Another Significant Special Election Defeat for the Republicans
Another data point that shows Trump's unpopularity.
I have been meaning to write about the special election for a seat in the Texas state Senate, wherein the Democrat, Taylor Rehmet, won the seat by roughly 14 points in a district that Trump carried by 17 points just last year. Now we have a similar story out of Louisiana.
CBS News reports: Democrat Chasity Verret Martinez wins Louisiana state House special seat in district Trump won.
Louisiana Democrat Chasity Verret Martinez defeated her Republican opponent by double digits in the special election Saturday night for a state House seat in a district President Trump won by 13 points in 2024.
Martinez won 62% of the vote compared to 38% for her Republican opponent, Brad Daigle, according to unofficial results from the Louisiana Secretary of State.
[…]
Her win was a 37-point swing from the 2024 results, although the district has voted for Democrats at the state and local levels previously.
The lack of a flip makes the outcome less dramatic than the one in Texas, and is a reminder that some voters did behave differently for local v. national offices (although, as a rule, less than they used to).
It is worth noting that the previous occupant, Chad Brown, was unopposed in his last election in 2023, making it difficult to make a comparison to the most recent race. Indeed, if I am reading his Ballotpedia entry correctly, the last time he was opposed was the 2015 primary (which acts as the first round in Louisiana), where he won 46% of the vote, and the second-place finisher dropped out for the general election. All of that makes any analysis less about the legislative seat itself and even more about Trump as a variable. That is: voters clearly took the opportunity to send a message about their discontent with the present political moment.
This comports with something I wrote back in October as it pertained to “messaging” concerns for Democrats.
Most voters vote solely based on their team, but if they are going to switch, it is to cast a vote as a referendum on the current party. If they are unhappy, they vote for the opposite party. I still think that the main driver for 2024 was a combo of frustration over inflation and COVID. Any attempt to fit messaging failures is largely a mistake.
I think it is likely that we are seeing a significant number of voters using these special elections to register their views about the sitting administration in Washington. Some are doing so by voting differently than they did in 2024, while some are staying home, and yet others are turning out who didn’t vote last time. As I noted ina post about 2021 off-term elections, electorates vary election to election.
All of this is a reminder that our parties are broadly nationalized and presidentialized. The nationalized part means that partisan identification is increasingly more important than local issues in sub-national elections. It also means that a Democrat (or Republican) in Louisiana is likely reacting in ways that are similar to a Democrat (or Republican) in Maine or Wisconsin (or wherever). The presidentialized part means that the central defining characteristic of a party is the president, and voters often respond, in terms of turnout and voting patterns, in response to their feelings and perceptions of the president.
This also means that voters who in special elections are likely to be responding to the sitting president more than they are to the candidates (and their messages!) in the election itself. Voters who are upset about affordability or who have strong feelings about Minneapolis have a chance in the special election to record those feelings in a meaningful way.
I will allow, of course, for the possibility that there are localized variables I am not aware of as I react to this story, but based on the available information, I have to admit that these kinds of results suggest that the Republicans are likely in a lot of trouble heading into the midterms. Of course, one must provide the caveat that it is always wise to refrain from trying to extrapolate too much from a handful of cases.
Let’s just say that based on the partisan lean of the district, the Republicans had a reasonable expectation of picking up this seat, as they did in winning the Fort Worth area Senate seat. And yet, not only did the opposite occur, but it did so by wide margins in both cases.
Maybe the outcomes were about the candidates or some other local variable, but the better explanation is that both were referenda on Trump.
