Democrats winning since 2017 with a vengeance?

In 70 special elections in 2017 — both for Congress and state legislatures — Democrats did, on average, 10 points better than their 2016 presidential margin. The latest in this saga is the State Senate election in the state of Wisconsin, where a 28-point swing away from the Republicans resulted in an unexpected win for Democrats.

Democrat Patty Schachtner, the chief medical examiner for St. Croix County, Wis., won the 10th District state Senate seat by more than 10 percentage points — a 28-point shift over the 2016 results.

Since 2016, Democrats in more than two-thirds of state legislative special elections over the country have outperformed the margins between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in those districts in the last presidential election. And in the six congressional special elections held in 2017, Democrats overperformed in five of these – and that list doesn’t even include the December pickup of a Senate seat in ruby-red Alabama.

Democrats also made gains in off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia – coming within a single vote in one district, or a random drawing of a lot, from erasing the GOP majority in the Virginia House of Delegates.

All of it, alongside the party’s latest success in a rural and suburban seat in western Wisconsin that backed Trump by 17 points, is unnerving Republicans from Madison to Washington.

“This special election hit the Wisconsin GOP like an electric shock,” said Charlie Sykes, a former conservative radio host in Wisconsin. “In particular, they’re very worried about women. They are losing women, suburban females, and if you extrapolate across the country, you have a genuine problem.

All these and the prolonged investigation by Robert Mueller into the Russians influencing the US Presidential election is not making Trump’s task any easier, regardless of the new, lower tax rates bill.