The Washington Post is reporting that the seat formerly held by Mick Mulvaney, now OMB Director, may be in play:
A poll from Anzalone Liszt Grove Research, completed on May 25 and obtained by The Post, has Democrat Archie Parnell down by 10 points to Ralph Norman, a state legislator making his second run at the rural and suburban seat. That’s a six-point bump for Parnell since March, when he began running TV ads, and it’s closer than the margin in Mulvaney’s last few races or the last presidential elections in South Carolina’s 5th District.
Mulvaney, the first Republican to win the district, won his elections while a Democrat was in the White House. In a Trump-era election, ALGR finds Democrats more interested in voting, twice as likely (5o percent to 26 percent) as Republicans to call the election “very important.” Just 42 percent of the district’s voters back the American Health Care Act, which the pollster described as the bill “to repeal and replace” the current health-care law. Fifty percent of voters opposed it.
Just how has this seat swung over the years? South Carolina gained a Congressional House seat in the census of 2010, which more or less rewrote the district maps of South Carolina, according to Ballotpedia. Thus, whereas the GOP often didn’t even run a candidate prior to the census in the Georgia South Carolina 5th, in 2010 Mick Mulvaney (R) defeated the incumbent. In the 2016 election, Mulvaney won by nearly 21 points.
Data from Ballotpedia, chart from Chartpart
So, if the poll results are accurate, Democrat Parnell being down by only 10 points represents a significant move. The special election date is June 20th, giving Mr. Parnell another 20 days to persuade the local independents that he’s worth their vote.
So far, the GOP has held on to what should have been easy seats in Montana and Kansas, but by far smaller margins than expected. The Democrats have picked up some state-level special-election seats which had belonged to the GOP, which is good in that it jars the GOP, but some national level pickups will hasten the collapse and rebuilding of the GOP, and that process must occur in order for the USA to have a healthy political culture.
[EDIT: Changed Georgia to South Carolina 11/5/2017]
