They posted their methodology and to me, as an unqualified lay person (…)
So like, if you know the above statement to be true, that’s exactly where you should stop in your reasoning. This is something that I find Americans to be guilty if constantly, which is to have the humility to understand that they shouldn’t have an opinion, and the proceed to arrogantly have the opinion they just acknowledged they shouldn’t have. I think it’s a deeply human thing, that we evolved to have to deal with missing information and so our brain fills in gaps and gives us convincing narratives. However, you have to resist the tendency when you know you really don’t know: and even more so when your beliefs go against what the data is.
If you can find me some sources of data on special elections, I’ll happily analyze it for you. I think it would be interesting if nothing else to see the offset. I’m not on my desktop machine, but I’ll give you some sources for data since you asked.