Democrats keep winning special elections in battleground states

Elections are the answer to Trumpism, which aims to undermine the Constitution that protects our freedoms.

Yesterday, we saw the antidote at work once again, and in battleground states, in special elections for state House seats in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. Both victories were consistent with a 2023 national trend, with abortion-rights Democrats overperforming in the wake of the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationally.

In New Hampshire, Democrat Hal Rafter flipped a GOP seat in the southern part of the state. Rafter won 56 percent to 44 percent in a district that Trump won by less than a point in 2020, 49.1 to 48.7 percent. Though it’s a small district, that’s a 12 percent turnaround.

Rafter favors abortion rights, and his Republican opponent is against them. Two months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, a Planned Parenthood poll showed that 6 in 10 New Hampshire voters opposed the decision.

Voters know and react at the ballot box when their freedoms, including reproductive freedom, are curtailed. Signs abound that voters’ reaction to the loss of those rights could carry into 2024.

In Pennsylvania, the victory of candidate Lindsay Powell was also consistent with a larger 2023 trend of Democratic overperformance.

Powell has been, in the words of EMILY’s List, “an outspoken advocate for reproductive freedom.” She is an African American woman who previously worked for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).

Her opponent, Erin Autenreith, was a local Republican Party chair who attended Trump’s Jan. 6 rally, though not the Capitol attack, according to PoliticsPA.

Powell’s election matters because it maintains the 121-120 Democratic majority in the Pennsylvania House. That majority was hard won last year after more than a decade of Republican control of both houses of the state’s Legislature. It also blocks a return of Republican dominance of both sides of the Legislature. There is a 28-22 Republican majority in the state Senate.

Under Republican rule in 2021, the Legislature proposed an anti-abortion state constitutional amendment. It needed to pass a second time in 2023-24 for the amendment to reach the ballot. Democratic House control continues to stop it.

Powell drew 65 percent of the vote. Even though conservative voters tend to vote more reliably in off-season elections like this one, she slightly bettered her liberal Democratic predecessor’s 64 percent performance in November 2022, four months after Dobbs. And Powell’s 65 percent total outpaced President Biden’s 60 percent tally over Trump in Allegheny County in the 2020 presidential election. (The district and Allegheny County cover some of the same territory, but not all.)

Brent Peabody of the Center for a New American Security has tracked Democrats’ overperformance in more than 20 state elections in 2023. The party’s candidates have outpaced Biden’s 2020 performance by substantial margins.

Noting the same trend, ABC News reported that Democrats had “outperformed the partisan lean” by an average of 10 percent in an analysis of 23 special elections in 2023. That doesn’t mean they always won, as 10 percent would not be enough in deep red districts. But it is a good sign for Democratic presidential hopes in 2024 battleground states.

None of this is cause for complacency for those who understand Trump’s threat to freedom. Those who care about it were undoubtedly part of Rafter’s and Powell’s victories, whether directly or by donating or sending postcards to voters in support. It takes citizens’ work to win elections.

Notably, Trump has pivoted on abortion because he understands its centrality to winning the general election. On Sunday, during a “Meet the Press” interview, he declined to say whether he would support a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks.

He knows that national victory will depend on support from independents and suburban voters who have been casting their ballots against staunch anti-abortion candidates. So Trump seems suddenly willing, up to a point at least, to accept blowback from some in his anti-abortion base.

Biden is not about to let voters forget who appointed the three justices who made the 6-3 majority voting to overturn Roe. On Tuesday, reporting appeared of his campaign’s digital ad buys in Iowa and South Dakota, where Trump is holding campaign rallies. The ads highlight Trump’s Supreme Court appointments.

Powell’s election yesterday not only saved the Democratic majority in the Pennsylvania Legislature — it also reinforced Biden’s understanding, and ours, of abortion-rights power, and voters’ power, going into 2024.

Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and civil litigator, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.