A Democrat has a good shot at winning in a special election Tuesday in an Ohio congressional district surrounding Columbus that hasn’t elected a Democrat since the 1980s. Danny O’Connor is running against Republican Troy Balderson to replace retiring Rep. Patrick Tiberi in Ohio’s wealthiest congressional district. So far, polling had the race in a dead heat, and Donald Trump was campaigning for Balderson the weekend before the special election, in a sign of GOP concerns about the race. Polls close at 7:30 pm ET. Live results, powered by Decision Desk, are below. Ohio 12th Congressional District, special election: Democrats try to break a 30-year losing streak This district, covering parts of suburban Columbus as well as more rural areas in Appalachia, always sends a Republican to Congress. Trump won the district by 9 points in 2016. Cook ranks it as R+7. But this district is a little better educated than Ohio as a whole, which might favor Democrats, and O’Connor has positioned himself to have a fighting chance. Recent polls have found him trailing by just a point or two, and the Democratic campaign feels good about the early voting numbers they’ve seen. Given the overall environment, and Democratic performances in prior special elections, election forecasters like Cook have rated the 12th special election as a toss-up.<doc-sep>When Ohio Republican Rep. Pat Tiberi announced in October 2017 that he would resign from the U.S. House of Representatives to become president of the Ohio Business Roundtable, Doug Jones and Conor Lamb were not yet household names, and Democrats had yet to flip a Republican-held seat in a special election. What a difference 10 months make. Ohio’s 12th Congressional District will finally elect Tiberi’s successor on Tuesday, and the race is following a very similar script to previous special elections. 1. The players Just like in Georgia’s 6th District and Pennsylvania’s 18th District, Democrats in Ohio’s 12th District picked as their nominee a fresh-faced 30-something: Franklin County Recorder Danny O’Connor. And just like in Georgia and Pennsylvania, Republicans chose a 50-something veteran of state politics: state Sen. Troy Balderson. Like his Democratic antecedents, O’Connor has outraised his opponent in campaign cash, deploying that advantage early on TV ads burnishing his centrist bona fides: He tied himself to Republican Gov. John Kasich and explicitly promised not to vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker. (Although he may have given back some of that yardage on July 24 when he said on MSNBC that he would support “whoever the Democratic Party puts forward” instead of allowing Republican control of the House.) Meanwhile, in keeping with special–election tradition, some Republicans have anonymously complained about their candidate, although others have publicly embraced him: Kasich (albeit after some initial reticence) endorsed Balderson and cut an ad for him, and President Trump flew in Saturday for a rally. As in past special elections, Republican super PACs have also come to their candidate’s aid; the top spender is the Congressional Leadership Fund at $3.2 million, and many of its ads have been negative. The good news for Republicans is that they have a sizable overall spending advantage — the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is the only progressive outside group that has spent more than $90,000 (investing $630,000). 2. The partisanship Ohio’s 12th District is traditionally Republican. According to FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric, it is 14 percentage points more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole. But most districts (along with the one state) that have hosted federal special elections since Trump’s inauguration leaned strongly toward Republicans, and most of those races were decided by single digits. In other words, Democratic enthusiasm, Trump’s unpopularity and the normal mean-reversion tendency of midterm election cycles have transformed normally safe Republican seats into nail-biters. How will Democrats perform in Ohio’s 12th District? U.S. House and Senate special elections this cycle, by the seat’s partisan lean and final vote margin Year Date Seat Partisan Lean Vote Margin Dem. Swing 2017 April 4 California 34th* D+69 D+87 +18 April 11 Kansas 4th R+29 R+6 +23 May 25 Montana at large R+21 R+6 +16 June 20 Georgia 6th R+9 R+4 +6 June 20 South Carolina 5th R+19 R+3 +16 Nov. 7 Utah 3rd R+35 R+32 +3 Dec. 12 Alabama Senate R+29 D+2 +31 2018 March 13 Pennsylvania 18th R+21 D+0.3 +22 April 24 Arizona 8th R+25 R+5 +20 June 30 Texas 27th* R+26 R+21 +5 Aug. 7 Ohio 12th R+14 ? ? Partisan lean is the average difference between how the constituency voted and how the country voted overall in the last two presidential elections, with 2016 weighted 75 percent and 2012 weighted 25 percent. * Results are from either an all-party primary or an all-party general election, both of which include multiple candidates of the same party; vote margin is the total vote share of all Democratic candidates combined minus the total vote share of all Republican candidates combined. Sources: Daily Kos Elections, secretaries of state Lo and behold, the special election in Ohio’s 12th has evolved into a toss-up race too, with perhaps a slight tilt toward Republicans. But this should come as no surprise: Since 2017, the margins of federal special elections have shifted leftward from their partisan leans by an average of 16 percentage points (calculated from the rightmost column in the table above). If Ohio