So the Democrat, Jane Kathy Hochul, has won the special election in NY26. Or so says the AP as of 10 pm or so.
My views on how to interpret off-year elections are here. In short, they don’t necessarily tell us anything about how any other election — in some other district or state, in some future year, featuring different candidates and a different pool of voters — will turn out.
MUCH more interesting is not “what it means” but “what POLITICIANS think it means.” Even though their perceptions may extrapolate well beyond the available data, it still matters whether they think that NY26 was an outlier, a harbinger of a voter backlash against GOP policies, a sign that Democrats can gain ground in 2012 by accusing the GOP of endangering Medicare, or what have you.
What I would love to see in the next few days is much less airy “news analysis” and much more reporting about what Democratic and Republicans leaders are saying (and therefore perhaps thinking).