everybody has gone home. a few hours ago, this was a pretty bumping party. democrats really felt like they had a shot here tonight. it the last 48 hours of this race, everything seemed to be breaking their way. the republican candidate stumbled into a gaffe about franklin county the night before the election started. their candidate had been all over the place in national and local media. they felt like they were fighting out the last few days of this campaign on democratic issue turf talking about health care, they were talking about protecting it social security. that s one of the reasons that democrats nationally by the way like what they see here today. they like the issue set that was fought over in this campaign. they re also going to like the enthusiasm a lot. you talked about that big franklin county number, 65% of the vote. you saw that reflected around this district over the last couple days. core democratic voters were fired up to vote in this race, fired up to volunteer out
a trumpist works well in a republican primary. it may not be the best thing for you in a jen election. this is really important to understand sort of mathematically as a political scientist. the vast majority of special elections are in gerrymandered districts. it s generally not a swigs where in a special election you can beat the incumbent party. democrats haven t won very many federal elections. they ve been winning at the state level. when you can break down a margin from 10 to 16 points to single digits knowing there will be a rematch in two months, every single republican has to be concerned heading into the fall and donald trump can t visit all the districts he needs to visit in order to stave off a blue wave. it s interesting. we talk about the trump effect. the obvious trump effect is the fact we had a competitive race in the 12th congressional district a democrat hadn t won since 1980. in terms of the result, the president going in on saturday making noise in this one, how
balderson is not the only candidate trump s endorsement appears to be helping. he tweeted his support for chris kovach in kansas s republican primary for governor. here s the result, kobach leading by 952 votes, jeff colyer, that s the incumbent republican governor, he had been the lieutenant governor, sam brownback left colyer takes over sort of an unelected as governor at least, here s the key though to keep in mind. the outstanding vote in kansas is almost all in johnson county. we talk about those more upscale suburbs, college changed all that stuff. we talked about them in ohio right outside kansas city. colyer leading by 13 points. certainly on paper you look and say maybe colyer despite being behind but a very close race. joining me now jason johnson,
then in three months, the zombies get into your cave. it may just be staving off the inevitable. i m just former republican congressman, you ran. having to deal with donald trump a little bit. if you were running right now as a republican just trying to survive, in terms of what s the strategy you try to employ? you can t survive a 50-50 district. one of the take-aways from balderson s race is interesting. he was not fully in with donald trump. he occasionally said the right things. i think he wanted to bid the wall. this was an entrenched establishment republican candidate. this was not a make america great again candidate. trump would say he should have been more trump. i m a product of special elections. my first race was a special election. to john s point, one of the things the party apparatus has to do is convince the high dollar institutional donors they can win these rays. i saw it in my election abconversely, i was running