagining how this board would react in September 2018 had the GOP flipped seats like DL-AL & CA-49 NV-3 in special elections.

Let's just say I wouldn't be expecting nearly as many 'Won't matter because Trump Midterm' takes compared to the incessant 'Won't matter because Biden Midterm' takes we're seeing now.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

https://twitter.com/MassJumbo/status/1563030686532976640?t=uw81hbhOwgVlmeCuIiuTf...
Republicans should be terrified

[S019]

I was just imagining how this board would react in September 2018 had the GOP flipped seats like DL-AL & CA-49 in special elections.

Let's just say I wouldn't be expecting nearly as many 'Won't matter because Trump Midterm' takes compared to the 'Won't matter because Biden Midterm' takes we're seeing now.

King Lear's dreams are coming true. On a serious note, if that happened, it'd be an awful omen for Democrats and forget taking the House, they'd be poised to lose 5 or 6 Senate seats.

[GM Team Member and Senator WB]

My house projection: Lean R -> Tossup. This is huge, and while a good portion rides on candidate quality there is no denying that this is not a normal midterm anymore.

[Vern]

While this is a big win for Democrats. I don't know how much one should read into it. Ranked choice voting you can get weird wins like this. Plus Palin was a bad candidate as well.

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

While this is a big win for Democrats. I don't know how much one should read into it. Ranked choice voting you can get weird wins like this. Plus Palin was a bad candidate as well.

Good thing for the GOP that they aren't running bad candidates in states like AZ and PA

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

While this is a big win for Democrats. I don't know how much one should read into it. Ranked choice voting you can get weird wins like this. Plus Palin was a bad candidate as well.

Good thing for the GOP that they aren't running bad candidates in states like AZ and PA

Yep. Especially since they are facing bad opponents, like a popular incumbent who was a veteran and astronaut!

[NOVA Green]

Not worth reading much if anything into special elections, but I do think Republicans losing Alaska for good is going to happen sooner rather than later. In my view, Blue Alaska is probably more likely than Blue Texas by the end of the decade.

It certainly is a real possibility especially if Anchorage continues to move more towards the Democratic Party, combined with an already existing large basket of rural Alaskan voters.

I believe this was my final consolidated numbers from the 2020 US-PRES-GE for the City of Anchorage:

[Schiff for Senate]

All this is true, but the only thing that concerns me is AK has very…unique politics (just one example of this: Lisa Murkowski win a write-in campaign for senate, and even in the 2014 wave, Democrats nearly won AK-SEN), and its form of voting in this case (RCV and whatnot) was also unique. Both those factors helped Paltola here. Don’t get me wrong, this victory is still just great, for a multitude of reasons, but we need to be a tad careful about reading too much into this. The NY special was a more significant “bellwether” IMO.

[Schiff for Senate]

Not worth reading much if anything into special elections, but I do think Republicans losing Alaska for good is going to happen sooner rather than later. In my view, Blue Alaska is probably more likely than Blue Texas by the end of the decade.

It has less to do with it being a special election and more to do with it being AK (with weird politics, and a unique voting system).

[Interlocutor is just not there yet]

All this is true, but the only thing that concerns me is AK has very…unique politics (just one example of this: Lisa Murkowski win a write-in campaign for senate, and even in the 2014 wave, Democrats nearly won AK-SEN), and its form of voting in this case (RCV and whatnot) was also unique. Both those factors helped Paltola here. Don’t get me wrong, this victory is still just great, for a multitude of reasons, but we need to be a tad careful about reading too much into this. The NY special was a more significant “bellwether” IMO.

All fine and dandy. But hypothetically-speaking, if there was a RCV special election in ME-2 in 2018 and the GOP ending up winning & widening their margins in the end, 100% chance this board would freak the f*** out. And I doubt you'd get reminders from folks about not reading much from the result like we're seeing now.

[Schiff for Senate]

All this is true, but the only thing that concerns me is AK has very…unique politics (just one example of this: Lisa Murkowski win a write-in campaign for senate, and even in the 2014 wave, Democrats nearly won AK-SEN), and its form of voting in this case (RCV and whatnot) was also unique. Both those factors helped Paltola here. Don’t get me wrong, this victory is still just great, for a multitude of reasons, but we need to be a tad careful about reading too much into this. The NY special was a more significant “bellwether” IMO.

All fine and dandy. But as a hypothetical, if there was a RCV special election in ME-2 in 2018 and the GOP ending up winning & widening their margins in the end, 100% chance this board would freak the f*** out.

