Republicans win Kansas special election, crushing Dems' dreams of an upset

They thought they were going to win something. Democrats have been on a brutal losing streak for a while now, and they were hoping that, finally, something would break their way. Two days ago, it was looking like they might be right. Conservative Ron Estes was struggling in his special election bid to replace Rep. Mike Pompeo, who President Trump has tapped to run the CIA. Liberals seemed to believe that, if they could defeat Estes, it would serve as a yardstick of sorts - a codification of Trump's failure and unpopularity. Republicans were nervous. Dems were salivating.

In the end, though, the GOP candidate managed to put one in the "W" column.

Ron Estes, the Republican state treasurer of Kansas, will serve as the next U.S. representative for his state's fourth congressional district, which was vacated by Mike Pompeo when he was confirmed to serve as director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the Trump administration. Estes won 52.5 percent of the vote, beating out Democratic civil rights attorney James Thompson, who fell short with 45.7 percent support. The Republican was expected to win the special election in a district that heavily supported GOP candidates in the 2016 elections.

The win is nice, but it may not be quite as rosy as it seems.

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In November, Pompeo won reelection in the district by 32 percent, while President Donald Trump won the district by 27 percent.

This has hand-wringing conservative political junkies a bit rattled. The prevailing wisdom is that Estes should have won by a much wider margin, since Pompeo and Trump both did so well. That "prevailing wisdom" is the same kind of one-size-fits-all thinking that gave us Hillary Clinton's defeat, and a stunned post-election mainstream media. The fact is that last November was a very unusual election season, and Trump was no ordinary candidate. Using the 2016 margin as a tool by which we measure the success or failure of future candidates is a fool’s errand. Every election is going to have its own set of circumstances. In the Kansas case, they included tons of outside cash, a deeply unpopular Republican Governor, a boring candidate who seemed to dislike campaigning, and a general feeling of political fatigue among the populace. That's not to say the GOP should completely ignore the data, but neither should they get all down in the dumps about the point spread. In the end, a victory is a victory. The Estes win may not have been pretty, but we'll take it.