What does the special election in Arizona mean?
Whatever conclusions you draw from it, I don’t think the news is good.
The Republican Debbie Lesko won; that’s true. But she won by a far smaller margin than she had every right to expect, considering the district’s history, according to most articles you will read:
Republicans have a 17 percentage point registration advantage in the district. President Donald Trump won there by 21 points in 2016. Democrats didn’t even field a candidate there in 2014 and 2016.
Special elections tend to be low-turnout affairs, attracting only the most loyal voters. Normally, that sounds like a recipe for the older, more conservative voters who are the core of Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, which includes the Sun Cities.
Even adjusting for the anti-incumbent mood that can prevail in midterms, Lesko delivered a lackluster finish in the Republican-heavy district…
Republicans held onto the seat after pouring more than $1 million to protect a solidly Republican seat under normal circumstances.
Democrats spent almost nothing.
That runs counter to the pattern of recent special elections won by Democrats, in which the Democrats outspent the Republicans, pouring vast resources into each battle. They must have felt this one was really hopeless for them, and yet Lesko won by only 5 points. That’s worrisome.
On the other hand, I tried to get an idea of turnout compared to an ordinary year, because special elections are notorious for being skewed because of their small turnout. The best I could come up with was that the turnout in the special election was about half what it was in 2016. So there’s plenty of room to say that this is completely unrepresentative of what will happen in 2018.
But I think that’s inappropriately optimistic. Perhaps a better comparison would be to non-presidential election years such as 2014, but that wasn’t a really competitive year, either, because there was a popular incumbent, Trent Franks, and turnout was relatively low perhaps because it was a foregone conclusion that he would win.
All the coverage I’ve seen of Lesko’s victory states that the 8th is an overwhelmingly, solidly, massively Republican district, and has been for years. That’s why the closeness of this election seems shocking and meaningful. For example, from FiveThirtyEight:
The area has traditionally been extremely Republican, having voted for John McCain by 22 points in 2008, Mitt Romney by 25 points in 2012, and President Trump by 21 points in 2016.
But at the Wiki entry for the 8th, I discovered something that seems to go very much against that prevailing “wisdom,” at least when you get to the Congressional level. Yes, the GOP candidates were preferred for president, but not for members of the House of Representatives. The 8th—for those with short memories—was Gabrielle Giffords’ district until she was nearly assassinated.
Democrat Giffords was the 8th’s member of the House beginning in 2006, when she won by a twelve-point margin. Her opportunity had come because her very popular GOP predecessor, Jim Kolbe, had retired. It is instructive to learn about Kolbe, because of what it tells us about the district:
Kolbe was a leading moderate Republican. This served him well; although his district included most of Tucson’s Republican-leaning suburbs, the brand of Republican politics practiced in Southeast Arizona has traditionally been a centrist and independent-minded one. …
While Kolbe had usually coasted to reelection, it had been expected to be very competitive if he ever retired. (Bill Clinton had narrowly won the district in 1996, and George W. Bush narrowly edged out Al Gore and John Kerry in both of his presidential bids.) Graf won the five-candidate primary on September 12, 2006. Kolbe refused to endorse Graf, who lost to Democrat Gabrielle Giffords in the November 2006 election.
And Graf—who had challenged him in the primaries, and became the GOP candidate in 2006, was far more conservative. Graf’s loss to Giffords indicates a moderate “swing” brand of Republican thinking in the 8th rather than any sort of rock-ribbed conservatism. Giffords was re-elected in 2008 by a similiar 12-point margin, and again in 2010 (a solidly GOP year) by a much smaller margin, about 1.5 points. But she won, even in a year that represented an enormous red wave.
After that, Arizona underwent redistricting, but (at least, as far as I can tell from that link) it went in the direction of making the 8th (and most of the rest of the state’s districts) more Democratic rather than less.
