Politico Proclaims ‘Dems Flip 2022 On Its Head’ After Surprise Victory
L: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, R: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Politico Playbook proclaimed that Democrats have “flipped 2022 on its head” after a surprise victory in a bellwether special election.
The political media world is buzzing over the results of a special election for the seat in New York’s 19th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives, which was left vacant following the resignation of Democratic Congressman Antonio Delgado to serve as lieutenant governor.
The last poll taken in that race showed Republican Marc Molinaro leading Democratic candidate Pat Ryan by a whopping 8 points, and Ryan hadn’t led in any poll taken for the contest.
But when the votes were cast Tuesday night, Ryan prevailed comfortably, defeating Molinaro by about four points.
Media outlets cast the win as an encouraging sign for Democrats, who have been gaining momentum in recent months amid predictions of a wipeout in November. But Politico Playbook really went for it, declaring “Dems flip 2022 on its head” in an entry authored by Eugene Daniels and Ryan Lizza.
Their case:
The race would offer a trial run of the parties’ general election messages. Democrat PAT RYAN’s “ads hammered on the need to elect a representative who would fight for abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June decision undoing Roe v. Wade,” writes Bill Mahoney, while Republican MARC MOLINARO’s campaign “centered on crime and inflation.”
Last night, Ryan defeated Molinaro.
Not only that, he overperformed Biden in 2020. Indeed, as Ryan Matsumoto noted last night: “Democrats have now outperformed Biden’s numbers in each of the four U.S. House special elections since the Dobbs decision in June.”
A win there by Democrats is the clearest evidence yet that the 2022 election is unlikely to turn out quite the way that conventional wisdom imagined less than a year ago, after Republican GLENN YOUNGKIN rode a red wave into the Virginia governor’s mansion.
They tap the brakes a little, noting “That doesn’t necessarily mean that Dems will hold the House and Senate. Nor does it mean that Republicans will be in the minority come 2023,” but write that it’s definitely a good sign the Democrats might not face the shellacking once thought.
Recent polling would support that conclusion, and many are crediting the issue of abortion and the cooling of gas prices as big factors. But a narrow bellwether win does not a wave make. Time will tell just how indicative this victory is of a broader pattern.