1.) AK’a system/circumstances are arguably even weirder than ME’s would be. Also AK has weirder and less partisan politics than even ME.
2.) Don’t get me wrong - I’m celebrating about this result. And yes, it is still a powerful encouraging indicator of the midterms being no red wave (as I said in the AK thread - I consider the chances of D’s holding the House to be much higher than a month ago). But I do think the results of the NY19 special are much better in foreshadowing the midterms, since NY19's circumstances were much more 'normal' and much less unusual than AK's (though the AK win was still much more exciting than NY19's for sure - AK was a Trump+10 state, whereas NY19 was a Biden district; and NY19 involved holding onto a seat, while AK involved flipping a seat last won by the Democrats 50 years ago...and all the other cool facts, like the 104% stat).

[OSR stands with Israel]

I wonder how screwed would Alaska Republicans be if Alaska wasn’t such a remote state where national campaigning is difficult. Cause aren’t Alaska republicans very reliant on urban areas there

[Holmes]

I wonder how screwed would Alaska Republicans be if Alaska wasn’t such a remote state where national campaigning is difficult. Cause aren’t Alaska republicans very reliant on urban areas there

Republican performance in Anchorage has been on the decline over the past few election cycles, much in line with how it’s been on the decline in the suburbs on the mainland. It’s one reason we’re seeing Alaska slowly but surely drift to the left. Strong Republican performance statewide is also usually fueled by a strong performance among Native voters too. Peltola was able to perform strongly in Anchorage and among Native voters.

[Schiff for Senate]

I wonder how screwed would Alaska Republicans be if Alaska wasn’t such a remote state where national campaigning is difficult. Cause aren’t Alaska republicans very reliant on urban areas there

Another point about AK having weird politics: Much of the rurals (with high Alaska Native populations) are heavily Democratic, whereas it's the oil-economy urbs and suburbs that are more GOP-friendly (most particularly the suburbs). This is a little less true now, but it is still largely true, and it's notably inverted from the political geography of most of the other states, where the rurals are largely if not exclusively GOP and the (sub)urban areas provide Democratic strength.

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

LOL 538 has given Peltola +0.4% of the vote, meaning they think she'll lose by 20.

[NOVA Green]

I wonder how screwed would Alaska Republicans be if Alaska wasn’t such a remote state where national campaigning is difficult. Cause aren’t Alaska republicans very reliant on urban areas there

Republican performance in Anchorage has been on the decline over the past few election cycles, much in line with how it’s been on the decline in the suburbs on the mainland. It’s one reason we’re seeing Alaska slowly but surely drift to the left. Strong Republican performance statewide is also usually fueled by a strong performance among Native voters too. Peltola was able to perform strongly in Anchorage and among Native voters.

Thank you for non-quoting me. 

Still, Anchorage (the City) is only around 40% of the total AK "vote share", so even assuming a "slow-drift", is likely to be more of a drip-drip unless DEMs can make significant inroads into Mat-Su.

Fairbanks is naturally a PUB stronghold and roughly equivalent to Juneau on team DEM.

Most of RUR-AK proper isn't really growing in POP, despite tending to be much more heavily DEM bcs of Native American population.

So yeah... really think Alaska might be a bit of a state to pay a bit of attention looking at going fwd over the next decade with compare / contrast, precinct maps galore and all that Atlas awesomeness.

[Roll Roons]

Candidate. Quality. Matters. Never let anyone ever tell you otherwise.

[Xing]

Of course this result alone doesn’t necessarily mean things won’t be better for Republicans in November, though it’s hard to argue that this isn’t a very strong result for Democrats, and when you have multiple data points, they begin to form a pattern. Republicans have another two months, and the economy could emerge again as a key issue that would pull many lackluster Republican candidates across the finish line. The point now is that the data is pointing to this being less certain than it seemed in May or June.

[Alben Barkley]

Of course this result alone doesn’t necessarily mean things won’t be better for Republicans in November, though it’s hard to argue that this isn’t a very strong result for Democrats, and when you have multiple data points, they begin to form a pattern. Republicans have another two months, and the economy could emerge again as a key issue that would pull many lackluster Republican candidates across the finish line. The point now is that the data is pointing to this being less certain than it seemed in May or June.

The economy has just been getting better lately...

There really is no reason to believe these terrible MAGA candidates -- down in the polls, losing actual races, Democrats actaully pulling off upsets in them and/or heavily outperforming their baseline ever since Dobbs -- will have "the economy" sweep in to magically save them. Especially when their economic agenda is so unpopular too!

As I said before, the GOP f--ked around, now they're about to find out. This race could be a 1948 redux but a midterm, where the GOP again gets way too cocky and goes way overboard, alienating the majority of the country as a result, leading to a win for the Democrats that defies pundit expectations.