“The world is run by those who show up” is an observation by Robert B. Johnson that was published in 1999 in the Journal of Management of Engineering.
While his observation has universal applicability, it is especially relevant with regard to political campaigns and elections.
Recent election news from Butler County, Pennsylvania, on the results of a special election to fill a vacancy in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives affirms Johnson’s thinking.
For many people, Butler County is remembered from international news coverage as the location of a failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
The special election news is much less riveting than a failed assassination attempt, but it does merit the attention of political observers everywhere.
Conventional wisdom was that the Republican special election candidate would win handily.
A Republican had held the vacant seat for 27 years. The previous incumbent won re-election in 2024 with 65% of the vote. Donald Trump carried Butler County by the same margin in 2024.
Conventional wisdom was wrong.
The Republican candidate narrowly lost in the special election. He received 49.7% of the vote while the Democratic candidate received 50.3% of the vote.
Some may suggest the outcome is evidence that former Trump voters and supporters in Butler County are disenchanted with his second-term job performance.
They may suggest those Republicans chose not to vote for a Republican in a special state legislative election as a way to express their frustration.
That suggestion is possible, but not likely.
More likely it was a perfect storm with four elements:
The historical pattern of special elections is not generating turnouts comparable to general election turnouts. In the Butler special election, fewer than 17,000 people voted. That is less than one-third of all registered voters in the district. Two years earlier in the November general election for the seat, the turnout was more than 43,000 voters.
This special election occurred in August, a time of year when many people are not focused on campaigns and elections, especially local ones.
Republican complacency about a need to energize and mobilize their supporters to vote for their candidate.
A failure by of the Republican candidate to plan and execute an effective ground game.
That is not unusual. Effective ground games are labor and time intensive. All too frequently, candidates and political campaign managers view ground games unnecessary in a high-tech world with a wide range of media options to deliver campaign messages to voters.
The timeless reality is that electoral politics is still and always will be a people project.
Ground games are a great opportunity for a candidate and campaign volunteers to meet with voters face to face, to listen to their concerns, to answer questions, and to ask for their vote.
Effective ground games can and do overcome expected results based on less than favorable party registration numbers and previous election results.
The Democratic special election candidate in Butler also benefited from help from the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. The party chair decided to break with tradition and support Democratic candidates in districts where conventional wisdom was that they would never win.
Earlier this year, the chair of the Maryland Democratic Party embraced that thinking.
The party launched a “Contest Every Seat” campaign with an ambitious goal to recruit a Democratic candidate for every General Assembly general election seat in 2026. They achieved that goal for the first time since 1974.
Governor Moore’s reelection campaign committee has been very supportive of that campaign. Confident about Moore’s re-election, his committee has contributed or helped to raise $1.2 million to support the “Contest Every Seat” campaign. Moore’s re-election campaign committee has given the maximum $6,000 contribution to Democratic candidates running in select Republican-held seats.
Not to be outdone, the Maryland GOP also launched a “Seat by Seat Campaign”. Their campaign was less ambitious and focused on recruiting Republican candidates to maintain or flip targeted (but not every) General Assembly general election seat in 2026.
A unique element of the GOP campaign was a link on the Maryland GOP website for potential candidates. That link had a values evaluation exercise for potential candidates to list their top five personal values, compare them to the top five values of residents in their district. The results helped to determine if and where there is an overlap or variances with a candidate’s own values. I am not aware of any updates on the recruitment results of that campaign.
In any event, after November 3, 2026, we will know if either campaign made a difference.
Until then, only two things are certain in the political arena.
Never assume anything will or will not happen based on history or conventional wisdom.
