A special election to the State Senate in Iowa just concluded (it took place because the former State Senator, Marianette Miller-Meeks(R), won the race to Iowa's 2nd Congressional District at a margin of only 6 votes, though we all may speculate that Dem voter fraud may have reduced the margins there; she replaced David Loebsack(D) who won by a decent amount in 2018)

Her State Senate District (District 41) was won with a R+3.6% margin in November 2018, and an R+1.8% margin in November 2014.

https://ballotpedia.org/Iowa_State_Senate_District_41

Tonight, her successor Adrian Dickey(R) won the special election with a margin of R+10.6%: https://twitter.com/ChazNuttycombe/status/1354284448959885313

While good news, note that he underperformed Trump's margin over Biden: https://www.bleedingheartland.com/2020/12/30/first-look-at-the-iowa-senate-district-41-special-election/

Trump won SD-41 at an R+19% margin in 2016 and an R+21.1% margin in 2020.

However, in 2012, Obama won SD-41 at a D+8.1% margin. This district is saturated with Obama-Trump voters. In the Trump Era it was still open to electing Democrats downballot, however, so Dickey underperforming Trump is not a particularly bad sign. Take a look at this sheet from the DailyKos where a bunch of autists catalogued statewide race results by legislative district, you have some statewide Democrats winning SD-41 like the 2014 Attorney General race where the D won in a landslide: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YZRfFiCDBEYB7M18fDGLH8IrmyMQGdQKqpOu9lLvmdo/edit#gid=2097162789

My takeaways from this are the following:

-In 2017 and 2018 there were multiple state legislative special elections where the Democrat candidate outperformed expectations due to low turnout races where the Dems were more motivated. If your expectations for this race tonight were formed based on state-level results, which is the reasonable thing to do given that this is a local race where there are voters willing to elect a localized blue dawg moderate Democrat, then the Republican overperformed.

-There was a blizzard in Southeastern Iowa today, so it definitely depressed election day turnout. Apparently the Dem was favored in the absentee/early vote, but the Repub was favored in the election day vote so one may argue that the blizzard made the Repub do worse than he would have otherwise

-I don't know how many of those absentee Dem votes are legit, but nevertheless it's clear that the Democrats aren't going to cheat their way to a win in literally every single election. I can testify that as someone who paid attention to these kinds of races in 2018, if this race for Iowa SD-41 happened in January 2018, you would have seen the Dem win by a huge lopsided margin (e.g. D+25%). Instead, we're seeing the Repub outperforming expectations

and if you check out his campaign statements, he seems like a bog standard 'muh small government, lower taxes' kind of Repub, not a MAGA "let's make sure Dems can't cheat again" type. I was worried that the Repub base in SD-41 would be unwilling to turn out enough because "voting is pointless now" but apparently enough did to the point where the Repub OVERPERFORMED expectations which is a good sign for 2022.

tl;dr Republican candidate in special local races does BETTER than expected, which means that Repubs seem to have a great chance of doing well in the 2022 midterms (maybe in other 2021 elections as well), despite potential demoralization from D's successfully stealing 2020