Republican Ron Estes won the Kansas special election Tuesday evening, but prominent news outlets interpreted the win as a positive sign for Democrats.
NPR asserted the race was a very strong Republican district, one that should have been won easily. The reason the race was close, NPR suggests, is because the race was a referendum of Trump, and not a referendum against Clinton, like the district voted in 2016. The outlet blared the headline: “A Special Election In Kansas Could Signal ‘Big League’ Problems For GOP, Trump.”
Politico noted that the Democratic party didn’t shell out any cash in the race, and compared that to the fact that President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan all held fundraisers and campaigned on behalf of Estes. Trump carried the district with a 27 percent lead over Clinton, Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer noted in Playbook, implying the win should have been much bigger, so it was a good sign for Democrats.
“The DCCC did not spend a dime in this race. Again: Trump won this district by 27 points,” Sherman and Palmer wrote.
CNN called the race a “surprisingly strong challenge” to Republicans, asserting that the GOP closely avoided a loss. “This should be a wake-up call to the Administration and the Republican Congress,” an unnamed GOP staffer told CNN. “The Democratic base is fully mobilized and unlikely to be defused. We will have to beat them. That will take motivating our base. So far we have not.” The outlet ran the ominous headline: “Republicans avert disaster in Kansas but 2018 trouble looms.”
Although the race was closer than former Rep. Mike Pompeo’s win in 2016, it was hardly close. Estes won with 52.5 percent of the vote, and Democratic candidate James Thompson earned 45.7 percent of the vote. That’s substantially lower than Pompeo’s 60.7 percent of the vote in 2016, but the lower number could be a result of multiple factors.
For starters, 275,251 people voted in the 2016 election, indicating that the presidential race brought a lot of people to the polls, and only 120,897 people voted in the special election. Estes also didn’t have anywhere close to the high name recognition enjoyed by the nationally-known Pompeo, who held the seat since 2011.
It should also be noted that Democrats sunk a record-breaking $8.3 million in Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff’s campaign in Georgia. That surge in cash to one race forced the Republican leadership to defend against all three of the special elections held this year to replace Trump appointments.
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