Democrats on Tuesday won a special election for a state House seat in South Carolina by an eye-popping margin, signaling yet again that the 2026 midterms could be a very good year for the Democratic Party.

Twenty-four-year-old Democratic nominee Keishan Scott defeated Republican William Oden in a special election for South Carolina’s 50th state House District, garnering 70.6% of the vote to Oden's 29.3%

That 41-percentage-point victory is far higher than the 5 points by which Vice President Kamala Harris carried the same district in last year’s presidential election. And it marks the second-biggest shift toward Democrats in any special election that has been held since November.

The result means that Democrats in special elections have now overperformed Harris’ result in those districts by 16.4 points, according to data from The Downballot. For context, the Democratic special election overperformance in the 2018 midterm cycle—when Democrats won back control of the U.S. House for the first time in nearly a decade—was 10.6 points.