Not an ordinary special election, and yet a typical result

As I wrote this ahead of Tuesday's special election to replace George Santos in New York's Third District, two starkly different outcomes seemed easy to imagine — or explain away.

One was that the results would be excellent for the Democrats, as in most special elections this year. If their strength were low turnout alone, that may not say much about their appeal to the broader electorate in November.

Another was that the outcome would be excellent for Republicans, as New York and Long Island have been for Republicans in recent years. If so, it could just be another New York romp, with little significance for the rest of the country.

Either way, the special election couldn't tell us much about President Biden's chances in the general election.

In the end, it was a victory for the Democrats. Tom Suozzi, a former Democratic representative, defeated Republican Mazi Pilip by just under eight points (54 percent to 46 percent) at the time of writing.

The result is significant in one sense: It moves Democrats one seat closer to retaking the House of Representatives, no small feat as Republicans entered the night clinging to a slim majority.

But significant doesn't necessarily mean informative — at least not when it comes to the big questions about the general election.

Special elections are special; it's in the name! These are typical cases with low turnout, coming from an unusual group of committed voters. Over the past thirty years, there has essentially been no relationship whatsoever between presidential results and special election results, based on data collected by Daily Kos. And this particular election had many quirks.

Not your ordinary special election. As we recently wrote, it's hard to learn much from special elections. They are not remotely representative of the general electorate. Only the most involved party voters participate. And in recent years, more and more of those voters have been Democrats, creating a major Democratic advantage.

That's not entirely a fair description of this particular election. In a special election, Tuesday's turnout was robust — higher than any special election so far this cycle. On paper, it looked as much like a midterm election as a typical special election. The balance of partisan turnout was also fairly typical, at least based on party registration figures reported from Nassau County.

Why was this particular one so different? You can start by thanking the infamous Mr. Santos, whose high-profile story is almost guaranteed to receive excessive media attention. For the record, this was a Republican-held Biden seat in a closely divided House, ensuring national interest and coverage. (Not many special elections are the subject of The Daily, our flagship podcast.)

The campaign was also unusual. Millions were spent on campaign ads, with Democrats far outpacing Republicans. And unlike most special elections, Democrats nominated a fairly well-known candidate. Mr Suozzi, who retired before the 2022 elections, had a strong electoral track record, beating Mr Santos here by more than 12 points in 2020.

On balance, these idiosyncratic factors favored Democrats. Mr. Santos' background likely helped energize Democrats, as voters often do to punish the party became embroiled in a scandal during a special election. The quasi-incumbent Mr. Suozzi undoubtedly helped, as did the Democrats' strong fundraising advantage. There was even a major snowstorm on Tuesday that may have dampened Republican Election Day turnout (Democrats voted more by mail). Add to that Democrats' broader tendency to excel in low-turnout special elections these days, and it's pretty easy to see why Democrats managed to win this district that President Biden won four years ago.

The confusing point of comparison. Normally, analysts assess special election results as I just did: by comparing them to the last presidential result. In this district, Mr. Biden won by just over eight points in 2020 — that's about the same as the margin of victory here. So normally we would say this was a fairly simple result. At the very least, one could advance the idea that the results were somewhat disappointing for Democrats, given all the aforementioned advantages that Mr. Suozzi seemed to possess. Either way, a single special election result like this is completely consistent with polls showing Biden and the Democrats in a tight race heading into 2024.

But the usual presidential-based analysis hit a snag in this election: New York — and Long Island in particular — has been great for Republicans in recent years. This may have been a Biden district, but Santos won by 10 points in 2022 and the polls continue to show Republicans doing well here heading into 2024. That In the base case, Democratic performance was nothing short of fantastic.

I think it's entirely plausible to argue that these results are great for Democrats, given what's happening in New York. However, it is much less plausible to interpret the results as a rejection of democratic weakness in the Empire State. In August 2022, Democrats excelled in two special congressional elections in New York, including one with national stakes, only to be defeated in the midterm elections in the same districts and state just two months later. These idiosyncratic special elections do not easily allow for grand extrapolation.

The race's polls raise another possibility: that Mr. Biden is just that much weaker than Mr. Suozzi. Last week, a Siena College poll — not a New York Times/Siena poll, to be clear — showed Biden trailing Suozzi and Donald J. Trump in the district by as much as nine percentage points.

When you put it all together, this election is clearly going to be difficult to interpret. Not only are special elections generally unrepresentative, but the idiosyncrasies of these elections made them even more difficult to interpret. With New York standing out as an area of ​​unusual relative weakness for Democrats, even a clear Republican victory elsewhere might not have had much significance. And with Mr. Suozzi holding so many advantages in a Biden district, it is equally difficult to say that the outcome shows that Democrats are much better positioned than previously thought.

PS about the elections. A few of my editors asked about the poll, which showed Mr. Suozzi with a modest lead (our friends in Siena showed him four points ahead), but did not show him on track for a decisive victory.

A miss of three or four points isn't perfect, but that's pretty good for a House election — let alone a special election. Historically, the average poll in the House of Representatives is off by about six points. But I understand why people would hesitate at even a modest underestimation of Democrats at this point, since the presidential race would undoubtedly look very different if three or four points shifted in Biden's direction.

The most likely answer here is probably about turnout. When we saw that Siena was conducting a poll, I told my editor I wouldn't touch a special election with a 10-foot pole (I don't think that was a pun). Our analysis shows that special elections are determined almost entirely by turnout, and that the one-off, low-turnout electorate is not something that polls are particularly good at. Indeed, Siena's electorate included an equal number of registered Democrats and Republicans; the actual electorate appears to have been about D+7 (it was D+5 in Nassau County, the district's larger and less Democratic district).

Given the unusual challenge of estimating the likely electorate in a special election compared to a general election, I wouldn't read anything into that disparity for November. But there are many signs right now that Democrats are excelling among highly engaged voters — including special elections — and I think this has the potential to pose some challenges for pollsters in the fall. It could also mean, as we wrote last week, that the polls of all registered voters may be underestimating Mr. Biden compared to the likely electorate.