On Feb. 7, 2026, Chasity Verret Martinez won a special election to fill a vacant seat in the Louisiana House. That’s an outcome that might not mean very much to people outside of the state or even outside her Baton Rouge-area district.

But Martinez is a Democrat who took 62% of the vote in a district that had given Donald Trump a 13-percentage-point victory in the 2024 presidential race. And her win came a week after Democrats seized a Texas Senate district that had supported Trump even more strongly – a result that immediately triggered concern in Republican circles.

Because fewer people turn out for special elections, they’re considered an early predictor of partisan enthusiasm heading into regularly scheduled elections. And with the 2026 midterm elections less than nine months away, analysts are already scrambling for indications of the likely outcome.

As a political scientist who studies congressional elections, I’m interested in the question of whether special elections can really tell us which way the political winds are currently blowing.

Democrats, of course, are hoping for a “blue wave” like they rode in 2018, when they picked up 40 House seats and won a majority in that chamber, while Republicans want to hang on to the very slim margins they have in both the House and Senate.

In the 2026 election cycle, as in previous ones, prognosticators and political professionals are looking to the outcomes of these intermittent races at various levels of government as a gauge of how voters are feeling about the two parties. And the results from the first 15 months of the second Trump administration appear to spell very bad news for the Republicans.

Since Election Day 2024, 88 special elections featuring candidates from both........

© The Conversation