Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price arrives at a meeting of House Republicans on Capitol Hill April 4, 2017. Whether Democrats can win the Georgia special election to replace Price will say a lot about their chances of competing in 2018. (Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images)

Not all special elections are created equal.

In a span of eight days, Republicans are defending two House seats after the GOP incumbents left to join President Trump’s Cabinet. The first race, on Tuesday, gave Democrats something to boast about, given the close nature of the battle to succeed CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

But the Pompeo seat, in culturally conservative southern Kansas, was never part of the Democratic calculus for reclaiming the House majority in next year’s midterm elections. It didn’t even make the overly ambitious list of 60 Republican seats that were dubbed “initial targets” that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released Jan. 30. Instead, Democratic operatives just hope that Republican Ron Estes’s seven-point victory, in a district that Trump won by 27 points last year, is a sign of energy among liberal voters.

Next week’s initial round of voting in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, vacated by the new health secretary, Tom Price, is much more critical for understanding the political landscape ahead.

This wealthy, well-educated area north of Atlanta has effectively become ground zero for the Democratic effort to reclaim relevance on Capitol Hill. Of those initial targets, Democratic leaders have homed in on about 35 or so House seats in largely suburban areas they believe are home to the party’s future: elite professionals who were turned off by Trump’s behavior during the 2016 campaign and can be permanently forged into a new and winning Democratic coalition.

(Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

Price’s seat, held by Republicans since 1978, is effectively serving as a beta test for the Democratic theory of the case for 2018 and beyond. Each side is pouring money into northern Georgia, with one estimate that nearly $20 million will have been spent by the time ballots are counted Tuesday.

If, as expected, Democrat Jon Ossoff does not get 50 percent of the vote next Tuesday, he will head into a runoff against the top Republican two months later, and millions more will be spent. By contrast, total spending in the Kansas race will not come close to $1 million.

Democrats began talking up Ossoff’s prospects more than two months ago at their issues retreat in Baltimore. “Watch the special election for Tom Price’s seat in suburban Atlanta,” Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) said in an interview there.

Maloney oversaw a review of what went wrong in 2016, when the six-seat gain for House Democrats well underperformed expectations. His advice is that the DCCC’s analytics and recruiting team should mostly focus on education levels and how rural versus suburban the district is to determine whether they should invest there.

Should House Democrats write off rural congressional districts?

Price’s seat is a case in point. Median household income is $83,000, according to census data, and almost 60 percent of residents have a college degree. The district went from delivering a nearly 24-point victory for Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, to a bare victory of 1 percent by Trump last fall.

Republicans are betting that Trump’s performance in the Price district, along with dozens of others that were previously GOP strongholds in presidential elections, is an outlier and that voter behavior there will revert to traditional norms without Trump on the ballot.

All of which makes it very difficult, for both parties, to nail down precisely which set of House seats are truly competitive with 2018 on the horizon.

This Trump-driven volatility became clear in last week’s release of the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voter Index, a data-driven look at all 435 House districts that is the equivalent of the political Bible for many Washington insiders.

How Donald Trump redrew the political map

The top-line figures reinforce the steady trend of fewer and fewer competitive districts as most voters continue to pull the lever for one party and not split their tickets. There are now 72 House districts where the average presidential performance swings between both parties with a margin of 5 percent, down from 90 seats four years ago. That’s less than half as many competitive seats as there were 20 years ago.

Trump won 230 House districts, while Mitt Romney won 226 of them as the Republican nominee in 2012.

But beneath the surface, Trump’s nationalist, “America first” campaign scrambled coalitions and busted up the electorate.

Take Price’s seat. After the 2012 elections, Price was considered to hold the 77th most Republican district in the nation, placing him in the top third of most conservative-leaning seats among Republican House members. After the 2016 results, taking Trump’s performance there into account and averaging it with Romney’s, Georgia’s 4th District is now the 165th most Republican seat, the Cook report estimates. That puts it in the bottom third, conservatively speaking, of the House GOP conference — quite a switch.

Further, the Cook analysis found that 36 House districts switched their partisan preference for presidential candidates, including 21 that previously voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and switched to Trump four years later.

One of those seats belongs to Rep. Cheri Bustos (D), whose western Illinois district went overwhelmingly for Obama, by almost 16 percentage points, in 2012. Four years later, those voters responded to Trump’s message, delivering him a narrow victory in that district.

It’s a district that is dramatically different from Price’s old seat in the Atlanta suburbs. Bustos’s territory contains voters with a median household income of $45,000, and less than 19 percent of residents have a college degree.

Trump created volatility all across the map.

According to a study by Daily Kos Elections, 119 of the 435 House districts saw a swing of at least 10 percent from the 2012 presidential race to the 2016 contest, a dramatic change over four years.

In Southern California, Reps. Mimi Walters (R) and Dana Rohrabacher (R) have never faced a difficult reelection contest. In the 2012 presidential race, Romney won their districts by the same big margin, 55 percent to 43 percent. Yet Trump lost both of those districts four years later.

If the electorate looks next year as it used to look, these two Republicans will again cruise to reelection — and Republicans will win the Georgia special election.

But if 2016 was a true turning point, there’s a whole new slate of seats that will see competitive races next year.

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