holds an average special election on Tuesday, that would suggest a 2-point O’Connor win. 3. The polling An O’Connor win could very well happen, but it’s worth noting that the Democrat has led in only one poll of the race. An average of the four polls taken in the final two weeks of the campaign puts the race at Balderson 47 percent, O’Connor 45 percent. The latest polls in Ohio’s 12th District show a close race Start End Pollster Pop. O’Connor Balderson Margin 8/2 8/4 Emerson College LV 47% 46% D+1 7/26 7/31 Monmouth University* LV 45 47 R+2 7/27 7/29 Public Policy Polling^ V 44 48 R+4 7/23 7/25 GBA Strategies† LV 45 48 R+3 7/10 7/13 GBA Strategies† LV 43 48 R+5 6/13 6/16 JMC Analytics LV 35 46 R+11 6/9 6/12 GBA Strategies† LV 41 48 R+7 6/7 6/10 Monmouth University* LV 38 48 R+10 * Monmouth University polls are an average of three likely voter models: the “low turnout,” “standard midterm” and “Democratic surge” models. ^ Poll conducted for liberal group End Citizens United. † Internal poll conducted for the O’Connor campaign. V = voters; LV = likely voters Democrats might make a few points to argue that their candidate will outperform the polls. They might point out that O’Connor has closed the gap significantly over the past couple of months. The implication there is that O’Connor will continue to surge — perhaps right into the lead — in the race’s final “poll” on election day. But as we’ve shown in the past, this concept of “momentum” in general-election polling is a myth. Democrats also might trot out early voting statistics, which appear favorable to O’Connor: As of July 26, 54 percent of early votes had been cast by Democrats compared with 31 percent by Republicans. But in Ohio, a voter “registers” for a political party by simply voting in that party’s primary election — an unreliable indicator for one’s true partisan feelings. Plus, the early vote is accounted for in polls, so we shouldn’t give it any weight above and beyond that. In fact, the decision to vote early may be correlated with other vote-deciding factors like enthusiasm, so the election day vote could look substantially different. As a result, early voting data has often led would-be predictors astray. (Remember this if and when O’Connor jumps out to a big lead in the initial returns Tuesday night.) No, the best argument that Democrats have on their side is that polls of U.S. House races have high margins of error, and polls of special elections have margins of error that are higher still. If the polls say Balderson has a 3-point lead, then a realistic reading of their uncertainty would suggest that any outcome from O’Connor+10 to Balderson+16 is possible. This was elegantly demonstrated by Monmouth University in its last poll of the race. Monmouth modeled three possible electorates for the special election and arrived at a different outcome for each: one in which Balderson led by 5, one in which Balderson led by 1 and one in which O’Connor led by 1. 4. The political geography If, as the polls suggest, O’Connor does fall short of Democrats’ 16-point average overperformance in special elections, demographics could be one reason why. Despite a (fading) narrative that affluent suburbia would sweep Democrats to victory in 2018, Democrats have actually overperformed the least in those types of districts in 2017-2018 special elections. By contrast, areas that swung hard for Trump in 2016 (compared with how they voted for Mitt Romney) have seen the biggest swings back to the Democratic Party. The Ohio 12th is indeed characterized by affluent suburbia. Stretching north and east of the state capital of Columbus, the 12th District encompasses Ohio’s wealthiest county (Delaware) and well-to-do suburbs like Dublin and New Albany. It is the classic home of the country-club Republican: It has been represented in Congress by only two men since 1983: the business-friendly Tiberi and Kasich, the face of never-Trump Republicanism.<doc-sep>Tuesday’s special election in a central Ohio congressional district will provide tangible evidence of where the battle for the House stands three months out from the midterms. Both parties have deployed their 2018 playbooks for the final special election before November, and its importance far exceeds the typical House race: If Democrat Danny O’Connor prevails, it will be a sign that Democrats are poised to take back the House next year, despite an avalanche of Republican outside money. But if Troy Balderson, the GOP nominee, wins, it will give Republicans hope that the House isn’t lost, and that President Donald Trump can still help the party get out the vote this fall. The Ohio special election isn’t the only key race on the ballot on Tuesday. There are also primaries in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Washington state — with hypercompetitive gubernatorial contests in Kansas and Michigan, and nominees set to be picked for a number of House races on the November battlefield. Polls close at 7:30 p.m. Eastern time in the Ohio special election. In the primaries, polls close statewide at 8 p.m. in Missouri, 9 p.m. in Michigan and Kansas, and 11 p.m. in Washington. Morning Score newsletter Your guide to the permanent campaign — weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or updates from POLITICO and you agree to our privacy policy and terms of service. You can unsubscribe at any time and you can contact us here. This sign-up form is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Here are five things to watch as the results roll in: What will Ohio tell us about the GOP