Specials: Orange County A Huge Win For Democrats
On Some Legitimately Good News
Tuesday was a good night for Democrats in a pair of special elections, getting a huge swing to them in a Maine Senate district that narrowly voted for Biden (and overwhelmingly voted for Susan Collins) and flipping a seat on the Orange County Board Of Supervisors - only the second time they've ever flipped a seat on that board, after a 2018 flip.
We'll start with Maine, because I'm less confident that it matters in a broader, macro sense. New England is weird, candidate quality is worth more there, I get it. It's obviously not a bad sign, but whether it is a product of differential turnout or just people being idiosyncratic is harder to discern. That isn't to say that Democrats shouldn't celebrate - remember, there was doomer discourse when a Democrat in Iowa overran Biden by 10%, so when an unambiguously good result happens, we can and should celebrate. But this is not the race of the two where I'm focusing my happiness.
Democrats flipped a Board of Supervisors seat in Orange County, quite literally the second time they'd ever won one of them, with a combined Democratic vote share around 49%, split between two candidates, against 51% for the three Republicans. But, because it's not a runoff, we win. We won a seat whose boundaries include Huntington, which is some of the most conservative territory in Orange County. Also, and here's the main thing, we won.
Turnout wasn't a disaster, actually - once the remaining trickle of mail ballots come in, it looks likely that we'll hit just over 75% of the total votes cast in 2018 this time - rendering this an actually usable example of partisanship. And, on that basis, there was a huge swing against the GOP from 2018. In 2018, Michelle Steel got 62.5% of the vote, and Tuesday the GOP barely scraped 51%. Yes, incumbents matter, yes, candidate quality, yes yes yes. That doesn't justify a 20% swing on margin, and if you think it does you're out of your damn mind.
This result is a sign of at least one of two things, and almost assuredly both. It is either differential turnout, which is to say that Trumpy, low propensity sat this election out while whites with degrees came out, or there was even more swing amongst educated, socially liberal whites in Orange County, continuing the (*say it with me now*) Global Fucking Trend even after Trump. Or, most likely, it's some combination of both. Huh. Who the fuck could have seen this coming? Anybody? Bueller?
Oh wait, I did. "The GOP's facing a scenario where they can't manage to pull off Trump level margins in the rural and regional areas without Trump on the ballot - which we've seen every single time he's not on the ballot - but instead of getting the Turnbull upside in the suburbs, they just get the slow bleed leftward they're facing currently," as I wrote in January. You want to understand politics? This is a place to start.
Democrats have been on a run of good form every time they haven't had to face Trump turnout levels. It worked in Georgia, where everyone expected a loss and then we won. It worked in Virginia in 2017, the midterms in 2018, and then even Kentucky and Louisiana in 2019. It failed spectacularly when Trump was on the ballot, when record turnout was happening, sure - but that doesn't mean shit for today, because Trump ain't President anymore and he's not owning the news cycle like he used to. He's putting out press releases, sure, but he's mostly irrelevant to national discourse. And, now, Democrats are getting election results in line with what you'd expect in an environment where the drift of wealthy, white educated social liberals continues apace.
You want to understand why Huntington would run left? Read about Southlake Texas, and this shit doesn't seem so fucking wild anymore, because this is happening everywhere. This is happening in every wealthy white enclave, not just in America, but in Canada, Britain, and Australia too. This is the logical election result for 2021 if everyone wasn't so wrapped around their own bullshit understanding of how things worked in 1852.
What does it all mean for 2022? It means that things are, as they have been this entire time, looking good for Democrats. Democrats have been the favourites in both chambers in 2022 since the moment Jon Ossoff won his Senate seat, confirming everything that we thought we knew about the way that US elections currently work. And now, we just got another evidence point, in a fairly high turnout election, that just makes sense with the pattern as it is shown.
We won. Democrats won, and they won in a way that is understandable and replicable. Tuesday was a very good night for the Democratic Party, and we should all enjoy it.