https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1 ... ears-later
Special elections are closely correlated with the House popular vote: Still true, six years later
In the dark hours of December 2016, we noticed something out of the ordinary. In one of the first elections following the previous month’s political apocalypse, a Democrat running for state Senate in Iowa ran up a margin 31 percentage points better than Hillary Clinton had in that same district.
A month later, we saw a 34-point overperformance in another Iowa district, this time for the state House.
We sat up and took notice.
And it wasn’t just a bounce-back from a Democratic downturn in Iowa, which had swung hard toward Donald Trump. These two Democrats also outran Barack Obama’s 2012 margin by double digits. This was not something we’d often seen in special elections over the previous several years.
Two weeks later, there was yet another massive overperformance, this time in Minnesota. Immediately, we swung into action. Which means, of course, we started a spreadsheet. I mean, we are Daily Kos Elections!
After a few months of tracking results, we started to wonder what their significance was. We dove deep into the elections archives—all the way back to 1989—and were able to show for the first time that special elections, when you analyze elections for both the U.S. House and state legislatures, are an important signal of the political environment: They’re correlated with the House popular vote. Thanks to our innovation, you can now regularly find coverage of special elections and their meaning in national news outlets.