Just under half of all states elect their supreme courts; 15 have nonpartisan contests, as Wisconsin does. But it doesn’t take long for Wisconsin’s court battles to become partisan ones, and last week’s was no exception. President Trump weighed in heavily for Daniel Kelly, the incumbent. And then Kelly lost.

The victory of Jill Karofsky seemed like another example of Democrats winning elections in the post-2016 political era. Granted, Karofsky wasn’t running as a Democrat, but it continued the party’s string of successes in the Trump era, the high-water mark of which was the Republican loss of the House in 2018.

Curious how the two parties had fared since Trump won in November 2016, we pulled data on special elections and the 2018 general election to see how districts had voted and how those votes compared to the vote in 2016. We relied heavily on DailyKos’s catalogue of special election data, as well as state-level results from the U.S. Election Atlas. In total, we pulled together 656 races.

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The split between the parties was close: Democrats won 324 of those races compared to 332 wins for the Republicans. But 378 of those contests were in states which Trump won in 2016; Democrats won 31 percent of those races. In the 278 races held in blue states, Republicans only won 26 percent of the time.

In 622 contests, there were district-level results for 2016 and the margin in the post-2016 election was at least one percentage point. Importantly for Democrats, their candidates outperformed Hillary Clinton’s margin in the contested district 471 times. The Democrats underperformed Clinton 151 times. Almost exactly half of those were in blue states.

This comparison between 2016 and subsequent elections is interesting for a variety of reasons. One is that interesting outliers are immediately obvious, like that cluster of red dots in the lower-right quadrant — representing contests won by Republicans where Clinton won in 2016. Those three big dots indicate gubernatorial wins in November 2018, victories by governors Charlie Baker (R-Mass.), Larry Hogan (R-Md.) and Phil Scott (R-Vt.). Those gubernatorial wins were a bright spot for the party, one not mirrored often elsewhere in the country.

What’s most important to the parties, of course, is results like Wisconsin’s: flipping a seat from one party to the other. It’s all well and good to outperform Clinton, but doing better than she did while still losing is not the outcome that Democratic candidates seek.

In the 634 contests in which the margin of victory in 2016 and the subsequent election was at least a point, the plurality were places Trump won and in which a Republican won the subsequent contest. In those 304 races, the GOP picked up 12 seats. An additional 68 contests were in districts Trump won but which a Democrat won after 2016. In those races, Democrats flipped 45 seats — about two-thirds of the time. Only 14 contests were in Clinton districts which went to Republicans after 2016. Republicans gained three seats in those.

Democrats also flipped 30 seats in contests where Clinton won in 2016. A number of those were House seats in 2018, places where Republican incumbents were ousted.

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One good sign for Republicans is that the average shift has gotten smaller over time. In 2017, Democrats outperformed Clinton by about 10 points on average. In 2018, including House, Senate and gubernatorial races, the margin was about six points. In 2019, it was about three points.