Voters in Mississippi’s 1st district will head to the polls Tuesday for the third time in six weeks for a special election that will be one of the first tests of how well early Democratic enthusiasm is going to endure as the election cycle wears on.

The race for Sen. Roger Wicker’s (R) former House seat has turned out more Democrats in both the general election primary and primary runoff, but they will need at least one more big day if they are to win a district that leans significantly Republican.

The general election primary process had no formal bearing on the special election, but the losing runoff candidates agreed not to actively campaign even though their names would remain on the ballot.

And the real match-up will be between Southaven Mayor Greg Davis (R) and Prentiss County Chancery Clerk Travis Childers (D), who are already their parties’ nominees for the November election.

Democrats turned out twice as many voters as did Republicans in the primary, when a competitive Democratic presidential primary drove many of them to the polls. Three weeks later, they edged the GOP again, 36,000 to 33,000 in the runoff, with Childers earning about 4,000 more votes than Davis.

Democrats have pointed to higher turnout numbers all over the country as evidence of the enthusiasm for their party and their candidates.

But Davis argues that many Republicans who crossed over to vote for president weren’t able to come back to the GOP side for the runoff because election rules forbade it. That won’t be the case in the special election, where previous votes don’t matter.

For Davis, turning out his base in DeSoto County will be key. He points out that Democratic turnout there dropped more than 80 percent, from 8,100 to 1,400, between the primary and primary runoff.

Overall Democratic turnout dropped from nearly 100,000.

“That held through in several other counties that are generally heavily Republican,” Davis said. “You’re looking at 5-6,000 votes just in one county, which more than closes the gap. And that was not unique to one county.”

Childers noted the significant “voter fatigue” of having so many races close together and said motivated voters probably weren’t the ones crossing over.

“If they were that strong of Republicans, don’t you think they would have voted in the Republican primary to vote for their congressional candidate?” Childers said. “Did it happen some? Sure. I just don’t think it was widespread.”

Notices will be posted at polling places to inform voters that the losing runoff candidates, former Tupelo Mayor Glenn McCullough (R) and state Rep. Steve Holland (D), are no longer candidates.

Still, their presence and some potentially unresolved hard feelings over the three-week-old primary runoffs could help send the race to a special-election runoff. A poll conducted for Childers two weeks ago showed the primary runoff losers combining for 21 percent of the vote — more than enough to virtually assure another runoff.

With that potential May 13 runoff in mind, neither the GOP nor the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) have yet made heavy investments in the race, despite the fact that Childers’s poll showed him and Davis in a statistical tie and that experts have deemed the race a “toss-up.”

As of filings available Monday afternoon, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) had spent more on independent expenditures than had the DCCC, $290,000 to $140,000, but the DCCC has also coordinated an ad with the Childers campaign.

The DCCC has so far spent more independent expenditure money on the May 3 special election for retiring Rep. Richard Baker’s (R-La.) seat, which also promises to be a competitive race.

“We have been very creative in using the funds that we’re allowed to coordinate with the other side … which has greatly boosted the TV buy that Childers did,” DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said Monday. “This is a two-step process. If nobody gets over 50 percent of the vote tomorrow, you go to the next round.”

The northern Mississippi district voted 62-37 for President Bush in 2004 and would be a significant loss for a GOP that has already lost former Speaker Dennis Hastert’s (R-Ill.) GOP-leaning seat this year.