The Democratic Party’s newest star has an unlikely group to thank for his upset victory: rural voters.

Rep. Pat Ryan prevailed in a close race over his Republican opponent in an August special election in upstate New York in part because rural voters came out to the polls at lower rates than voters in more populated places in his bellwether congressional district.

The race in New York’s 19th District wasn’t unique. A POLITICO analysis of turnout data before and after Roe v. Wade was struck down in June shows that voters in rural counties were less motivated to cast ballots than those in more Democratic-leaning suburbs and cities after the Supreme Court decision. Though special elections are not a crystal ball, that could spell potential trouble for the GOP if the trend continues to the midterms in November, because rural voters, who overwhelmingly supported former President Donald Trump, are a key constituency for Republican candidates.

“Republicans are not as energized as they want or expected, and Democrats are very energized right now,” said Chris Walsh, Ryan’s campaign manager.

In four congressional special elections that have been held since June to fill vacant House seats — in Nebraska, Minnesota and New York — the portion of registered voters who cast ballots averaged 27 percent in suburban and urban counties, compared to 22 percent in rural counties, according to the analysis. Ahead of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe, those three groups had turnout numbers similar to each other.

Not coincidentally, in each of the contests that saw lower rural turnout, Democratic candidates overperformed compared to President Joe Biden’s 2020 results. Democrats’ higher turnout numbers have given the party hope that voter anger over the elimination of abortion rights would turn an anticipated red wave in the midterms into more a ripple.

“The suburban voters who Republicans thought were just anti-Trump are now kind of coming to realize they’re anti-Republican,” Walsh said. “With the Dobbs decision, it really fired them up that this is still an existential fight for their lives.”

The GOP is still the odds-on favorite to win a majority in the House, and inflation and dissatisfaction with Biden continue to be a drag on every Democrat running for office. Republicans said the recent special elections had distinct circumstances that they believed benefited Democrats — for instance, New York’s special election was held on the same day as a handful of contested Democratic primaries.

“Democrats played politics, they knew having competitive primaries in [Ryan’s district] would boost turnout for the special election, and it would create this false narrative that the election was a referendum on Dobbs,” said Will Dawson, campaign manager for Marc Molinaro, Ryan’s Republican opponent in August. “The midterm elections are and always have been a referendum on the White House.”

There are plenty of examples over the years of special elections that did not prove to be predictive of November’s results, and the races only reflect a small share of the electorate. But unusually high turnout in special congressional elections in 2017 and 2018 also foretold some of the surge in Democratic voters coming out to the polls for the 2018 midterms.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster for Biden’s 2020 campaign, said rural voters may have felt complacent after the conservative movement’s decades-long effort to strike down Roe v. Wade was successful.

“A lot of rural voters, they’re more conservative religiously and they were very mobilized by abortion and now they think they’ve won,” she said. “Whenever you see a kind of falling-off of pro-life voters because they’re less engaged, you’re going to see that particularly in rural areas.”

People vote during the June Primary Election at the Brooklyn Museum on June 28, 2022, in New York City.