CNN
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Democrats continued a trend of strong overperformance in off-cycle elections on Tuesday, making double-digit gains on the margin over their 2024 showing in both Florida congressional districts and statewide in Wisconsin. That trend has emerged at least in part because Democrats’ base is increasingly more likely to vote in such elections, but a CNN analysis shows that Tuesday’s results may reflect more than just a deeply engaged base.
Strong results in special elections do not necessarily lead to future electoral success. Democrats followed up a string of strong special election results early in Trump’s first term with resounding wins in the 2018 midterms, yet fell short in the 2024 general election despite overperforming in the special elections leading up to November.
CNN examined the 12 House special elections between the June 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and November 2024 that involved a single Democratic and Republican candidate and found the average margin was 10.8 points more favorable toward the Democrat than in the 2022 midterm margin in the district.
The Democratic candidates in both Florida races fared better than average on Tuesday, with Gay Valimont shrinking Republicans’ November margin in Florida’s 1st District by 17.3 points and Josh Weil tightening the GOP advantage by 19 points in the race to replace Mike Waltz in Florida’s 6th District. In Wisconsin, Democratic-backed Judge Susan Crawford outpaced Kamala Harris’ margin in the 2024 presidential election by nearly 11 points.
Special election margins are notoriously volatile, and it is difficult to say what these results mean for the future.
Democratic supporters hope they could foreshadow a strong showing in the 2026 midterms. Republicans might counter that the Democratic advantage in off-cycle elections is unlikely to hold in higher turnout contests such as a midterm. But there are some signals from Tuesday’s elections that bear watching.
The electorate in the Florida districts was considerably more Democratic than in November 2024. In Escambia County, for example, registered Republicans outnumbered registered Democrats by more than 21.1 points in November. On Tuesday, that advantage dropped to 11.3 points. Valimont actually flipped the county, which she lost by over 14 points in November and which no Democrat has won in a race for a federal office since 2006, when Sen. Bill Nelson won reelection.
While Wisconsin does not have party registration, there are some indications that the electorate was more Democratic-leaning than in 2024. Counties that voted for Harris, particularly the Democratic stronghold Dane County, generally held a higher share of their 2024 turnout than rural, more Republican-leaning counties.
A Democratic base that’s more inclined to turn out generally could be an advantage for the party in the 2026 midterms. While midterms have higher turnout than special elections, they still tend to draw lower turnout than presidential elections.
… and Tuesday’s races had unusually high overall turnout for off-cycle elections
According to a CNN analysis of turnout in those 12 House specials from June 2022 through the 2024 general election, turnout for the same districts relative to the 2022 midterm turnout varied widely. The total ballots cast in the June 2024 special election in Ohio’s 6th Congressional District, for example, represented only 21% of the 2022 midterm total. A February 2024 election in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, by contrast, had 64% the turnout of November 2022, and a November 2023 election in Utah’s 2nd Congressional District had 61% the turnout of November 2022.
Democratic success in those specials seems tied to the level of turnout. While the Democrat overperformed by 26 points in the lower-turnout Ohio election, the Democratic candidate in the Utah election trimmed the margin by just 2.4 points relative to the midterm. In the five races where the number of votes cast was less than 40% of the 2022 midterm turnout, Democratic candidates improved over 2022 margins by an average of 15.1 points, and none of those races had an overperformance of less than 7.5 points. In the seven races where the special election turnout was above 40% of midterm turnout, the average Democratic gain was 7.7 points.
That pattern did not hold on Tuesday, when Democratic-aligned candidates fared far better than their general election counterparts even with turnout on the high end of what is typical for a special election. Nearly two-thirds as many votes were cast in Florida’s 6th Congressional District compared with 2022 (a higher rate than any of the 12 previous special elections), and turnout in the 1st Congressional District was nearly 60% of midterm turnout (higher than all but two prior races). But there have been other strong performances with relatively high turnout. Democrat Tom Suozzi overperformed by 15.6 points in the special election to replace George Santos in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, though his 8-point margin was only 4.4 points higher than his margin in November 2024.
Crawford’s decisive victory in Wisconsin also came amid astonishingly high turnout. In other recent Supreme Court races, turnout ranged from 1 million to 1.8 million ballots cast. In this year’s race, though, over 2.3 million voters cast a ballot, nearly 90% of the total ballots cast in the 2022 Senate race.
Crawford came just 9,000 votes shy of Democratic candidate Mandela Barnes’ total in the 2022 Senate race despite nearly 300,000 fewer ballots being cast. To put the scale of her victory in context, even if Tuesday’s turnout had matched 2022 midterm turnout, Schimel would have needed nearly all of the additional votes (91.3%) to win the race.
While Republicans worry about turning out their lower-propensity base, Tuesday’s elections also flashed another warning sign: the potential for considerable crossover vote, with Republican voters casting ballots for Democratic candidates.
More than 36,000 registered Republicans cast ballots in Escambia County in Florida’s 1st District, but Republican candidate Jimmy Patronis received only 35,829 votes. This means that even if he received no votes at all from registered Democrats or those registered with no party affiliation, he lost at minimum a few hundred Republican votes. If Patronis had received 5% of Democratic votes and split all other non-Republican voters evenly, he would have lost nearly a fifth of registered Republican votes.
This dynamic played out across the district. Shortly before polls closed, reports from county election officials suggested that nearly 58% of the ballots cast in the race came from registered Republicans, yet Patronis ultimately carried only 56.9% of the vote.
That wasn’t the case in the 2024 general election. Republican candidates then received a vote share that exceeded registered Republican turnout. In Escambia County, 50.8% of votes came from registered Republicans, while Republican candidates Matt Gaetz, Rick Scott and Donald Trump received 57.1%, 60.9%, and 59.0% of the vote, respectively.
