Democrats pull off massive historic upset victory in special election in Trump-heavy district

| 9:22 pm EST February 20, 2018
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Political elections are like football games in the sense that it doesn’t matter how many points you win by, as long as you win. But the margin of victory can often tell you a lot about the strength of the teams involved. The Democrats just won yet another special election today, in yet another Republican-leaning district. This isn’t a surprise. But the margin of victory, and more importantly the total point swing from the last time this same district voted, is the stuff of legend.

Democrat Linda Belcher defeated Republican Rebecca Johnson in today’s special election for the Kentucky House of Representatives in the 49th House District, by a blowout margin of more than thirty points. In 2016, Donald Trump won this district with nearly three-quarters of the vote. It all adds up to a stunning eighty-six point swing in this district over the past two years.

In one special election after another, the Democrats just keep outperforming. In the Alabama special election for U.S. Senate, Democratic candidate Doug Jones performed roughly twenty points higher than he historically should have. In smaller district-level races, the Democrats have swung things in their favor by even larger margins. But the Kentucky 49th takes the cake with its eighty-plus point swing.

This comes even as Donald Trump and his apologists have begun bragging that the Republicans are now supposedly performing better in a generic ballot poll than they had been in recent months. But this is a misrepresentation of the polling data. And as today’s special election showed, the Democrats are continuing to steamroll their way into the November elections, as mainstream America continues to reject Donald Trump and his Republican Party.