With Republicans treading water in most national polls, a special election in Minnesota on Tuesday looks likely to be an early test of whether November’s expected “red wave” ends up being more of a trickle.

The special election in Minnesota’s first congressional district will determine who serves the remainder of Congressman Jim Hagedorn’s term — businessman Jeffery Ettinger, a Democrat, or a Republican state representative, Brad Finstad. Hagedorn died in February.

Unlike dozens of primaries held so far this summer, this election will pit a Republican against a Democrat. It is only the second to do so since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade and turned abortion into one of the season’s top issues. 

Mr. Finstad’s campaign has focused its efforts on nationalizing the race, making the election a plebiscite on the popularity of President Biden’s administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress. The messaging targets pocketbook issues like the price of food and gas and persistent shortages at the grocery store, which the candidate blames on Democrats.

Mr. Ettinger, a former CEO of Hormel, has argued that Mr. Finstad isn’t paying enough attention to local issues. “I feel like he’s apparently running against Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, and not me,” Mr. Ettinger told Minnesota Public Radio.

The special election will be another data point in efforts to assess voter sentiment going into the 2022 midterm elections.

A professor of political science at John Jay College, Brian Arbour, tells the Sun that “political people tend to find special elections better gauges of what’s going to happen in November than polls, in part because they are better gauges of turnout.”

He argues that though Republicans are generally favored in the rural Minnesota district, analysts will be looking at the race’s margin as a test of political momentum going into November.

In 2020, Mr. Hagedorn won the seat by three points and President Trump won the district by 10 points. In a midterm election with an unpopular president, the GOP should at least be able to outperform its 2020 margin. 

However, a poor performance in Nebraska’s special election — a major rebuke of Republican abortion politics in Kansas — and changes in polling numbers have led many to question how much of a red wave will be seen in 2022. The Minnesota election will provide another test.

On July 19, voters in Nebraska’s first district backed a Republican, Congressman Mike Flood, over his Democratic opponent, Patty Pansing Brooks, by a little more than six points. Even though it was a victory for the GOP, analysts saw the margin as a warning to Republicans. In 2020, they carried the seat with a 22-point margin.

A month earlier, Texas’s 34th district held a special election and saw Myra Flores, a Republican, prevail over a Democratic challenger, Daniel Sanchez, by about eight points. Her victory marked the first Republican win in the Rio Grande Valley since reconstruction.

Between these two elections, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion and subsequently making abortion rights, which a large majority of Americans support, one of the top issues of 2022.

Since the decision, FiveThirtyEight’s generic ballot average, measuring sentiment regarding whether people prefer Republicans or Democrats in Congress, has flipped in favor of Democrats.

Between November 2021 and August 2022, Republicans had been the favorite party among those polled. However, since August 3, Democrats have edged ahead, by less than half a percentage point.

Perhaps more tellingly, Rasmussen Reports, one of President Trump’s favorite pollsters, found that the national Republican lead has shrunk to three points at the beginning of August from 10 points in July.

When considered along with last week’s vote in Kansas, which resulted in a resounding defeat for a Republican-backed constitutional amendment that would have allowed the state to further restrict abortion rights, the polls suggest that Republicans might be on the wrong side of the abortion issue.

On Sunday, a Republican congresswoman, Nancy Mace, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that despite of her “stauchly pro-life” positions,  she is concerned about the party’s trajectory going into November because of the abortion issue.

“I do think that it will be an issue in November if we’re not moderating ourselves,” Ms. Mace said. “Somewhere in the middle is where we’ve got to meet.”