Home / General / Winning MT-AL By 7 Points Is Excellent News For John McCain, And Other Fallacies

Winning MT-AL By 7 Points Is Excellent News For John McCain, And Other Fallacies

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As we’ve discussed before, the most determined nothing-matters-Democrats-are-always-doomed Eeyores like to cite Sam Brownback winning re-election after destroying the state. The obvious problem with this is that he was re-elected with 25 points less of a margin than he was elected with, so this just shows that Republicans are largely insulated from blowback in states where they have a 20-point inherent advantage. But, of course, their margin in the House is much less than this, and their Electoral College “advantage” is “less than 100,000 votes assuming the director of the FBI implies that the Democratic candidate is a crook less than two weeks before the election.”

The regrettable loss in MT-AL is, I’m sure, being met with a wave of “Democrats are DOOMED” and/or “Democrats are DOOMED unless they adopt precisely my policy views and run on them in every jurisdiction” takes on Twitter as we speak. But the results are in fact encouraging:

Greg Gianforte’s 7 percentage point win in the Montana special election keeps a seat in Republican hands but fundamentally represents bad news for the GOP. The basic issue, as David Wasserman breaks down for the Cook Political Report, is that for prognostication purposes you don’t only want to know who wins or loses a special election — you want to know the margin.

Montana is considerably redder than the average congressional district. According to Wasserman’s calculations, in an election where Democrats got 50 percent of the two-party vote nationwide, you’d expect them to get just 39 percent in Montana. Quist scored 44 percent, and with the Libertarian pulling in 6 percent, his share of the two-party vote is more like 46.

Things aren’t as simple as saying that Rob Quist outperformed the 39 percent benchmark and therefore Democrats are on track to win — geography means Republicans can hold their majority with less than 50 percent of the vote. But the GOP underperformed badly in Montana, after a similar underperformance in the special election for Kansas’s Fourth Congressional District.

There are 120 Republican-held House seats that are more GOP-friendly than Montana’s at-large district. If Republicans are winning in places like Montana by just 7 percentage points, then they are in extreme peril of losing their House majority in November 2018.

In addition, as Yglesias goes on to observe, the marginal districts that are the path to the next Democratic House majority are almost certainly the Sun Belt suburbs (and, I would add, some Republican seats in blue states like New York and California), not red state rural districts. If Ossoff loses, then I think there’s real reason for concern. Yesterday’s result, conversely, indicates that the House is very much in play in 2018 to the extent that it indicates anything.

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