Maddow’s Blog | Why Democrats’ latest special election victory adds to GOP headaches

When the Democratic Representative Brian Higgins resigned to become president of Shea’s Performing Arts Center in Buffalo, his party was relatively optimistic about retaining his New York district. As NBC News reportedthe results of the special congressional election to fill the vacancy suggest that Democrats’ optimism was well-founded.

This was not a case where the Republican Party nominated an unelectable candidate. On the contrary, Dickson was the first Republican elected town supervisor in the Buffalo suburb of West Seneca. in 50 years.

Even so, the results were uneven: according to a Buffalo News report, Kennedy, who very worn his Republican rival defeated Dickson by about 37 points.

At first glance, the result may not seem to affect the national panorama much. In a reliably Democratic district, voters replaced a longtime Democratic member with a Democratic state senator. Republicans didn’t make much of an effort to compete in the race.

But on Capitol Hill, the results of the race in New York’s 26th District complicate the legislative arithmetic of the House’s beleaguered Republican majority conference.

When Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin recently resigned, the Republican majority in the chamber fell to just 217 members. This left Republican leaders with a one-vote margin: in any vote, if Democrats remained united, Republican measures would fail if just two of the party’s members broke ranks.

Last week, however, Democratic Rep. Donald Payne Jr. of New Jersey died unexpectedly, increasing the number of vacancies and reducing the threshold for passing legislation in the House to 215. Or put another way, in light of Payne’s death, The Republicans’ majority margin went from one to two.

The results of the special elections in the Buffalo area change that arithmetic: After Kennedy takes office, Republican Party leaders will once again discover that their margin in the House has returned to just one vote.

This article was originally published in MSNBC.com