Back in May, we wrote about California’s 25th Congressional district special election where Republican Mike Garcia captured a Democratic seat in convincing fashion. Well, today we want to look more closely at what occurred last week in New York’s 27th congressional district. This district consists of various suburbs outside of Buffalo. The district has leaned Republican recently, but has been somewhat of a pivotal district for national elections. For example, Barack Obama won the district in both 2008 and 2012 whereas Trump won the district in 2016. Likewise, in congressional races, Republicans have held the seat for several years but their margin of victory has varied considerably.
In 2012 and 2018, the Republican candidate squeaked by. In 2018, the incumbent Republican Chris Collins won 49.1% of the vote to defeat his challenger Nate McMurray who had 48.8% of the vote or a margin of only 1100 votes. In 2012, the Republican Collins won by a margin of 48.9% to 47.4%. For comparison, in 2016 and in 2016, Collins won handily garnering 67% of the vote in both years. So the range of vote share for the Republican candidate has been from 48% to 67% in the past four congressional races in this district.
This brings us to the special election held last week to fill the vacancy. The Republican incumbent had resigned over ethics issues. One might have expected this to hurt the Republicans. Instead, Republican Chris Jacobs defeated Democrat Nate McMurray by a margin of 69% to 30%, the widest margin in recent history for a Republican in this district. Admittedly, the number of voters in a special election is much smaller than in a Presidential year. Still, one must ask what happened. For the third consecutive congressional special election, the Republican candidate has considerably outperformed polls and expectations. We believe that this reflects much higher enthusiasm among Republican voters, a good sign for the November elections for the GOP.
NewEnglandPolitics.com 