3. This is not a great result for Republicans. Moral victories are a myth, but they can tell us things about other, similarly situated contests. It’s the reason the NCAA selection committee takes strength of schedule into account when seeding postseason tournaments. All other things being equal, Republicans weren’t neutral on the outcome here. They would have preferred that Ossoff wind up in the low 40s or even the 30s, instead of taking them to the wire. This district is, at its core, a Republican one, which a Republican should have won easily. As I put it Tuesday, there was a continuum of concern among Republicans from hardly any at all if Ossoff won 40 percent of the vote to panic if he won the district outright, with genuine concern starting in at around 45 percent. I still think that’s correct, and this outcome was closer to panic than “meh.”

It is true that Donald Trump did not run well here – the presidential race was very close. But that is part of the point. Republicans were hoping that the 2016 results were race-specific, and that without Trump on the ballot, this district would revert to Republican form. The reason is that there is a host of historically Republican suburban districts such as Texas 7, California 45, Texas 32, Illinois 6, and Virginia 10 where Trump ran well behind the traditional GOP baseline. If those numbers stick, there will be a lot of races that we haven’t seen as competitive in the past pop up on our radar screen. Additionally, this will help recruiting, as a bevy of Democratic officeholders will be thinking, “If a novice can do this, just think what I can do!”

Perhaps most importantly, there’s a larger storyline out there. In 2013, one of the better pieces that I wrote dealt with the Democrats’ drop-off problem. It noted that Democrats running in special elections were consistently running about four points behind President Obama’s 2012 vote results, and that if this kept up, they would have a rough 2014. In fact, that’s about where their popular vote share in 2014 wound up. I waited until December to write that piece, and will do so again here, but the results in 2017 House special elections, as well as in special elections for state houses and state senates to date, suggest that these trends have reversed.