Republicans Seem To Have Stopped The Savagery In Two Special Elections!!!


Special elections for state legislatures are an interesting indicator of partisanship. That wasn't always the case in the late twentieth century when savvy local candidates and notables frequently persuaded citizens to vote across party lines. Local special elections, however, are a proxy for national opinion in this century of increased party polarization and straight-ticket voting.

Consider the results of the two extraordinary legislative elections so far this year that have resulted in a change of parties.

The first was on Aug. 17 in Connecticut's 36th state Senate district. This is Connecticut's wealthiest state Senate district, and possibly the wealthiest in the US. Greenwich, the super-rich town where Prescott Bush, the father, and grandfather of presidents, served as moderator of the Representative Town Meeting for 17 years, as well as New Canaan and the northern portion of Stamford, are all part of it.

During Donald Trump's presidency, the 36th district shifted from being predominantly Republican to be more Democratic. In 2016, Republican Scott Frantz defeated Democrat Alex Kasser 50 percent to 49 percent, and in 2018, Democrat Alex Kasser defeated Republican Ryan Fazio 51 percent to 49 percent. For a seat full of affluent college graduates, these are not unusual outcomes.

Kasser resigned in 2021, and Fazio reclaimed the seat by a razor-thin margin of 50 percent to 48 percent. Republicans celebrated this as a major triumph, but it was more of an indication that, after eight months of President Joe Biden, high-income disapproval of Trump had reached a tipping point.

The other party switch occurred this month in Iowa's 29th state House district, which encompasses much of Jasper County as well as industrial Newton, the old home of Maytag. It's a working-class neighborhood with a lot of union members, and it's been a safe Democratic district for a long time. Wesley Breckenridge, a Democrat, won it by double digits twice, 51 percent to 38 percent in 2016 and 59 percent to 41 percent in 2018, but just 52 percent to 48 percent in 2020. Republican Jon Dunwell won by a 60 percent to 40 percent margin on Oct. 12 after he retired in 2021.

Trump failed in 2020 because he fell short of his 2016 performance among upscale voters and did not make sufficient gains among lower-income white and minority voters to compensate. The legislative results in Greenwich and Newton imply that Republicans have halted the bloodletting among the wealthy and restored ground among lower-income voters.

This corresponds to CNN analyst Harry Enten's claim that Republicans have been running significantly ahead of projected November 2020 projections since April 2021. It's in line with the widely held belief that Democrats would lose and maybe by a large margin the 222 to 213 House majority they achieved in 2020.

Redistricting, as it always is in years ending in a "2," is the wild card here. Democrats have redistricting power in only a few states, but they appear hell-bent on wiping out the few Republican seats in Illinois and New York, as well as the sole Republican member in Maryland and New Mexico.

Note the eerie silence of leftists who have been decrying Republican gerrymandering as a threat to democracy. Similarly, when Democrats controlled most redistricting in the 1962, 1972, and 1982 cycles, liberals were baffled by gerrymandering. The goose gets the sauce, but the gander doesn't.

However, as Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report points out, redistricters can be inept or overly adept. If you buy a series of 52 percent districts for your party, you're probably going to lose them all if your party's numbers drop a few points.

In the long run, it's probably better to defend incumbents, as Texas Republicans are doing, and give some seats to the opposition when the tide has been heading their way. The affluent districts of north Dallas and west Houston were the most Republican in the country in the 1980s. However, they shifted to the Democratic Party in 2018, and Republicans are currently working to make them even more Democratic in 2022.

A final word on redistricting. Some states' supposedly neutral redistricting commissions, which have been lauded by liberal critics, aren't working out so well. They've unavoidably devolved into political brawls, because who else but partisans would want to spend their time drawing district borders on maps?

The simple, though disagreeable, the fact is that politics will always exist in politics, particularly in times of strong political struggle including, and especially, special elections to state legislatures.


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