Utterly disastrous special election for the Republicans tonight
There was a special election today to fill a vacant House seat in Ohio’s 6th District, which should have been fully non-competitive. The district leans a whopping sixteen points Republican, meaning there aren’t even enough Democrats living there to give the Democratic candidate a chance to win. Except a funny thing is happening.
With two thirds of the vote counted, the Republican candidate is only ahead by about four points. Given the nature of the remaining uncounted votes, the Republican is going to win. But he’s going to win by a much smaller margin than he should have. Why? Republican turnout is in the toilet.
To give you an idea of how many Republicans stayed home today, in one county where Trump won by forty points in 2020, the Republican only won by six points today. That’s just a stunning collapse in Republican turnout. Special elections tend to have lower turnout than regular elections to begin with, so you can’t directly correlate these numbers to anything that’ll happen in November. But it is clear that Republican voters are very much not motivated to turn out for anything anymore. This means that if we can help drive turnout among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, we will win in November.
