Indeed, as Ryan Matsumoto noted last night: “Democrats have now outperformed Biden’s numbers in each of the four U.S. House special elections since the Dobbs decision in June.”

A win there by Democrats is the clearest evidence yet that the 2022 election is unlikely to turn out quite the way that conventional wisdom imagined less than a year ago, after Republican GLENN YOUNGKIN rode a red wave into the Virginia governor’s mansion.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that Dems will hold the House and Senate. Nor does it mean that Republicans will be in the minority come 2023. But “Ryan’s victory in the marginal swing district suggests that Democrats have at least a chance of bucking both traditional midterm losses for the party that controls White House, and an economy that many voters say they still believe is headed in the wrong direction,” as Zach Montellaro writes.

“It can be tempting to read too much into special elections,” write David Siders, Gary Fineout and Matt Dixon. “They’re not always predictive of results in the fall, and Republicans this year have overperformed in some places, too. In June, the GOP won a South Texas House seat that had been held by a Democrat. But that was before Roe shook the political landscape.”