Voters cast their ballots on Sept. 23, 2022, in Minneapolis, Minn.
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Steve Bullock, the former Democratic governor of Montana and co-chair of the liberal super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, offered an alternative theory about the recent special election results: The end of abortion rights is actually turning off some rural voters, he said.
“Unfortunately, the Republicans have been doing a lot better in rural areas over these last few cycles. And they finally kind of caught the car bumper. Urban and rural folks didn’t necessarily think that Roe would be overturned or they’d work on a nationwide abortion ban,” said Bullock. “I think it’s suppressing some of the Republican interest in rural areas.”
He added that “in rural areas where access to affordable and quality health care is already challenged, when you turn around and say that you’ll have no reproductive health care in many states, I think that’s in part why we’re seeing what we’re seeing.”
This cycle’s special congressional elections got off to a typical start. In 2021 and the first half of 2022, turnout in the races was low in rural, suburban and urban areas, measuring 18 percent, 19 percent and 20 percent, respectively, according to a POLITICO analysis of elections across Texas, Florida, Louisiana, New Mexico and Ohio. That likely reflected, in part, the lack of interest in contests so far in advance of the midterms. Most of the elections over that period were also not in swing districts.
After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, however, voters came out in higher numbers. That was true across the board, but the jump was the largest in suburban and especially urban counties, where turnout rose 10 percentage points. (POLITICO’s analysis excluded one special election, Alaska’s at-large district, because it used a ranked-choice voting system and the state’s geography does not correlate with the rural-urban divide seen in many other states.)
Still, even post-Dobbs, turnout this year has not matched what Democrats saw ahead of the 2018 midterms when they flipped the House. For example, 58 percent of voters that year cast a ballot in the expensive special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District where Democrat Jon Ossoff narrowly lost to Republican Karen Handel. No special election this year has neared that level of participation.
Supporter Jan Yanes, center, cries as Jon Ossoff concedes to Karen Handel at his election night party in Atlanta, on June 20, 2017.
