Next week’s special election in Florida won’t tell us what will happen in the future.
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While much of the media is focusing on the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, a number of political observers are turning their eyes to next week’s special election for an open House seat in Florida. The election was called after longtime Republican Congressman Bill Young died in the fall and it is pitting Democrat Alex Sink against Republican David Jolly. And while this race might be a nice distraction from Vladimir Putin behaving like, well Vladimir Putin, its result is neither a harbinger of things to come in November, nor a window into the psyche of the American electorate.
This is not to say that it’s not important. Every special election for Congress is important because any one member of the House can potentially have an impact, especially over the course of their career. But where political observers get it wrong is when they try and draw out information about national political trends from very local affairs.
And special elections are very local affairs. They are often fought over local issues that don’t translate to the rest of the country. For example Jolly’s newest campaign slogan is to call himself, “a Bill Young Republican.” Which is confusing to some people even in the 13th district and means virtually nothing to anyone else in the rest of the country.
In addition, the people who turn out to vote in special elections usually don’t reflect the make of the electorate that shows up to the polls on a normal election day. Since special elections are less well known and happen at atypical times of the year it’s the folks that really follow politics that tend to show up and vote. And people who heavily follow politics are more likely to be partisans attached to a party, while the true swing voters that move between the parties in elections tend to be folks who largely ignore politics, and thus are less likely to vote in a special election. Making special election electorates dominated by the extremes with fewer folks in the middle. Combine this with the fact that few Congressional districts represent the American electorate as a whole and it’s pretty clear why trying to predict the future with special elections is a lot like reading tea leaves. Your prediction could turn about to be true, but that doesn’t mean your method actually has any predictive power.
So feel free to follow along at home, but ignore all those silly predictions that this election will foretell what will happen in November, or will predict the future of Obamacare. Next week’s outcome will matter, but it won’t prove anything about the future.
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