Ohio special election leans GOP.
The tight race between Democrat Danny O’Connor and Republican Troy Balderson in a deep-red Ohio House district Tuesday reinforces a trend that has been developing for more than a year: Democrats are routinely beating their 2016 performance by double digits — a pattern that puts dozens of GOP-held House seats at risk and even gives Democrats hope of flipping the Senate in November.
In Ohio’s 12th Congressional District, which encompasses the northern suburbs of Columbus and rural expanses to the east, voters preferred President Donald Trump by 11 points and GOP Rep. Patrick Tiberi by 37 points in 2016. But with votes still being counted late Tuesday night, those voters showed a marked shift away from Republicans.
The war for the control of Congress has been, for a year and a half, fought in a series of such skirmishes — their names ringing in the ears of Washington political operatives like famous battlefields: Georgia 6. Arizona 8. Pennsylvania 18. And Alabama — never forget Alabama.
The battle moves now to a broader tableau, away from one-offs marked by floods of outside spending and heavy national media coverage to a 435-district scramble where any one contest will have difficulty standing out.
In race after race, national Republican groups have intervened with spending to offset
strong fundraising from Democratic candidates. More than $6 million was spent to benefit Balderson, according to preelection campaign finance reports, versus the $1.2 million spent in support of O’Connor.
Trump personally endorsed the GOP special election candidates and, in some cases, held political rallies to drum up votes among supporters who might not be inclined to back a generic Republican, such as Balderson, a longtime state legislator who shied away from an enthusiastic embrace of the president.
Now, with the battlefield expanding to dozens of House districts and a handful of key Senate races, those particular advantages stand to be diluted. Instead, political strategists say, the fundamentals will become more salient.
“It makes what’s happening organically more important,” said Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster who worked on special elections in Alabama
and Georgia and is advising numerous midterm campaigns. “There’s a Democratic intensity advantage. Organically, independent voters are tilting Democratic in most places . . . Everything else being equal, the playing field advantages the Democrats.”
Democrats need to win 23 Republican-held seats to claim the House majority. A net gain of two seats will flip the Senate, but many more Democrats are vulnerable to Republican challengers this year.
Republican campaign officials acknowledge the head winds but say they are confident that a strong economy, smart campaigns and targeted spending by national GOP groups will mitigate the Democrats’s advantage. They point to an overall 5-2 record in the special elections for GOP-held congressional seats held before Tuesday.
But that tally obscures the larger trend. In an April 2017 Kansas race, Republican Ron
Estes beat Democrat James Thompson, but only by six points in a district Trump won by 27.
Two months later, Republican Ralph Norman won a South Carolina seat - by three points in a district Trump won by 19. In an Alabama shocker, Doug Jones became the first Democrat to represent his state in the Senate in two decades. And in March, Democrat Conor Lamb broke through in western Pennsylvania, eking out a 755-vote victory in a district Trump won by 20 points.
What has been more telling has been the relative stability of the Democratic campaign message. Virtually every Democratic special-election candidate has run on health care and economic fairness — not taking direct aim at Trump and his administration as much as a Republican policy agenda that they say favors the rich and well-connected over ordinary Americans.