Chedrick Greene is a firefighter from Saginaw, Michigan. On Tuesday, he won a state Senate seat in a district that Kamala Harris carried by less than one percentage point in 2024. He won it by 19.
Greene’s victory preserved the Democratic majority in the Michigan Senate, 20 seats to 18. It also added another data point to a pattern that has now repeated itself across more than a dozen states since Donald Trump returned to the White House.
Democrats are not just winning special elections. They are winning them by margins that were not supposed to be possible.
The Numbers
Since the start of 2025, Democrats have improved on their 2024 presidential baseline by an average of 13 points in special elections across the country. In the six special elections held for U.S. House seats, the average swing toward Democrats has been roughly 15 points.
The Greene race fits that pattern. Harris carried Michigan’s 35th Senate District by 0.8 points. Greene won by 19. That is an 18-point swing in a single election cycle, in a seat that nobody would have called a bellwether.
The Michigan result is not an outlier. Earlier this year, a Democrat won a Texas state Senate seat in a district Trump had carried by 17 points. The swing in that race was nearly 32 points toward Democrats. These are not flukes. They are a trend.
What Special Elections Tell Us
Special elections are imperfect predictors. Turnout is low and uneven, and the particular circumstances of any individual race can distort the result. Analysts are careful not to read too much into any single contest.
But patterns across many races, in many states, over an extended period of time, are harder to dismiss. The last time Democrats posted sustained swings of this size in special elections was in the months before the 2018 midterms. That year, Democrats gained 41 seats in the House and flipped the chamber. A Time magazine analysis published this week concluded that a blue wave in November as large as the one in 2006, when Democrats flipped 31 House seats, “no longer seems far-fetched.”
The Enthusiasm Gap
The special election results track with what polls are showing about voter motivation. A Washington Post and ABC News survey released this week found that 73 percent of Democrats say the upcoming midterm elections are more important than past midterms. Only 52 percent of Republicans said the same.
That gap matters because midterm elections, more than almost any other kind of election, are decided by who shows up. A party whose voters are more motivated, more energized, and more convinced the stakes are high tends to perform better when turnout is lower and the margins are tighter.
Democrats have that gap right now. The question is whether it holds through November.
What Republicans Are Doing About It
Republicans are not ignoring the numbers. The redistricting scramble that followed the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling last month is, in part, a response to what the special election data is showing. If Democratic voters are going to turn out in higher-than-expected numbers, the calculation goes, the solution is to make sure the maps limit how much that turnout can translate into seats.
In the last two weeks, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, and other states have moved to redraw congressional maps to add Republican seats before November. That effort is now running on a parallel track with the special election results, and the two stories are related.
Democrats are winning elections at a rate that suggests the midterm environment is favorable to them. Republicans are responding by trying to change the rules of the maps before the votes are counted.
What Comes Next
The Michigan win keeps Democrats in control of the state Senate by two seats. It gives the party some leverage in a state that will matter in November and again in 2028. And it extends a winning streak that has now stretched across more than a year of off-cycle contests.
Special elections are not the general election. The environment can shift. Republican turnout can consolidate. New issues can scramble the picture.
But the data from every special election held since Trump returned to office points in the same direction. Voters in these races are swinging toward Democrats by double digits, in red districts and purple ones, in states across the country.
In November, there will be 435 of those races at once.