Seems the leftists in bright jelly-bean-colored glasses with laptops in front of them and Starbucks in their hands were fairly confident that the Democratic Party candidate, Danny O'Connor, had the election in the bag. Not because he was of the moderate type of Democrat that has been winning many of these special elections, but because of this :

Watching the live Ohio special election results like any political junkie, and looking for news of results from any source I could find, I found myself reading even Vox, the Obama-hipster news operation run by former JournoList echo-chamberist Ezra Klein. Yech.

This district, covering parts of suburban Columbus as well as more rural areas in Appalachia, always sends a Republican to Congress. Trump won the district by 9 points in 2016. Cook ranks it as R+7. But this district is a little better educated than Ohio as a whole, which might favor Democrats, and O'Connor has positioned himself to have a fighting chance.

A little better educated? And better educated means Democrats win?

Let's get into what this really means: Republicans are toothless and stupid, right, Vox? As the hairspray boys at Politico say? Or "poor," and "uneducated, lazy, POS," as an anti-Trump FBI official texted? Or because Republicans are "deplorables," in the famous words of Hillary Clinton?

You don't want to take political forecasts from this bunch, not just because, sure enough, the Ohio special election was narrowly won by Republican Troy Balderson. It's because just on a data level, that analysis is bad. That's ironic, because Vox prides itself on being data-oriented.

President Trump, as a matter of fact, far from drawing toothless voters, did take more votes from college-educated voters than Hillary Clinton did, in that group's largest demographic: the white population. Here's an early post-2016 election analysis from Chronicle of Higher Education:

All along, Mr. Trump's support was believed to be concentrated among white voters with lower levels of education, and the exit polls bear this out: 67 percent of such voters went to Mr. Trump, 28 percent to Mrs. Clinton. But Mr. Trump also won the white college-educated vote, with 49 percent to Mrs. Clinton's 45 percent.

The Columbus, Ohio area, which is where this special election took place, has a white demographic of 61.5%, which is sizable.

A later, more detailed analysis from Pew Research reports that yes, indeed, Trump won the votes of college-educated whites by four percentage points.

Here's another surprise for the whiz-kids at Vox: the very poorest voters overwhelmingly went to Hillary Clinton, by about 12 points. This just goes to show that leftists continue to consider President Trump's voters stupid and uneducated, and by extension, that makes blue waves likely in "educated" districts.

Surprise, surprise. I don't think the Vox hipsters know the voters quite as well as they think they do.