Dan Pfeiffer

The number of votes received by both the Democrats in these districts dramatically exceeded the number of registered Democrats in the district.

And so the only way they could perform that well was to do very well with independents and Republicans.

Another thing that our friend Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report has pointed out in a piece today, special elections have been pretty predictive of midterms.

So both in 2018, Democrats were winning special elections by about 11.5 points, and they won the national popular vote by nine points.

And then in 2022, Republicans were winning special elections by about four points, and Republicans won the popular vote by three points in that election.

I think the average of all the special elections since 2025 has been about 12 points.

I think that's been the, the, the performance above Kamala Harris's number.

Um,

There have been a couple gigantic ones this month.

These things are always very... You got to look at all of them because they're very race-specific.

You could have a very bad candidate.

You look at this...

You use the Trump number, not the previous House race in that House district with Mar-a-Lago because it probably was not particularly competitive because the Democrat didn't run a real race.

So you throw them all in there.

Right now, the special elections look like 2018 in terms of margin.

Except for the generic ballot.

Yeah, I think it seems bad because that says there's no deal, which means there's no law being passed that sends money to the Department of Homeland Security that they can then take that money and give it to the workers.

The sticking point was, if you want to get nerdy about this, is that if you fund all of DHS except ICE, you're still funding CBP and HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, and they do immigration enforcement.

And so they would be proceeding, we'd be paying them to do immigration enforcement absent reforms.

And if we remember, it was CBP officers who were involved in the killing of