How bad was MS-01 for the GOP?

American University's Brian Schaffner has a nice graph illustrating the implications of the GOP's defeat in the special election in Mississippi's first district. He plots the vote for GOP House candidates in open seat elections in 2006 against President Bush's vote total in the district in the 2004 election and then superimposes the MS-1 result in red:

Candidates who performed as well as Bush would appear on the diagonal line from the bottom left to the upper right. Deviations below that line indicate underperformance; those above that line represent overperformance. As Schaffner notes, only three open seat candidates in 2006 performed as poorly as Greg Davis did last week (and that doesn't take into account the fact that the special election was in Mississippi). Given the way the fundamentals are looking, we may be looking at a historic pro-Democratic swing in November.

Comments

[Jinchi]

...and that doesn't take into account the fact that the special election was in Mississippi

Sure it does. It's wrapped up in George Bush's margin of victory.

[Brendan Nyhan]

Good point. Let me be more clear -- the implicit premise of my post was that the anti-Bush/GOP backlash might be less severe in MS than the rest of the country, meaning we could see results further toward the bottom right corner in November.

[BG]

Can you draw in the diagonal? I'm trying to eyeball it and having a tough time.

I currently live about 20 miles from the Mississippi 1st district, over the border in NW AL. What you have to understand about this area of the country is that the overall Democratic performance is actually pretty high. When you judge these areas in Statewide and State Legislative districts, they are pretty strong Democratic areas. Of course, Republicans have been able to nationalize Federal elections, and turn the districts, but that hasn't effected local office holders.

That's the main effect of weak Republican fundamentals in districts like MS-1: its challenging for a Republican to successfully nationalize the election without drawing baggage from the national Republican party upon himself. Thus, you get a Federal election which sticks more closely to the underlying Democratic performance at the local level. So when you have a strong Democratic candidate, you have a chance to win.

However, if you took a similar district in say, Ohio, which has been heavily Republican up and down the ballot for decades, I doubt you have the need to nationalize the election to overcome the natural democratic performance in the District. The Democratic performance at the local level is low, so there's no underlying threat of a flip.

In this sense, I suspect that the Hastert seat victory represents a much bigger threat to Republican chances in November than MS-1, as I suspect that his district was actually a much more heavily Republican district top to bottom.

I could go and find some numbers to back up this assertion, but that's your job.