Last night's South Carolina special election is a danger sign for House Republicans

For Republicans it was business as usual: Republican Ralph Norman, a former state representative and real estate developer, beat Democrat Archie Parnell, a former Goldman Sachs tax attorney, in South Carolina’s Fifth Congressional District — a special election that no one seemed to be paying much attention to. It was going to be an easy win for the Republican candidate, in a district that has been deeply red since Mick Mulvaney, now the Office of Management and Budget director, won the seat in the Tea Party wave of 2010.

The reality is that Republicans won the seat in name, but Norman is a hardline conservative and a vote in the House that will align with the Freedom Caucus — which has been causing trouble for Republican leadership on every major agenda item.

Democrats should be paying attention to what happened in South Carolina. In the lead up to the election, FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten put it this way:The closer Norman comes to beating Parnell by 19 points (or more) — the default partisan lean of the district — the better for the Republican Party. A Parnell loss in the low double digits, by contrast, would be consistent with a national shift big enough for Democrats to win the House.


Democratic contender Archie Parnell lost by only 3.2 points, in a surprisingly close race. By contrast, in 2016, Mulvaney carried the district by 20 points and Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 18.5 points.

Other than going briefly viral for being House of Cards’ character Frank Underwood’s fictional district — a story Parnell tried to capitalize on with House of Cards themed campaign videos, the race didn’t receive anything close to the national attention that was directed toward Georgia, or even Montana.

https://www.vox.com/2017/6/21/15844370/south-carolina-election-republican-ralph-norman