playbook of Trump and Pelosi? The special election in Ohio will test the potency of boiling down a House race to two candidates not on the ballot: Trump and Nancy Pelosi, a pair of polarizing figures that each party hopes will drive turnout. Trump campaigned alongside Balderson last weekend, aiming to juice support for the state senator in a race that’s tightened into single digits, according to public and private polling. But the president’s rally — along with a negative tweet about Ohio’s favorite son and NBA star, LeBron James — also risks alienating well-educated Columbus suburbanites who prefer Gov. John Kasich to the president and could swing the special election. But Republicans believe that “Trump stoked the base. He energized them this weekend, so that will help balance out the intensity on the Democratic side,” said Mark Weaver, a Republican strategist based in Ohio. “The race is closer than it ought to be, but this is still a Republican district. And the fundamentals are on Troy’s side.” Republicans also tried to tie O’Connor to Pelosi in TV ads, a strategy the GOP has used in special elections throughout the past year and is prepared to replicate in the fall. O’Connor tried to cut into the anti-Trump-Republican voting bloc by signaling his independence from his national party, pledging not to support Pelosi in his first and last TV ads. But in the middle, O’Connor flubbed his answer on Pelosi in an MSNBC interview, which Republicans have deployed against him in their own ads. If Democrat Danny O’Connor prevails, it will be a sign that Democrats are poised to take back the House next year. | Scott Olson/Getty Images The results out of Tuesday’s special election will give each party hard data on how a red-leaning seat performs, just three months out from the November midterms. But Tuesday isn’t only about a data point: O’Connor and Balderson will face off again in the general election, and the winner of the special will certainly have a leg up in the race for a full term. How does Trump’s last-minute endorsement in Kansas alter the governor’s race? Kris Kobach was an early Trump ally, advising the then-candidate on immigration policy and protecting against voter fraud. “One of the things that struck me when I first met him and spoke to him for the first time is just how intellectually hungry he was,” Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, told POLITICO just before the 2016 election of his first meeting with Trump. So when Trump endorsed Kobach’s gubernatorial campaign in a tweet just 20 hours before the polls open, some might have wondered, “What took so long?” But Trump had good reason to stay on the sidelines. Kobach is challenging incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer, the former lieutenant governor who was elevated to the top job because Trump tapped then-Gov. Sam Brownback for a State Department post. Moreover, the president had been urged to stay on the sidelines by the Republican Governors Association and some White House advisers, who fear that Kobach could be defeated in a general election. (And even if Kobach wins, some Republicans believe he would drag down the party’s other candidates, including in the competitive 2nd and 3rd congressional districts targeted by Democrats.) Kansas might be a solidly red state in national politics — Trump won it by 27 points in 2016 — but Brownback was wildly unpopular by the time he left office. After nearly a decade of losses to Brownback and his allies, GOP moderates have been reasserting their power in recent years. (The 95-year-old Bob Dole endorsed Colyer in a tweet of his own Monday afternoon.) But Colyer isn’t alone on the ballot as a Kobach alternative, and Jim Barnett — the 2006 GOP nominee for governor — has emphasized Colyer’s ties to Brownback to stake his claim to the moderate lane. If Kobach wins a narrow victory on Tuesday, Trump will likely be able to take credit for his victory — and any resulting GOP heartburn over Kobach’s prospects against the expected Democratic candidate, state Sen. Laura Kelly. Will Trump’s Michigan endorsements pay off? Kobach isn’t the only Trump-endorsed candidate on a primary ballot on Tuesday. The president is also backing two men running statewide in Michigan, one of the three states Trump flipped to propel him to an upset victory in the 2016 presidential race. For governor, Trump picked state Attorney General Bill Schuette over Lt. Gov. Brian Calley. Polls show Schuette with a double-digit lead in the contest, and few observers are expecting an upset from Calley, who is backed by outgoing moderate Gov. Rick Snyder. Trump has also endorsed in the Senate race, backing businessman John James, an African-American Army veteran, over self-funder Sandy Pensler. In a reaffirmation of his initial endorsement last month, Trump, in a tweet Monday called James a “potential Republican Star.” Polling is limited, but James appears to have moved past Pensler, whose campaign turned ugly in the final days. A racially charged Pensler ad that began airing last week said James “thinks he’s a celebrity, a rock star. But peel back the onion, and you find Jesse Jackson.” Can Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez play kingmaker in Democratic primaries? It’s been six weeks since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shocked the political world by ousting Rep. Joe Crowley of New York in a Democratic primary, and liberals are angling for their next victory. There are a number of targets on Tuesday — most prominently Abdul El-Sayed, a 33-year-old