Forecasting the future is a favorite past time of political professionals and pundits. One possible approach is to use the results of special elections at the state level, which occur with fair regularity as elected officials die unexpectedly, win other seats, retire due to illness, and other such life events.
Of course, using special election results can be a minefield. Turnout is commonly light and filled with ideological zealots, rather than casual citizens. The weather and even traffic conditions can skew votes, as can the quality of the candidates and their fund-raising abilities.
In the end, it’s those seats that change hands that attract my attention. Oh, there goes one now!
In this case, this is probably due to the quality of the Republican candidate, a deduction which does not necessarily exempt this special election, necessitated by the movement of the former seat holder to the Michigan State Senate, from use by the crystal ball.
First, why I suggest this is a candidate-quality result. The Republican is Robert Regan, whose advice to his daughters if they find themselves being raped went national:
... panelist Amber Harris, a Republican strategist, told the group that it is “too late” to continue challenging the results of the 2020 election, suggesting Republicans should instead move on and focus on future races, to which Regan replied: “I tell my daughters, ‘Well, if rape is inevitable, you should just lie back and enjoy it.’ ” [WaPo]
And if that seems ambiguous, this is not:
One of Regan’s daughters urged voters not to elect him to office in a viral tweet during his 2020 bid for the state House.
“If you’re in Michigan and 18+ pls for the love of god do not vote for my dad for state rep. Tell everyone,” Stephanie Regan wrote on Twitter.
Turnout in this special election vs the last normal election? The Democrat, who did not run in 2020 and whose name is Carol Glanville, saw slightly less than 50% (19897 vs 7288).
Regan, the Republican? Disaster. Regan did not run in 2020, either, and the comparison is 34,068 vs 7,288, or in other words Regan received little more than 21% of the former holder of the seat's totals.
So what? And that's a great question.
First, I don't think that Regan is the outlier that many might assume. The Republican Party has rapidly slid into fourth- and fifth- rater land over the last twenty years. Names like Greene, Gaetz, Boebert, Gosar, Biggs, Trump, Jordan, and maybe another two dozen members of the House and Senate at the national level serve as encouragement to the far-right and the amateur to try their hand at being representatives of the people, untrained by a Republican Party that lost its capability to sieve out the unsuitable and train the suitable at about the time Newt Gingrich declared total war on the Democrats after the end of the Soviet Union. Their views resemble that of a stubborn bar-room denizen, certain beyond rationality of the rightness of their views, unperturbed by logic or sentiment.
I fully expect to see more and more of these wretched candidates popping up in elective contests.
Second, I think and hope that non-MAGA Republicans, former Republicans, and conservative independents who voted Republican in 2020, but sat out this special election, are, at heart, decent people. Fallible, sometimes mistaken, and stubborn - not just like liberals, but like all Americans. Their disgust with Regan, handing Glanville the seat in a landslide, speaks to this thought.
And that leads to my third point. Glanville, in the short amount of time between now and the 2022 elections, has an opportunity to convert these voters. The sitouts may be willing to reconsider the Democrat in races if Glanville can leave a positive impression on the district. In short, she has a chance to make Republicans respect herself and the Democrats - a small chance, given her short time in office, but a chance.
This is what the Republicans need to worry about. I don't know what they can do beyond spreading rumors and lies about Glanville, because I don't know that they'll have a decent candidate who can win primaries in Michigan. By comparison, the Tennessee GOP is being very mindful of this problem, removing Trump-endorsed candidate for the Tennessee 5th Congressional District Morgan Ortagus, who had worked for Trump in the State Department as a spokesperson, from the Republican primary ballot. Maybe it was just politics, but I suspect a lot of it was an evaluation of Ortagus, and finding her to be too extreme.
Maybe the Michigan GOP has lost that capacity.
