Democrats just won a Wisconsin special election Scott Walker didn’t want to have

Wisconsin Democrats just picked up a Republican-held state legislature seat in special elections on Tuesday, serving yet another wake-up call to Republicans in the state.

Democrat Caleb Frostman, the former head of the Door County Economic Development Corp, won northeastern Wisconsin’s First Senate District, which voted for Donald Trump by a whopping 17 points in 2016. Frostman’s seat will be up for reelection again in November.

This is undoubtedly a victory for the state’s Democratic Party, in the third Wisconsin state election this year that has left Republicans sounding alarm bells. In January, Democrats flipped a rural Trump +17 state district with a comfortable 10-point margin of victory — a loss Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who is also up for reelection this year, called “a wake-up call for Republicans in Wisconsin.” Liberals also won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court by a huge margin in April.

Tuesday’s victory will fill a seat that has been vacant since December, when Walker appointed then-sitting Republican Frank Lasee to his administration. Walker also appointed former state Rep. Keith Ripp, a seat that a Republican picked up Tuesday. At the time Walker refused to schedule the special elections, which many speculated was out of worry that Republicans might lose. But in March, the state courts mandated the contests be scheduled.

It appears as though Walker’s concerns were founded. In a state that was so crucial to Trump’s 2016 victory and where Democrats have a vulnerable senator up for reelection this fall, Tuesday’s special election is an indication that Democrats are enthusiastic to get out to the polls.

There’s a lot of debate about how much weight to put on state-level special elections. After all, they represent a very small group of voters and are by their very nature “special.” It’s hard to prognosticate any 2018 midterm election outcomes from those races alone.

But there’s no question that Democrats have outperformed in Trump-era elections across the country, even in races they’ve lost. They’ve claimed a Senate seat in the deeply red state of Alabama, won a Trump +18 House district in Pennsylvania, and even came close in a race in an Arizona Republican stronghold — there have already been a lot of signs of a possible “blue wave.” We’ve also seen this on the state level, as Vox’s Andrew Prokop summarized:

In the 74 special elections for both state legislatures and Congress across the country since Trump won that they tracked, Democrats performed, on average, 11 points better than they did in those areas in the 2016 presidential election.

While the average movement was in Democrats’ favor, there was a fair amount of variation. In 49 of those races, the Democratic candidate’s margin was better than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. In 23 races, the Republican candidate did better than Trump. In the other two, it was about a tie.

Democrats aren’t just running up the score in already-blue areas. The party made many of its biggest improvements over the 2016 presidential in districts Trump won in the South and Midwest. This goes to show that the 2016 elections don’t at all seem to have heralded doom for Democrats in regions that tipped to Trump — in fact, it’s many Republican-held seats in those regions that suddenly seem to be flipping to Democrats for the first time in years.

There are some hotly contested races lined up in the fall, especially in Wisconsin. Sen. Tammy Baldwin is among the 10 vulnerable red-state Democrats up for reelection this year in states Trump won, and Democrats are also making a bid for Walker’s governor’s seat. On the state level, they’d also like a shot at taking back the Senate, where they need to win three seats in November to gain a slim majority.

Of course, a lot can happen between now and November. But for now, Tuesday is a win for the Democrats.