From the New York Times, I'm Michael Varvaro. This is The Daily.

Today.

Republicans have found themselves unexpectedly scrambling to hold on to a house seat in Tuesday's special election in Ohio.

It's turned out to be a symbol of what's ahead for the party in the midterms.

It's Tuesday, August 7.

Alex Frants, tell us about this election in Ohio today.

This is sort of an accidentally important election. We're only having this vote in Ohio today

because the previous congressman Pat Teaberry long serving Republican quit in the middle of his term to go take a lucrative job in the private sector.

This wasn't supposed to be a competitive race. It's a solidly conservative district to the north and east of Columbus, Ohio.

Voted for President Trump by 11 percentage points and voted for other Republicans by a great deal more than that.

But the race has gotten shockingly competitive and in a way that is pretty revealing for the larger landscape of the midterm election.

And you have this battle wage between two candidates who are themselves very conventional politicians.

You don't have a rock star on either side of the race here. The Republicans estate senator, named Troy Balderson, former card dealer, the Democrat to 31 year old county official, Daniel Connor.

They are basically generic Republican generic Democrat.

And so in spite of the fact that they are both basically boring candidates.

And despite the fact that the district is basically a conventionally Republican district, it's a very, very close election.

And this is all about the enthusiasm on the Democratic side, the divisions within the Republican Party, the sense of basically being demoralized that you hear and see from so many conventional Republican Republicans.

So it sounds like we've got an interesting race here because it's a Republican district that could flip to Democratic control with two kind of plain vanilla candidates that stand in for their parties more broadly.

That's right. Plain vanilla is a much nicer thing to say about them than boring. And in some ways it's more accurate. You don't have a larger than life figure in this race. And you don't really have a larger than life issue in this race.

You get to see really a snapshot of what the Republican message is going to be and what the Democratic message is going to be and who that message resonates with.

It's very much a race about the two parties and their strategies, just a few months before the general election kind of feels like it's a perfect, petri dish version of what November's midterm will look like it's pretty close to an ideal test.

If you wanted to test the mood and the messages in this campaign nationally, you would want to do it in a district that was a little more moderate, a little more diverse than this one is overwhelmingly white and solidly conservative.

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