Since Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential victory, Democratic candidates have won special elections by an average of 14.4 percentage points over the 2024 presidential vote margin.
Leading into the 2025 November general election, some dismissed the Democratic performance as merely an indicator of shifting party coalitions. When high and low education voters started moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party starting in 2010 and accelerating in the Trump era, Democrats benefited since these high education voters tend to have much higher turnout rates in low turnout elections than the lower education voters who moved over to the Republican Party.
It is difficult to calculate turnout rates for district elections. One can use voter registration as a denominator, but state and local policies regarding voter registration vary, making this a poor measure to compare across states, districts, and even time.
Following up on my post on 2025 statewide turnout rates, I mentioned that a rule of thumb might be to halve the average special election margin as a indicator of what we could expect as a national swing in advance of the 2026 midterm elections.
That might not be such a bad rule. Below I provide the 2025 statewide voting-eligible population (VEP) turnout rates for California, Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, listed in ascending order of their turnout rate, and the shift margin in the Democratic direction for these states. The VEP is all adults minus non-citizens and ineligible felons, depending on state law.
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