At NYT. Alexander Burna and Denise Lu report that the GOP has lost ground in every special election during the Trump presidency.
In a special House election on Tuesday, Debbie Lesko, a Republican, won the conservative Arizona district, but was ahead by less than six points as of 12:00 a.m. Eastern with most of the votes counted. That is a narrow win compared to the victory margin of Trent Franks, who beat his opponent by 37 points in 2016, but resigned amid scandal.
In 2016, President Trump won the district in a landslide, but on Tuesday, Republican support dropped in nearly all precincts.
Most easily predictable mess ever. Yet so many in GOP were blind to the obvious, just rolled their eyes at early warnings (from the few of us who spoke up) and now, here we are. #GonnaNeedAnArk https://t.co/Ev0NyYIUKL— Mike Murphy (@murphymike) April 25, 2018
There just aren't any excuses. The Republican wasn't Roy Moore. The Democrat wasn't Conor Lamb. The turnout wasn't low. The district doesn't have, say, a latent Democratic tradition. It oddly has the effect of making all the prior excuses seem less relevant, too.— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) April 25, 2018
To win the House, Dems need an average overperformance of 4% vs. @CookPolitical PVI. Here's their overperformance in the past 8 specials:#KS04: 12%#MTAL: 8%#GA06: 6%#SC05: 7%#UT03: 6%#ALSEN: 15%#PA18: 11%#AZ08: 11%— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) April 25, 2018
Matthew Yglesias at Vox:
In a Tuesday night special election race on Long Island, Democrats flipped a long-Republican State Assembly district to mark their 40th Trump-era takeover of a GOP-held seat. The seat had been held by a Republican since 1978.
The New York State Assembly is firmly in Democratic hands, and control of the New York state Senate is caught up in intra-caucus weirdness, so the flip has no particular concrete result. But it does serve as a further sign of the strong wind at Democrats’ backs downballot in the Trump era, with their candidate Steve Stern running 11 points ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margin in the seat and 15 points ahead of Barack Obama’s 2012 margin.
The race was also notable as yet another example of the GOP trying and failing to make the Salvadoran street gang MS-13 into the Democratic candidate’s running mate.