What Went Down In The Ohio 12 Special Election

We’re calling it a night, folks. There are actually still a few interesting races left unresolved. In particular: The GOP primary for governor in Kansas, where Gov. Jeff Colyer and Kris Kobach are running neck-and-neck; and the special election in Ohio 12, where Republican Troy Balderson has what seems like a safe lead, but it’s small enough that we don’t expect the race to be called tonight.

Ohio 12 was the headline race going into the night and it basically went according to script. Balderson had a small lead according to an average of polls, and it looks like he’ll squeak it out. More broadly, Ohio 12 looks to have shifted by about 13 points towards Democrats relative to its partisan lean (how we would expect it to vote in a neutral political environment):

That’s just about in line with Democrats’ average overperformance in these elections in the Trump era. Special elections have been a good sign for Democratic midterm hopes for awhile now, and Ohio 12 was no exception (even if Balderson hangs on).

In any case, here’s our plan: We’ll have some additional analysis/thoughts on the night’s results (hopefully fully resolved by then) in a separate article going up early tomorrow morning. Please check back then.

In the meantime, thank you as always for watching the returns with us.

The top prosecutor in St. Louis looks likely to be defeated. Bob McCulloch, criticized by activists for not pushing hard enough for an indictment of the officer who shot Michael Brown, is down by 10 percentage points to a challenger named Wesley Bell. Activists involved in Black Lives Matter had been campaigning to defeat McCulloch. About 90 percent of the vote is in, so Bell is very likely to win.

We have over 100,000 votes now in both the 3rd and 5th districts of Washington, and boy howdy, are they not what Republicans wanted to see.

In the 3rd District, which was supposed to be Likely if not Solid Republican, Democrats combined vote totals are outpacing Republicans’, 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent. It looks like that contest will be between GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler and Democrat Carolyn Long in November.

And in the 5th District, a Republican-leaning seat, Republicans only lead Democrats by an aggregate of 50.5 to 47.1 percent. That race will be between GOP Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (the highest-ranking Republican woman in the House) and Democrat Lisa Brown.

Not all the results are in yet, obviously, but enough are that we can guess tonight isn’t going to change the trajectory of science candidate success — or lack thereof. Of the 17 people counted by us and 314 Action, six will definitely advance (four of those were uncontested races). That number could be bigger tomorrow. But not by much. Overall, this was in keeping with the other primaries where STEM backgrounds and evidence-based policy platforms didn’t really seem to help win races.

In Washington’s 8th District, we already have 72,000 votes, and they are 72,000 pretty great votes for Democrats. They currently have 52.7 percent of the total vote to Republicans’ 44.4 percent. Those are the numbers of a Lean or Likely Democratic race, not a toss-up.

We’re still waiting on Johnson County to report its damned results in Kansas. There are really two competing theories of the case: it’s Kobach’s home district on the one hand, but its affluent and educated on the other hand, which would seem to favor Colyer. Whoever wins there will likely win the state. Unfortunately, only one precinct has reported (which went 48-33 for Colyer).

The political-analyst-in-chief has weighed in on Ohio:

As regular FiveThirtyEight readers know, the president has his facts wrong. First of all, we don’t know how much Balderson was down in early balloting at that point; the state only releases the party breakdown of early voters, not the actual results. Second, early voting is often a very poor way to predict the outcomes of elections for that very reason — voters don’t always vote with the party they’re registered with. Third, the election day vote is often very different from the early vote, as we saw tonight. In this case, enthusiasm was on Democrats’ side, so they rushed to cast a ballot at their first opportunity. Republicans were content to just wait until today to vote.

Washington, like California, uses the top-two primary system, so both Democrats and Republicans run on the same ballot. That essentially makes tonight like a massive poll of the general election — a chance to check in and see how many people vote for Democratic candidates (in total) vs. Republican ones (in total).

Keep an eye on the 3rd and 5th Districts. We think they lean toward Republicans right now, but maybe tonight’s results will show unexpected Democratic strength. And the 8th District is expected to be a toss-up; this will be a good sanity check to see if it really is 50-50.

So, O’Connor needs to win the absentee/provisional ballots by 21 percentage points to win the state if all of those ballots are counted, which they presumably won’t be. So let’s round up a bit and say he’d have to win them by 25 points. Provisionals tend to be very Democratic leaning, and so it wouldn’t be crazy to think he could get there if all of the uncounted votes were provisionals. However, the majority of them are actually absentees, and those won’t necessarily be Democratic. So it’s something of a long shot, but there are enough votes there that I wouldn’t want to “call” the race, unless I knew more about the nature of who tends to vote absentee in the district.

One more note about turnout in OH-12: It wasn’t uniform across counties. Franklin County accounted for 35 percent of the vote when it was only 32 percent in 2016. On the other hand, turnout was depressed in the rural, more Republican counties.

Polls are closed now in Washington state. #WestCoastBestCoast

With 100% reporting, and bearing in mind that there are still an unknown (but smallish) number of provisional ballots to count, 202,521 ballots were cast in OH-12 today. In 2014, 221,081 people voted in the House race. So this was midterm-lite turnout.

Jaimie Schoolcraft, a paramedic, won his primary in Missouri’s 7th district. Chemist Katy Geppert advanced uncontested in the 3rd district. So Missouri is 2/2 on their science candidates.

The race in Ohio may not be the closest one tonight. Kobach leads by .1 percentage points over Colyer with almost 60 percent of the vote counted.

100 percent of precincts reporting:

We don’t know how many provisional ballots there are (we’re trying to figure that out now) so it’s premature to make a call. Obviously, as a matter of probabilities, O’Connor is a heavy favorite.

I don’t call races, Micah, but I agree that Balderson can start measuring the drapes.

The more aggressive race-callers are calling OH-12 for Balderson. Anyone want to jump on board? Or urge caution?

Haley Stevens is widening her lead in Michigan’s 11th. She’s now 6 points ahead with 44 percent of precincts reporting. That’s interesting. The one independent poll I saw on this race had State Rep. Tim Greimel solidly in the lead. Likewise, several Republicans I spoke with in the 11th District expected Greimel to win the Democratic nomination. And that matters, I think.

In our story about science candidates, we talked a lot about how Republicans and Independents have been favoring candidates who haven’t held public office before. And how the last two people to hold the 11th district seat fit that bill when they were first elected. It’s probably safe to say that a race between Republican front-runner Lena Epstein (a first time candidate) and Stevens (a first-time candidate) would look pretty different than a race between Epstein and Greimel.

The AP has called Proposition A in Missouri; it is defeated 63 percent to 37 percent. After a losing streak for organized labor that included the failed recall of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, this might be the biggest victory for organized labor since overturning Ohio’s anti-union SB 5 at the ballot box in 2011.

The not-terrible news for Trump is that he flew to Ohio to campaign for Balderson and Balderson won. The bad news is Trump’s unpopularity and Democratic enthusiasm against him are making these kinds of races close in the first place. And the Manafort trail. And Don Jr. and Mueller, etc, etc.

A not-crazy scenario is that provisional ballots will lower Balderson’s margin below 0.5 percentage points, which (if I’m reading the law right) will trigger an automatic recount in Ohio — then Balderson wins the recount because recounts rarely reverse results unless it’s really, really close.

There’s an unusual situation in Michigan’s 1st Congressional District, which covers the state’s Upper Peninsula and the Northerly reaches of its Lower Peninsula. The district has become quite Trumpy, but it’s vestigially Democratic — Bart Stupak represented the district until 2010 — and the sort of long-short race that Democrats wouldn’t mind taking their chances in.

However, their candidate, Matt Morgan, will need to do so by write-in vote tonight since he was disqualified from tonight’s ballot on a technicality. It doesn’t sound like too big a challenge — he’ll basically need only 1 in 20 Democrats in the district who voted in Michigan’s gubernatorial primary to write his name in — but Michigan isn’t reporting those write-in results so far tonight so it will likely be a few days to know whether he’s qualified.

Time for another ABC News Live update on the races!

To echo Nate, as a native Kansan, I have to wonder if Kobach’s inability to pull off an easy win tonight might be some mainstream Republican fallout from the voter ID trial this spring. He did not, shall we say, come off like a very competent public servant in that case. Then there’s the recent news that he’s been pocketing cash (while simultaneously serving as Kansas AG) off voter ID consulting in other parts of the country. And, you know, there’s the white nationalists on his payroll. My own Subjective Analysis™ suggests his bravado plays really well with some conservative Kansans — and that the sloppiness and whiff of “well, that’s different” hovering around him would play really badly with another kind of Kansas conservative.

Now all but 7 precincts reported in OH-12, and Balderson leads by 0.8 percentage points or about 1,500 votes. O’Connor will need help from provisional ballots, or he’ll need there to have been voting irregularities. Ohio tends to have a lot of provisional balloting, but it’s a longshot.

John James is black and a West point graduate. Good profile of him by New York Times’ Jeremy Peters’ here. It looks like the Trump endorsement changed that race. He will be a big underdog against Stabenow. Only three black members of Senate (Booker, Harris, and Tim Scott, the only Republican.)

I have family in Kansas, so I’m allowed to use Subjective Analysis™. Kansans are quite conservative, but also quite modest, so I wonder if Kobach doesn’t seem like a bit too much of a showboat for them. And it actually wasn’t even all that great a state for Trump, who fell off relative to Romney’s vote share there. Plus, there’s a lot of disillusionment with Brownback and the ultra-conservative wing of the GOP.

Re Perry’s note that Trump’s endorsement maybe isn’t helping Kobach that much in the GOP primary for governor in Kansas: I can think of a couple explanations for that.

First, in other races, Republican primary voters might not have known the candidates too well. In that case, Trump’s endorsement just gave them the information they needed to vote: “Oh, I don’t know much about this guy, except I know Trump endorsed him, so let’s go with him.” In Kansas, everyone knows Kris Kobach, and they’ve already made up their minds about him.

But second, maybe it DID make a difference. Maybe Kobach was trailing by a decent amount before that endorsement came through, and it threw him a life preserver.

Kobach-Colyer basically tied with 40 percent of the vote in (Colyer up by .6 percent). I am surprised Kobach isn’t doing better — Trump’s endorsement was so powerful in the Florida and Georgia gubernatorial races.

I still don’t believe you.

I don’t know what it will say, Micah. Honest to god.

And we haven’t even finished collecting 2018 polls yet, so even if the program were ready to run, it wouldn’t resemble what we’ll actually publish at launch.

OK, Nate, now that it’s late — give us a preview of the House forecast. You know what it says … don’t lie.

It may not matter for November (Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow is heavily favored), but John James (whom Trump endorsed) leads Sandy Pensler for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Michigan, 57 percent to 43 percent.

Fun fact: Trump flipped Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2016. Democrats could win all six governors races in these states this year. The Cook Political Report says four of these races are toss-ups, the GOP is favored in Wisconsin and Democrats are favored in Pennsylvania.

We’ve tried not to focus on the national implications of OH-12 so much tonight. For the reason why, listen to Monday’s podcast — basically, we think there are a lot more precise indicators of both the national environment and individual districts now, such that we don’t gain as much from the useful-but-noisy metric that is special elections. To be clear, though, a photo-finish for Republicans is not good news for them tonight. If similar districts around the country are photo-finishes on Nov. 7, Republicans will almost certainly lose the House.

Right, Maggie! In my primary preview, I compared him to an 1892-style upper-case-P Populist, whose presidential candidate James B. Weaver won five states on a progressive, pro-farmer platform. (He basically paved the way for William Jennings Bryan to be the dominant figure in Democratic politics for the next 20 years.)

You know who we can probably safely say won’t be Governor of Kansas? Joshua Svaty. He’s running in third place for the Democratic nomination — more than 30 points behind the front runner. He was an interesting experiment in cross-platform politics, right Nathaniel? An anti-abortion, pro-Medicaid expansion Democrat?

When discussing Kansas earlier, I forgot that Kobach is a former city councilman in Overland Park, in Johnson County. So while Johnson County is not very Trump-y, he has some local ties there. Still no votes reported from Johnson County, yet.

Whitmer has officially won in Michigan. She was the favorite, so this is not a huge surprise. But this would have been a big win for Sanders wing if El-Sayed had won.