Split Ticket

The last positive electoral news for Democrats before President Biden’s lackluster debate performance came from a special election in Ohio’s 6th district on June 11th, where Democrat Michael Kripchak exceeded expectations in a contest to replace Republican Rep. Bill Johnson. The seat, which backed former President Trump by nearly 30 points, voted for the Republican candidate, Michael Rulli, by just single digits — a difference of over 20 points. 

With this marking the latest instance in a series of Democratic special election overperformances, many analysts have debated whether and to what extent Democratic overperformances result from partisan differential turnout. To answer this question for Ohio’s 6th, we did a deep dive into the state’s voter file to analyze the partisan make-up of the electorate.

Ohio’s 6th district is very red. Like much of Appalachia, it has a Democratic pedigree that has faded as of late. Barack Obama won this seat twice, but Donald Trump carried it twice himself, winning it by 29 points in 2020. On the Senate front, Democrat Sherrod Brown lost the district by 1 point in 2018, while Republican J.D. Vance won it by 22 points in 2022. Given its recent history, it is unsurprising that Republicans enjoyed a heavy turnout advantage in the March 2024 primary.

But the special election’s electorate was very different, with a significantly smaller Republican turnout advantage. Republicans enjoyed a R +44 margin in the March primary, but the primary voters who also turned out in the May special election were only R +22, cutting the GOP’s district-wide edge in half in this lower-turnout election. 

This suggests a significant Democratic turnout advantage on an individual basis; Democrats were more likely to turn out again for the special election than Republicans, and while there was still enough Republican turnout in the district to keep the seat red, the result was a far closer election than almost anyone predicted.

The areas south of Mahoning County became noticeably more mixed, with blue pockets in Massillon, Marietta, and New Philadelphia, and the shades of red visibly lighter almost everywhere. Even in Mahoning County, the heavily white working-class cities surrounding Youngstown showed signs of heightened Democratic support. 

The turnout propensity gap is much more striking with a swing map showing the shift in partisanship between the primary and special elections.

The bluest areas in Mahoning County generally have the smallest partisan gaps, particularly on Youngstown’s western side. Further south, the gaps reach as high as 41 points in Tuscarawas County. 

Another metric we can use is the percentage of voters a party retains between elections. That is, comparing the percentage of Democratic primary voters who then voted in the special election against the corresponding figure for Republicans.

Nearly half of the district’s Democratic primary voters showed up for the June special. For Republicans, meanwhile, this figure was just about 30% — a turnout difference of just under 20%. When the propensity difference is plotted on a per-precinct level, the map looks very similar to the partisanship swing map plotted above.

The map tells a tale of how Democratic voters did a better job of returning themselves to the polls. Unsurprisingly, the lowest turnout gap is in Mahoning County, which is the bluest and most educated in the district — factors that have been linked to higher voting propensity, especially in the post-Dobbs era of politics. The largest gaps were in Tuscarawas and Noble counties, where fewer than 20 percent of Republican voters from the primary turned out.

Now that the turnout gap is quantified, we can roughly approximate the persuasion effect on the county and district levels. We can adjust the 2024 special election margins based on turnout differential to get a sense of what things would have looked like in a higher turnout environment. Then, we can compare these adjusted numbers to the 2020 presidential margins to roughly gauge any “persuasion” effect.

The numbers suggest that there was sizable Democratic persuasion in the rural areas, but that it was canceled out by Republican persuasion in the urban areas, for a net-zero effect across the district. This, again, implies that virtually all of the 19-point Democratic overperformance on Biden’s 2020 margins was down to turnout. However, there is a sizable amount of variation on the county level.

The rural counties in the southern part of the district all show sizable persuasion effects in Democrat Michael Kripchak’s favor among those who actually voted. Particularly in Tuscarawas County, the result Kripchak got was 18 points better than what he would have been “expected to”. 

All this is balanced out by persuasion in Rulli’s favor in Mahoning and Columbiana counties, which makes sense given his longtime presence in the area as a grocery magnate and legislator. Observers on election night were surprised by the relatively thin Democratic margin. But with Rulli’s persuasion effects, it makes sense that the outcome was a D+9.6 result there.

Given that the two aforementioned counties constitute 42% of the seat, it is likely that a more generic Republican nominee may have lacked special appeal in the Youngstown area, which would have allowed Democrats to achieve margins consistent with a districtwide win.

It’s worth noting that even if you feel uncomfortable using the primary election as a baseline, alternative and independent techniques would yield the same result. For example, using a broader method in which every voter’s partisanship is based on their past primary participation, the partisanship of this special election’s electorate would only be R+11, with 54% Republicans, 43% Democrats, and 3% Independents. Again, given that the result was R+9, this would imply very minimal persuasion.

While the Democrats certainly posted an impressive overperformance in the special election, Rulli is on track to win comfortably in November. Without the massive turnout differential observed between the primary and special elections, Democrats simply cannot narrow the gap enough to keep the 6th competitive in a general election. Combining presidential-level turnout with the effects of the ongoing realignment sweeping eastern and southeastern Ohio creates a perfect storm for Republicans — one that Democrats likely will not forestall anytime soon.

For these reasons, it is important not to read too much into the Democratic special election overperformance as indicative of a sea change among the eastern Ohio voters at large. It is unlikely that Kripchak’s overperformance will carry over into November’s election, where tens of thousands of low-propensity Republican voters are likely to show up, driven by the presence of Trump on the ballot. But this election still serves as an interesting case study on the impact of turnout on special election results.