JOHNSTOWN, Pa—Mark Critz was on top of the world. Seven years ago in May, Critz, the longtime district director for the powerful Western Pennsylvania Democratic congressman Jack Murtha, won his late boss’ seat in a hard-fought special election.
He held the seat for Democrats, handing then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a symbolic victory that she could point to as proof that Democrats were well on their way to expanding their majority that November.
Seven months later, Democrats lost 63 seats in the House—their worst electoral defeat in decades—as disaffected centrist Democrats, conservative-leaning independents and Republicans turned out big.
Voters cast their lots against then-President Barack Obama and against the Democratic Party and handed the House majority back to Republicans just four years after sweeping them out of office for essentially the same reason: being out of touch and out of sync with Main Street America’s economic concerns.
Critz’s victory wasn’t the only special election that Democrats won that year; they won six of them in the lead-up to Obama’s first midterm election cycle.
Reporters and pundits in Washington, D.C., were quick to report after each of those wins that any suggestion of 2010 becoming a wave election year for Republicans was a poor calculation.
They were all wrong. So what happened? How could six special elections in one cycle all go to the same party and that party end up getting shellacked a few months later?
The answers are complicated. But simply put, special elections are not harbingers of what the next midterm elections’ outcome will be—not in the same year, and certainly not two years ahead of the next Election Day.
Recently the political class, the progressives and the Republican establishment all glued their eyes to a special election in Kansas to replace Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo, who joined President Trump’s administration as CIA director. The state treasurer, Republican Ron Estes, won, beating Democrat rival James Thompson by 8 percentage points.
Immediately, Democrats cried victory. Why? Well, because Estes didn’t win bigger.
Headlines and tweets proclaimed a “political earthquake,” a “major shakeup” and a “harbinger for the 2018” midterms.
All of them claimed the race was a referendum on Trump. They were wrong.
Special elections are just that: special. They are typically driven by local issues and rarely understood by national political reporters who parachute into a district and cover the race from a national perspective, overlooking the local issues that drive voter sentiments.
Everyone looks to interview that one voter who dislikes President Trump, who blames him for switching their vote from reliable Republican to Democrat, and then calls it a story.
It is more complicated than that—and it is that kind of reporting (or pontificating) that led to a lot of political professionals getting last year’s election results so horribly wrong.
Republicans need to get disciplined on message and busy raising money if they want to hold on to their majority. And Democrats need to learn the real lessons of this special election cycle and ignore the empty flattery and hype if they want to make any headway in 2018.
—––––– ❖ –––––—
Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner.