Democrats lost in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old district. They still had one of their best election nights in recent memory
At this point, it’s not really news that Democrats are doing very well in special elections and other races held since the 2024 presidential contest. Their recent track record is abundantly clear.
But even by their recent standards, Tuesday was a very good night – one of their best of the Trump era, in fact.
In one swing state, Georgia, they notched their best Trump-era overperformance in a special congressional election, across more than three dozen races.
And in Wisconsin, arguably the nation’s top swing state, the Democratic-aligned state Supreme Court candidate sailed to victory by a huge margin.
Perhaps Tuesday’s most-watched contest was the special election for former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 14th District in Georgia. Greene, after all, has refashioned herself as a Trump critic of late, and there was some question whether the Iran war might hurt Republicans.
While it’s difficult to isolate the causes, the results certainly weren’t encouraging for the GOP.
Republican Clay Fuller won the race, as expected, in a district that President Donald Trump won by 37 points in 2024. But with nearly all the vote in, Fuller was winning by less than 12 points.
That’s a 25-point overperformance for the Democratic candidate, Shawn Harris.
That would make it Democrats’ biggest special election overperformance since Trump first took office in 2017, according to data compiled by CNN. Their previous best was a 23-point overperformance in Florida’s 1st District last year.
And the Georgia race cements a very favorable picture for Democrats in these recent special congressional elections. They have routinely overperformed in them throughout Trump’s presidencies, but now half of their top 10 overperformances have come since the 2024 election.
Democrats also notably improved from the first round of voting on March 10, in the early days of the Iran war.
Back then, Democratic candidates combined for nearly 40% of the vote; on Tuesday, Harris got about 44%. That was even as national Republicans made the remarkable decision to actually spend money on the race.
The election in Wisconsin wasn’t as high-profile, which was a big contrast to the race for another spot on the same court a year ago.
You might remember that 2025 race featuring a large dose of Elon Musk – and marking the beginning of the end for his time as a face of the Trump administration as well as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) – when the GOP-aligned candidate lost by 10 points. That allowed liberals to keep a 4-3 majority on the court.
This year’s contest was sleepier in large part because control of the Supreme Court wasn’t at stake.
But the results were still pretty remarkable.
Democratic-aligned candidate Chris Taylor not only defeated Republican-aligned candidate Maria Lazar and moved the Supreme Court from a 4-3 liberal advantage to a 5-2 edge, she won by about 20 points. (Wisconsin Supreme Court races are technically nonpartisan, but the candidates effectively run under the Republican and Democratic banners.)
That would be the largest margin in a competitive Wisconsin Supreme Court race since 2000, an especially lopsided result in a state that has been decided by less than a percentage point in each of the last three presidential elections.
Taylor managed to flip some historically Republican counties. One of them was exurban Jefferson County, which Trump won by 16 points just two years ago. She was also poised to flip Ozaukee County, which Trump won by 10 points, in the Milwaukee suburbs.
Winning any statewide contest in a swing state by such a margin is a pretty big statement.
