If House Republicans really want to play it this way, they’re in deeper trouble than we thought
Last night’s Democratic Party victory in the NY-19 House special election is being labeled a “shocking upset” that no one could have seen coming. But that’s only because the polls rather bizarrely had the Republican candidate up by 8 to 10 points. We expected the special election results to be closer to how Joe Biden performed in that same district in 2020, and sure enough, that’s what happened. Biden won that district by one point, and Democratic candidate Pat Ryan won that district last night by about three points.
The question now is how everyone involved will shift their expectations and strategies accordingly. Headline writers are now starting to become less negative (still negative, but less negative) about the Democrats’ chances of keeping the House in November. Pollsters will surely review their methodologies in an effort to make their polling more accurate going forward. The Democrats now have a blueprint for winning, given that Pat Ryan’s messaging worked perfectly. And the Republicans… well, they’re apparently doing nothing.
Normally, when your party’s candidate ends up doing thirteen points worse in a special election than the polls were predicting, you sound the alarm. You acknowledge that your strategy isn’t working, or your messaging is off, or your candidate sucked, or something to try to keep this from becoming a pattern in the upcoming main election.
But House Republican Tom Emmer, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, has reportedly sent out a memo insisting that nothing is wrong. He’s claiming that Democratic turnout in the special election was only high because Democrats were really turning out to vote for higher profile candidates in the primary race. This is absurd given that the Democratic primary for Governor of New York actually took place back in June, and Senator Chuck Schumer wasn’t facing any serious challengers in his primary race. The only real reason for voters in NY-19 to turn out yesterday was that they specifically wanted to vote for the Democrat over the Republican in this special election.
So the NRCC is just going to pretend that last night didn’t happen. That is not a winning strategy. When you underperform that badly, you have to acknowledge that something went wrong, if only to let your side’s activists know to get out there and do something.
It’s enough to make you wonder what’s going on here. We’ve already seen that the NRCC’s Senate counterpart, the NRSC, is investing very little in Republican Senate candidates even while facing accusations of financial impropriety from within. Now the NRCC just got its butt kicked in a House special election, and seems mainly interested in trying to convince House Republicans that nothing is wrong. Something is off kilter with all of it. The longer the Republicans keep blowing this, the more of an opportunity the Democrats will have.
