Special Elections

Speaking of Republican frittering away special elections, a single race for the Pennsylvania legislature does not mean much, but combined with other data points, this is quite significant.

A Democrat won a surprise victory on Tuesday in a special election for the Pennsylvania State Senate, narrowly prevailing in a district that Donald Trump won by 15 points last fall.

The election, conducted in the small towns and suburbs of Lancaster County where no Democrat had won since the district was redrawn decades ago, joined two currents that are powering the political moment. It underscored the galvanizing fury among Democratic voters, who have flocked to rallies and crowded town hall meetings in the early weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term. And it was further evidence of the changes in the two parties’ electorates, with Democrats drawing more and more of the kind of highly educated voters who reliably turn out for special elections.

The victory does not affect control of the state senate, where Republicans now hold a four-seat majority, though another special election, near Pittsburgh on Tuesday, gave the Democrats a one-seat majority in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. The outcome of the House special election was not a surprise, but the margin of the Democratic victory there also exceeded Kamala Harris’ performance in the district in 2024.

Now, we have to note something here. Too often, Democrats–and this very big in this comment section–argue that what really matters is electing more Democrats. Now, that’s a huge error. Electing more Democrats is only the first step. Our complacency comes when we win a slight majority in a divided nation and think most things are OK, i.e., November 2020-November 2024. That’s a gigantic problem. Not only do you then need to elect better Democrats (preferably under the age of 80), you need to have active action plans on how to continue building momentum, activate local communities to keep fighting, and give people something to do outside of just showing up to vote every 2 or 4 years, or in the case of many voters, not even doing that because they are so disengaged. In other words, the ideal politics would be the chance Obama had in late 08 and early 09 when an actual social movement coalesced around his election and he told them to all go home, that he had it and everything would be fine. Whoops!

In any case, more about the future of the nation will be known with the Wisconsin judicial election next week, but this is still a notable victory. Another few thousand of them, plus Democrats completely rethinking their modus operandi of politics, and maybe we will save the nation after all.