Dan Pfeiffer

They are indicative of the political environment.

It's about an 11, 12-point swing in...

The district that has Mar-a-Lago, a big swing in the Tampa district where that Democrat was outspent 10 to 1 in the race and still won.

Wow.

And we spent a lot of time in 23 and 24 pointing out that special elections were not perfectly predictive, that it's a very different political environment.

We were succeeding in them as Democrats because we had a base of high propensity voters who turn out all the time.

Now, two interesting things here.

One, yes, there was very good Democratic turnout in these races, but that's not why the Democrats won.

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...