Having been involved in special congressional elections, they are often hard to poll and analyze. They typically aren’t “bellwethers” until they are. This is especially true for special elections in districts that coincide with decennial redistricting. That can be very confusing.
An especially painful memory involves a special election I helped co-manage. In 1985, following Ronald Reagan’s historic 1984 reelection landslide, he nominated a conservative Democratic Congressman from northeast Texas, Sam Hall, to a federal judgeship. Then-newly elected US Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX) sought to seize the opportunity to switch a seat that had never been competitive into the GOP column deep in the heart of then-Democratic east Texas. He recruited a telegenic Texas A&M football legend, Edd Hargett, who played for the New Orleans Saints and Houston Oilers for several seasons in the NFL.


Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review, where he has covered national politics and policy for 25 years. He is also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, which syndicates his articles in newspapers across the nation. He is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and he serves as a contributing editor to National Affairs, the quarterly journal of conservative ideas. His articles are frequently published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In 2015, he was included in the “Politico 50,” Politico’s list of “the thinkers, doers, and dreamers who really matter” in American politics. In 2014, Ponnuru contributed to and (with Yuval Levin) edited the book Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited Government and A Thriving Middle Class. New York Times columnist David Brooks called the book “the most coherent and compelling policy agenda the American right has produced this century.” Ponnuru was subsequently featured in a New York Times magazine cover story about reform-minded conservatives. In 2013 he was a resident fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. He is a regular speaker on policy, politics, and constitutionalism at the nation’s leading college campuses and law schools. He also appears regularly on television programs about public affairs. He is the author of a book on the sanctity of human life and American politics and of a monograph on Japanese industrial policy. Previously he has been a columnist for Time magazine and