That’s the fuller picture of the 8th district over the last decade-plus. It’s a picture I have yet to see painted in any of the articles I’ve read on the subject of yesterday’s special election. However, I came across it after only a few minutes of Googling and reading. Interesting, no?
At this point, too soon to determine if a Republican win this one particular race is the harbinger of anything.
The left is motivated and our side is not. There are ample reasons but it does not help to list them. Suffice to say that the duplicitous, scurrilous performance by Ryan and McConnell and the other establishment Republicans in Congress has practically guaranteed their defeat in November.
Other than wringing our hands and saying woe is me, what is to be done? I have decided to target my small contributions directly to embattled possibly conservative House Republican candidates. I live in deep far-left Silicon Valley so no activism I can think of will help in my local district. I do not travel well so going to other districts is not my thing.
Other than that, batten down the hatches and pray that our cold civil war does not turn hot.
Look at the numbers. The GOP turnout was less but the Democrat vote was less than the green party last time. It was a safe seat and will be up for election in November again.
Arizona’s 8th congressional district election, 2016
Republican Trent Franks (incumbent) 204,942 68.6%
Green Mark Salazar 93,954 31.4%
Total votes 298,896 100%
Republican hold
Arizona’s 8th congressional district special election, 2018
Republican Debbie Lesko 91,390 52.6% -15.97
Democratic Hiral Tipirneni 82,318 47.4% +47.4
Total votes 173,708 100.00
Republican hold
No Democrat candidate in 2016.
Too early to be pessimistic. IMO the rabid left (media, academics, social justice warriors, loony politicos like Maxine Waters) are preaching to the choir. Be of good cheer.
Predictions are a fool’s game, but foolish me predicts, barring catastrophic events, the gop will remain a majority in the House and pick up somewhere around 3 to 5 senators to add to their current slim majority.
Tucson is not a GOP town. It is a university, arty-fartsy town, with a fair % of residents retirees from the Northern Midwest. There’s a lot of New Age bizarrity and ‘alternative’, holistic medicine around.
The local joke is that IOWA stands for Idiots Out Walking Around.
The best thing about Tucson is the absence of street lights, to avoid “light pollution” affecting the observatories 50 miles away.
A House race is between two individual persons, not between two political parties, regardless of funding.
The winner was not an attractive candidate, kind of a plowhorse, not a thoroughbred. The Dem loser was an attractive candidate, though she lied thru her teeth to make herself seem ‘moderate’. Tucson Democrats are not ‘moderate’, I assure you. It was probably due to this the race was close. GOP stupids were fooled yet again.
Neo, the Wikipedia article is screwed up. The current AZ8 district is in the northwest of Phoenix–nowhere near Tucson. See this map
The Tucson district much more closely divided and is represented by RINO Martha McSally, who is currently running for the AZ senate seat to be vacated by her fellow RINO Jeff Flake.
The current AZ8 district does include several large retirement communities. This makes me feel better about the results. They were probably too busy playing shuffleboard and bingo to drop the ballots in the mail.
Thanks, skeptic. I assumed from the Kolbe paragraphs Neo quoted that we were talking about a Tucson-based district. That you observe “the Tucson district is much more closely divided” underscores my comments about the Tucson electorate.
The Sun Cities and other old geezer communities south of Phoenix might be nominallyGOP, but they’re still old geezers, and I agree they shuffle more than vote.
I’m fairly pessimistic about November too, but I don’t think these by-elections mean much. The choice will be quite different on election day – for one reason because it will then be a clear choice between giving the Dems the power to impeach Trump or not. I think the by-elections are shots across the bow, but a blue vote in November is a vote for impeachment which, after all the press coverage and infantile screaming could bring out a red wave. It really will depend on how Trump is perceived at the time. What the Dem resistance does not see is that they are daily revealing themselves as unfit to govern. I hope they fail to get rid of Trump and that he gets reelected, but their real problem is that they can’t get rid of themselves. The Republicans seem to have a similar problem. We shall see. Will Sessions do his job and prosecute Comey and the other conspirators? Will Ryan run against Trump in 2020? Will Senate Republicans vote to convict if the house impeaches? Will Trump take himself out or do something undeniably positive and finally shut them up?
