Watching Special Elections for Signs of a Wave

This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on April 10, 2017

Wichita is 1,250 miles from Wash­ing­ton, D.C., but you can bet quite a few people in­side the Belt­way will be check­ing elec­tion re­turns from there Tues­day night. Nor­mally, few out­side of Kan­sas would care much about the res­ults of a spe­cial elec­tion to fill a staunchly Re­pub­lic­an House seat like Kan­sas’s 4th Dis­trict, a va­cancy caused by Mike Pom­peo’s de­par­ture to be­come CIA dir­ect­or. After all, how com­pet­it­ive could a dis­trict be that voted for Don­ald Trump by a 27-point mar­gin (60 to 33 per­cent for Hil­lary Clin­ton) and four years earli­er for Mitt Rom­ney by 26 points (62 to 36 per­cent for Pres­id­ent Obama)? Old-timers will re­mem­ber this dis­trict as the one once held by Demo­crat Dan Glick­man, who won in 1976 as Jimmy Carter de­feated Pres­id­ent Ford and lost in the Re­pub­lic­an tid­al-wave elec­tion of 1994 to Todd Ti­ahrt. Ti­ahrt then served eight terms be­fore giv­ing the seat up to run un­suc­cess­fully for the U.S. Sen­ate—los­ing to fel­low GOP Rep. Jerry Mor­an in the Re­pub­lic­an primary—and