There were all kinds of closely watched elections this week in Texas, Arkansas and North Carolina, up and down the ballot, but there was only one race in which one party lost a seat to the other. That contest was in Arkansas, and it delivered another round of good news for Democrats. The Hill reported:

Democrat Alex Holladay is projected to win the special election to represent Arkansas’s House District 70, edging out Republican Bo Renshaw, according to Decision Desk HQ. […]

Holladay’s victory does not change control of the state’s lower legislative chamber, where Republicans have held a 80-19 majority. But the Democratic pickup could matter for appropriations bills, which require a 75-percent supermajority vote from both chambers.

Arkansas is clearly one of the nation’s more reliably red states, but Holladay was running in a politically quirky area: According to calculations from The Downballot, Donald Trump carried this district by 4 points in 2020, but Kamala Harris won the same district by 2 points in the 2024 cycle.

As the dust settled on this week’s special election, Holladay overperformed, winning by double digits.

This has been happening a lot lately. Indeed, for Democrats, 2026 is off to a very encouraging start: Two of the party’s candidates won lopsided victories in two special elections in Minnesota, the first two contests of the year, restoring the state House to an even partisan split.

Soon after, in Texas, Republicans invested a considerable amount of resources to keep a state Senate seat in the suburbs of Fort Worth. They failed: Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a union leader and an Air Force veteran, won a double-digit victory in a district Trump won by 17 points in 2024. (The president personally tried to rally support for the GOP candidate, but then pretended he didn’t after she lost badly.)

In early February, Republicans in Louisiana saw a unique opportunity to flip a state legislative seat from blue to red — in a district Trump won by 13 points — but when voters had their say, the Democratic candidate prevailed by 24 points.

Holladay’s win in Arkansas, in other words, is part of an unsubtle pattern.

What’s more, The Downballot’s analysis noted that the results out of Arkansas marked the ninth time Democrats have flipped a district from red to blue in a special election since Trump returned to the White House. Over that same period, the number of seats flipped from blue to red remains zero.

Some will no doubt argue that it’s best not to read too much into a special election held in the winter, several months before November’s races. It’s a fair point, to be sure. But what matters is the degree to which the results fit into the broader political landscape. Republicans are tied to an unpopular president; a growing number of their congressional members are retiring; key elements of the GOP agenda are facing an intensifying public backlash; and they keep losing special elections, including in contests they expected to win.

If party insiders aren’t concerned about their standing ahead of this year’s midterm elections, they’re not paying close enough attention.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.