While virtually nobody paid attention to the race, unheralded and underfunded Democrat Michael Kripchak was losing by less than 10 points in a district that Biden lost in 2020 by 29 points. For a time Tuesday night, it appeared as though it could have been even closer.
Democrats have over-performed in special elections throughout the 2023-2024 election cycle, but this House race was one of the biggest swings to date.
As for what it actually could mean? Some context is in order.
The Democrat was far outspent
Republican state Sen. Michael Rulli, now representative-elect, outspent Kripchak, a former research physicist in the military who most recently worked as a waiter, $571,000 to about $7,000 as of May 22, according to campaign finance reports.
Outside groups including the national parties basically ignored the district because it had been uncompetitive in recent presidential elections.
Despite its redness, this eastern Ohio district is unusual. As Kyle Kondik of the Crystal Ball has noted, the current version of it actually would have gone for Barack Obama by nearly eight points in 2008. So it swung about 37 points in presidential elections between 2008 and 2020.
None of the country’s 434 other congressional districts featured a bigger swing toward Republican presidential candidates over those 12 years.
On the one hand, it’s gone very red. On the other, it has been far less red relatively recently. And it’s difficult to apply any lessons here to many other districts.
While the result was surprisingly close, it came with very low turnout. The results show just shy of 60,000 votes, with 98 percent of the expected vote counted. That’s less than 20 percent of the votes cast in the district in the 2020 presidential race.
Turnout was about half of what it was in the primaries for the same seat, which were held alongside presidential primaries back in March. The contest drew just over a third of the turnout in the hotly contested special election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District in February.
Big swings are significantly more common in special elections with lower turnout, like this one.
The over-performance follows a string for Democrats
Those caveats aside, this result was just the latest encouraging sign for Democrats.
According to data crunched by Daily Kos Elections, the 19-point over-performance is the biggest thus far across six Republican vs. Democrat special congressional elections this cycle. Democrats have over-performed Biden’s 2020 showing in four of those six races, including three times by double digits.
Republicans have over-performed in just one race, in Utah.
The sixth race was the New York one, where the results closely matched the 2020 presidential race. But Democrats swung the results by double digits from the 2022 race for the same seat and flipped the seat blue.
Their special election advantage has waned
While Democrats hailed the results Tuesday night and have been encouraged by both the New York result and another big recent over-performance in a competitive Pennsylvania state House district, their advantage in such races has shrunk this year.
The Daily Kos Elections data show Democrats over-performed the 2020 presidential results in congressional and state legislative elections by an average of 5.2 points in 2023, but that has shrunk to just 1.2 points in 2024.
At the same time, they’re over-performing relative to a 2020 election that they won. And they’ve over-performed it in seven of the past eight special elections.
Democrats also have other recent elections to cheer them — ones with much higher profiles than the Ohio special election.
In addition to flipping the New York congressional seat, they won a crucial Wisconsin state Supreme Court race, and abortion rights continued to be a big winner on the ballot in Ohio in November.
Performing well in non-regular elections is usually a good sign for a party. But we’re also in unusual times, in which the Republican Party has become remarkably reliant on voters who simply don’t turn out as much when Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot.
Those more casual and infrequent voters are much more likely to vote in the presidential election. The question is how many of them do — and whether these special elections betray an enthusiasm gap that could cost Republicans.