physician running for governor in Michigan against an establishment-backed candidate, former state Sen. Gretchen Whitmer. Ocasio-Cortez campaigned with El-Sayed in late July, while Sanders visited this past weekend. The final polls gave Whitmer a double-digit lead over El-Sayed and a self-funding candidate, Shri Thanedar — but those surveys are two weeks old. Back in July, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez actually hit the road together to campaign for two congressional candidates in Kansas, including Brent Welder, a former Sanders campaign staffer seeking to take on Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) in the fall. Of the three major Democratic candidates running in the suburban Kansas City district, Welder is viewed as the most liberal — and Republicans are confident they can paint him as out-of-step with a traditionally Republican area that has recoiled at Trump’s GOP. Ocasio-Cortez is also backing a liberal Democrat seeking to unseat an incumbent in a primary Tuesday: Cori Bush, who is running against Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) in a St. Louis-based district.<doc-sep>
Most analysts agree that this is likely to be a bad year for the congressional GOP. There is disagreement as to just how bad it will be. This late in the season, we can look for crystallizing moments that summarize the challenges facing the incumbent party. One such crystallizing moment can probably be found in Tuesday’s special election for Ohio’s 12th Congressional District. On its face, the 12th is a poor choice for a bellwether district; the heavily Republican 12th and its predecessors have sent Republicans to Congress in every election dating back to 1980 (and 1936 before that). But the weakness of the modern Republican Party among college-educated whites will hit hard here, and we could see an upset that presages a wipeout in November. On its face, the 12th is a varied district. One arm extends to the east to take in Zanesville, on the outskirts of the Allegheny plateau. A second arm extends northward to encompass Mansfield, an old manufacturing center that is home to the famous prison used as a set-piece for “The Shawshank Redemption.” These areas of the district were strong for President Trump: He won about 70 percent of the vote here. But although these “arms” take in a large portion of the land area of the district, they cast only about a third of the vote. The 12th is largely a suburban district and is one of the best educated in the state. The remainder of the district’s population is split roughly evenly between Licking, Delaware, and Franklin counties, with a plurality actually living in Franklin. Licking County is anchored by the old industrial center of Newark and contains a heavily Democratic pocket in Granville (Denison University). The growth, however, is occurring on the western edge of the district, where places like New Albany are enjoying substantial exurban development. The county actually swung more toward Republicans in the 2016 elections: While Mitt Romney won 56 percent of the vote, Donald Trump improved to 61 percent. The extent to which these blue-collar voters turn out and pull the lever for Republicans this cycle may hold the key to Republicans’ keeping control of the House. Delaware County, to the north of Columbus, is a different story. While there are rural areas, and an old industrial town (Delaware, which is also home to a small college), the bulk of the vote will be cast in the wealthy suburban/exurban portion of the district. These voters are traditionally Republican, and Delaware County hasn’t voted for a Democrat since Woodrow Wilson beat Charles Evans Hughes here in a landslide in 1916 (it was also one of five Ohio counties to back Barry Goldwater in 1964). But lately the trend is away from Republicans. George W. Bush carried the county by 36 percentage points in 2000 and 33 in 2004. McCain won by 20; Romney improved slightly to a 22-point win here, though that was less than his nationwide improvement. Donald Trump, however, won here by just 17 points. Finally, there is the Franklin County portion of the district. The area includes Dublin, which is an upscale, wealthy suburb of Columbus, as well as Westerville, which is more solidly middle class. The district also juts into the heart of Franklin County, dipping down into the inner suburbs of Upper Arlington and Clintonville, and taking in a student section east of High Street (if you live in a fraternity or sorority house, you go to school in the 3rd District but vote in the 12th). All of this adds up to a district that is clearly Republican – Trump and Romney both carried it by about 10 points – but where Republicans have potential vulnerability in a wave election. That appears to be what is happening. Pat Tiberi, who was elected to replace John Kasich in 2000, opted to resign from Congress this year, setting up Tuesday’s special election. Unlike some other special elections, where unexpectedly close outcomes could be attributed to local issues (KS-4) or weak candidates (PA-18), both parties nominated relatively typical candidates. Republicans opted for state Sen. Troy Balderson, while Democrats went with Franklin County Recorder Danny O’Connor. The polling initially showed Balderson (pictured) with a substantial lead, with two June surveys showing him ahead by an average of 10 points. But Balderson was below 50 percent, and the undecideds seem to have broken hard for O’Connor (Balderson has been virtually absent from the airwaves, suggesting fundraising difficulties).