A favorite pastime of political prognosticators is to use out-of-cycle special elections as a predictor for the next major general election, but three recent special House elections show just how useless such analysis is.
As much as we look for clues for the electorate’s feelings toward its elected politicians, special elections are never the bellwethers that we want them to be. But these off-cycle races do tell us a number of things about how the electorate engages in politics when the big ticket races are not on the ballot.
The most recent of these unusual special House elections occurred Tuesday in the 4th Congressional District of Colorado, where Republican Greg Lopez defeated Democratic candidate Trisha Calvarese in the race to replace Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), who abruptly retired earlier this year.
While some votes remain uncounted, Lopez is on track to defeat Calvarese by roughly 25 points. It is a result that was largely expected in a district that had not elected a Democrat to the House of Representatives since 2008. In fact, the margin of victory largely tracks with Buck’s victories in 2020 and 2022.
The same cannot be said for the special election in Ohio‘s 6th Congressional District, where Republican Michael Rulli won the race to replace Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH), who also retired earlier this year. In that race, Democratic candidate Michael Kripchak garnered 45% of the vote, a 13% improvement from the party’s performance in the 2022 general election for the same seat.
Another massive swing occurred in the special election to replace the expelled Rep. George Santos (R-NY), who was elected to represent New York‘s 3rd Congressional District in the 2022 midterm elections with nearly 54% of the vote.
In an almost complete reversal, the 2024 special election saw Democratic nominee Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) earn almost 54% of the vote himself as he defeated Republican nominee Mazi Pilip.
With the exception of the Colorado race, all three results have been used by pundits and Democratic Party operatives as evidence that President Joe Biden is in much better shape for his reelection campaign than polling actually indicates.
These attempts to spin every result as a good outcome for one’s preferred party are entirely predictable, but are just that: spin. Each of these results says far more about the voting habits of the electorate than the partisan preferences of voters in the current political climate.
The results of the three special elections effectively come down to low-propensity and high-propensity voters. In other words, voters who are more likely to turn out in off-cycle elections and those who generally only turn out for the big ticket races.
Take the Ohio special election. In 2022, Johnson won the race with more than 189,000 votes, while his opponent, Louis Lyras, received slightly more than 90,000 votes.
But in this month’s special election, Rulli won the race with less than 33,000 votes, while Kripchak received less than 28,000. For a sense of scale, the total number of votes cast in the special election was less than the number of votes that the losing candidate received in the regular cycle race in 2022. If turnout this November is anywhere near what it was in 2022, the November rematch between Rulli and Kripchak will not be nearly as close.
A similar story unfolded in New York. In 2022, Santos received 145,824 votes, while his opponent, Robert Zimmerman, received 125,404. But in the special election in February, Suozzi won the race with slightly more than 91,000 votes, while Pilip garnered slightly more than 78,000.
Again, while turnout declined significantly as compared to 2022, the decline hurt Pilip far more than it hurt Suozzi. Come November, Suozzi will face Republican Michael LiPetri in what will surely be a far more competitive race that will see much higher voter participation.
Both New York’s 3rd district and Ohio’s 6th district include a sizable amount of working-class voters that tend not to turn out in off-cycle elections. Thus, the electorate in the special elections in these two districts likely skewed towards more politically engaged voters which tend to have college degrees, which is a demographic that tends to favor Democrats.
But unlike the New York and Ohio races, the special election in Colorado’s 4th district did not feature such a dramatic swing, even as voter turnout declined significantly from 2022. That year, Buck won re-election with 216,024 votes, while his opponent, Ike McCorkle, received 129,619 votes.
In Tuesday’s special election, as of this writing, Lopez has received more than 95,000 votes, while Calvarese has received more than 56,000 votes. But unlike these other districts, the more politically engaged voters of this district tend to skew Republican. One only needs to look at the vote totals in general elections to see that the voters in this district are much more likely to vote than those in Ohio and New York. In 2022, despite each district having roughly the same population, more than 354,000 votes were cast in Colorado’s 4th district, while 280,000 were cast in Ohio’s 6th, and 271,000 were cast in New York’s 3rd.
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At the end of the day, none of these special elections really tell us much about the political climate that will influence the November presidential election. No one can accurately predict exactly who will show up to the polls in November, and as low-propensity voters turn out this fall, the Democratic Party’s overperformance in these special elections will be a forgotten footnote. The only electoral bellwether for the presidential election is the vote that will be taken on November 5.