I don’t know enough about this particular by-election, but I think it would be safe to say that the media onslaught (and the onslaught of the Democratic Party, as well as, sigh, that of the Never-Trumpers in the GOP) will be continuous, hysteria-driven and vicious all the way to November.
At the same time, the MSM will NOT mention anything about the efforts by Nunes et al. to expose the malefactions of the Obama administration (and the Clinton campaign), the suborning of the DOJ and the FBI (as well as other govt. agencies, e.g., the IRS, but that’s old news).
Since all that is Fox (i.e., Faux) News…. for deplorables, only.
And so, this extraordinary cover-up of the most massive scandal in US history, combined with a ramped up attack on Trump and the GOP (which attack is also part and parcel of the cover-up) has got to have some effect on the electorate.
The question is how much.
If, on the other hand, Nunes and the powers of light (and law) succeed in exposing the Democratic Party for what it is, then all bets are off.
(But even if Nunes is able to do this, one wonders whether any of the Trump-must-go crowd will give a damn….)
In short, it doesn’t look especially promising, unless enough people care about the disintegration of the body politic.
I really despise the Red/Blue characterization that has so rapidly become an essential part of the parlance of American political discussion.
It in fact obscures the distinction between the Right and the Left, reminds me of the White Russians v. the Red after the fall of the Czar in Russia. What did the White Russians stand for? No one know or remembers.
It is particularly vile that GOP states have been tagged as the “Red”, the traditional color of the Left, and the Left has seized the Blue, as in “Blue-blooded Americans”, which of course they are not.
I do not use Red or Blue and urge others to do the same. Use Left or Right, GOP or Dem.
To the previous generations, Red was the color of Commies, Red Russia or China: the enemy, period, the end.
In modern generations, say after 1990s, Red means the Red Pill vs the Blue Pill. The Red Team vs the Blue Team. It’s a war or sports analogy now a days.
People get it, even when they don’t understand what Dems or Republicans are.
In terms of color power: blue stands for reason or peace, and red stands for power or Mars.
Red Team: Stay on the target, salvo launch all torpedoes at the Death Star the Social Justice Whores are defending.
As skeptic pointed out, the current 8th is not the same as the old 8th, the Tucson district.
As I explained in my post yesterday, Arizona was redistricted in 2012, and the 2nd and 8th districts were more or less swapped. Just to confuse things further, a special election was held in 2012 in the old 8th, while the general election was held in the new one.
In general, old people tend to have higher voting rates than the young.
If the voting booths made a mobile app game for voting, you would have so many “young people” voting that you would have to check for ages, since many of them would be under 16.
The GOP _could_ turn this around and sweep if they wanted. The problem is that Ryan and McConnell don’t want to do so.
There is little doubt in my mind that McConnell would like to be minority leader, of a nice big minority. Then he can blame conservatives for losing the election that he helped throw, focus on business priorities, help pass immigration amnesty, and sit back and let the Dems go after Trump.
Heck, I’m pretty sure McConnell wanted to be in the minority in 2014, and that they had the ‘Cromnibus’ planned out ahead of time just in case the GOP won that election.
This last omnibus bill was ideally calculated to depress GOP voter enthusiasm, and I have little doubt that McConnell and Ryan privately encouraged Schumer and Pelosi to gloat publically afterward.
McConnell and Ryan work, more or less, for the Chamber of Commerce and their ilk, and the CoC is today almost diametrically opposed to the GOP voter base, so the GOP is at war with itself, almost literally.
It’s still too soon to give up. But don’t expect Ryan and McConnell to do much that’ll help between now and November, and don’t be shocked if they behave counter-productively. If the GOP holds its own or gains in November, it’ll be in spite of the GOP leadership, not because of it.