I don't normally watch Chris Hayes (8pm EDT, msnbc) but the boy is growing on me.
Tonight's lede was this. Looking at 30 special state elections (SSEs) in '23 so far, the Ds have been beating their normal "margin" by 11 points.
What does that mean?
Say you've got an R district where the Rs normally win by say 5 points. Now, there's an SSE and Ds win by 12. That's a swing from their normal margin of 17 points.
For a D district, same thing just different. Normal D win is 3 pts, they win by 11, that's a swing of 8.
Now statistically, is this significant? Hard for me to say. What I remember from stats is that sampling tends to be asymptotic. That means the accuracy of a sample as the sample size increases tends to go higher but at a slower and slower rate.
In the US there have to be thousands upon thousands of SSE districts. So your first impulse is, well, it's within the normal MoE (margin of error).
Maybe. But maybe not.