Yes. last night Republicans won a Dem held congressional seat #CA25 for the first time since 1998. This is a shocker, but not a shocker, as there was a lot of conversation about how Dems wanted to win this outright in the primary, knowing that a special election would be tough.

The win puts Republicans back at 7 members, and one vacancy in a Republican held seat #CA50 (Hunter), and Dems still hold 45. The last time Republicans flipped a Dem seat they held 24, Dems were left with 28.

The result is ripe to be “over-learned” as media and consultants try to use this as a barometer for three things: (1) the state of the the #CA25 race in Nov, (2) the state of the other 2018 Dem pickups, and (3) the impact of all mail elections.

Let’s unpack these things. First, #CA25 should be super competitive in the General. Republicans worked incredibly hard, but @millanpatterson and her team know they will have to work harder to hold it when turnout is roughly twice as high as it was for this race.

This says absolutely nothing about Democratic prospects in other districts in the Fall. The #CA25 race was a jump ball between two non-incumbents, in the middle of the first (hopefully only) wave of a global pandemic, without @realDonaldTrump on the ticket.

This also says nothing about the conversion to all-mail elections in CA or nationally. While everyone over-reacted to Wisconsin and thought for a hot minute that election changes would help all Dems, were gonna see the opposite hot-take here. Both are wrong.

The one baffling datapoint comes from in person voting in LA. Generally this favors Democrats (thus, the angry @realDonaldTrump tweet storm on Saturday about how in-person votes shouldn’t count). But here @MikeGarcia2020 won in-person votes by a 40-point margin!

This is so crazy, I’ll say it again. Among the 4,199 utilizing person voting in LA, which, along with other late votes, generally is going to skew more Dem than the district, Dems won 1,319, Reps won 2,878. That’s a greater than 2:1 Rep advantage...in freakin’ Los Angeles County.

More votes will come in, but this is over. Now the battle is against media and others who look at a special election, in the high desert, in the middle of a pandemic, and start to draw large lessons from it that apply to the rest of CA or the whole country. That would be...