Within the Margin

Earlier this month, I attended a We Won’t Go Back March in Poughkeepsie, NY. At its conclusion we heard from quite a few local electeds, candidates, activists and community members. Among them was Pat Ryan, county executive in Ulster County across the river – and candidate in the upcoming (August 23) special election for New York’s 19th Congressional District. The 19th – my home for the last 14 years and my neighboring district before that – is very swingy district, with Democrats flipping it in 2018 and Republicans hellbent on taking it back this year. Pat naturally made reference to the special election during a brief and focused speech that read the parade and rally audience reasonably well. He noted that it is the only remaining Congressional special election following the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and before the November general election. The outcome will be picked apart, analyzed and weaponized: will it show Republicans marching inexorably toward retaking the House of Representatives majority? Or will it upend the narrative by showing Democrats mobilizing in a post-Roe world, and perhaps indicate that some voters who were leaning toward the usual midterm behavior of punishing the party in the White House are changing course in reaction to the Supreme Court’s far-right supermajority?

But it is important to note that the election in NY-19 is not the only Congressional special election between Dobbs and November: there are several others, and we actually already had one in late June, days after the ruling and largely out of the national spotlight. It was in Nebraska’s 1st Congressional District, the updated lines of which continue to contain the capital city of Lincoln (the state’s second-largest, with 291,082 people), along with the fast-growing Omaha suburbs of Bellevue (featuring a population of 64,176, making it the third-largest city in Nebraska) and Papillion (24,159), Offutt Air Force Base, several smaller cities beyond the Omaha metro area such as Columbus, Fremont and Norfolk, and several very rural counties (Butler, Cass, Colfax, Cuming, Seward, Stanton and part of Polk), some with populations below 10,000. It’s worth noting an oddity in this election: it was held on the new lines for NE-1, even though the special election is for the final months of the current term – meaning the winner, Mike Flood, will be representing people who couldn’t vote for him, and tens of thousands of people who could vote for him won’t be represented by him. It’s hard to imagine this is a remotely constitutional arrangement.

It was also hard to imagine the election being particularly close: as drawn, the new NE-1 is a little bit bluer than the old version, thanks to some land swaps by Nebraska’s Republican-dominated legislature to make NE-2 redder (that’s the one Democrats occasionally carry in presidential and Congressional races). But it’s still safely Republican under most circumstances; it voted 54%-43% for Trump over Biden in 2020. Lincoln (and Lancaster County) is something of a Democratic outpost thanks to the presence of the University of Nebraska and its government workforce and high education attainment levels. But it doesn’t vote Dem by landslide margins, and is comfortably outvoted by the much redder counties around it. Those suburban pieces of Sarpy County mentioned above are trending blue but aren’t quite there yet. Like many military posts, Offutt AFB trended hard away from Trump in 2020, but it still voted narrowly for him. One can see the pieces coming together for NE-1 to be more competitive in a decade…but we wouldn’t have expected it to be particularly close this time around, especially in a political environment that had trended toward the GOP all year.

And yet…it was pretty close. Republican candidate Mike Flood won by 5.4% (52.7% to 47.3%) in this district that, as noted above, would have voted for Trump by 11 points if we overlay the 2020 results onto its new configuration. Overperforming a district’s partisanship by almost six points is no small feat when you’re the party in power in DC; special elections typically see the out-of-power party overperforming instead. The Democratic candidate, Senator Patty Pansing Brooks of the Nebraska unicameral legislature, was dominant in Lincoln’s Lancaster County, leading the Republican nominee – fellow Senator Mike Flood – by just over 10,000 votes, or 14%. This strikes me as notable given that this was a summertime election, meaning the University of Nebraska and its massive student population were largely away from campus for the summer and less likely to be voting in this election. Flood carried each of the remaining counties, with Sarpy the closest as we’d expect. Brooks would need to carry Sarpy handily to win the November rematch; she probably also needs to cut his margins in the rural counties where he generally exceeded 80% of the vote.

Not a win, which would have upended the political landscape, this seat has been held by Republicans since 1966 – but a stunning performance nonetheless. Was this a product of Democratic voters charging to the polls following the Dobbs ruling a few days earlier? Is it an interesting portent of renewed Democratic enthusiasm despite the myriad challenges currently facing the party in power (however narrowly) in Washington? It’s only one data point so we should avoid drawing conclusions; it’s possible it was simply anomalous – a summertime election in a district whose voters are not accustomed to competitive Congressional elections in the first place. It’s possible Dobbs was a factor but will be swallowed by other factors as the year goes on. The next opportunity to learn more will be August 23, when Democrats attempt to hold onto the more traditional swing territory of NY-19.