Posted on 06/20/2017 11:53:25 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Democrats need to outperform Hillary Clinton to take back the House. Ossoff did worse than her.
Democrats faced yet another disappointment in Tuesday’s special elections, as Jon Ossoff, their candidate in the runoff for Georgia’s 6th congressional district, fell short and Republican Karen Handel came out on top.
Meanwhile, in the much lower-profile race for another open House seat in South Carolina’s 5th district, Democrat Archie Parnell came far closer to winning than expected in a heavily Republican territory. In the end, he lost to GOP nominee Ralph Norman.
The results make Democrats 0-for-4 in the House districts vacated by Republican members of Congress who have joined the Trump administration.
But it’s the Ossoff defeat that’s particularly painful for the party. Though former Rep. Tom Price (R) repeatedly cruised to victory in this district, Donald Trump only topped Hillary Clinton in it by 1.5 percentage points. This meant that, on the presidential level, the district was by far the most favorable to Democrats of those four open seats.
Democrats hoped that five months of a chaotic Trump administration would galvanize their voters to turn out, and send a message to Republicans in Congress that they should abandon the president or risk losing their jobs. And the liberal grassroots spent accordingly, showering Ossoff with money.
In the end, though, Republican outside groups spent millions too, and the GOP effectively turned out their own voters in what turned out to be the most expensive House of Representatives race ever.
The 2018 midterms are still over 16 months away, and a great deal in politics obviously can and will change before then. But Ossoff’s defeat suggests that, if the whole House of Representatives was up for election today, Democrats would likely fall short of retaking it. Here are three things to take away from the results.
1) To retake the House, Democrats need to do better than Clinton did against Trump. Ossoff didn’t.
Democrats have found comfort in several of their losses in open seat House elections this year, because the candidates they’ve put up came far closer to winning than Hillary Clinton did in those districts. Here are the comparisons (the 2016 numbers used were tallied by Stephen Wolf at Daily Kos Elections): •In Kansas’s 4th district, which Trump won by 27.2 points, the Republican candidate won by just 6.8 points. •In Montana, which Trump won by 20.6 points, the Republican candidate for the district that encompasses the whole state won by just 6.1 points. •Now, in South Carolina’s 5th district, which Trump won by 18.5 points, it appears the Republican candidate won by a little over 3 points.
All of this seems very encouraging indeed for Democrats.
But then there’s the Ossoff race.
Donald Trump won Georgia’s 6th district by 1.5 points. And though the votes aren’t all counted yet, the Upshot’s projections as of Tuesday evening suggest Karen Handel will outperform Trump, winning the district by about 4 points.
That’s a big problem for the Democratic Party. This race was indisputably the highest-profile contest, and therefore perhaps the most like what we’d expect the 2018 midterms to be — Republicans weren’t caught sleeping, like they were in a few of these other races.
Furthermore — and crucially — Donald Trump won the median House district by about 3.5 points.
That means that if Republican candidates in high-profile contested races slightly outperform Trump or even slightly underperform him, the GOP will keep the House. Handel’s victory shows that, at this point, that’s still a definite possibility.
2) It doesn’t look like there’s a furious national backlash over the Republican health care bill — not yet, at least
The American Health Care Act polls horrifically. In the House’s first attempt at passing it, back in March, moderates shied away from the bill at the last moment.
Then, when the GOP regrouped and passed an amended version through the House in May, Democrats responded with a song they hoped would foreshadow the 2018 midterms: “Na na na na, na na na na, hey, hey, hey, goo-oodbye.”
And yet health care never dominated the Ossoff-Handel race. While Ossoff did criticize the GOP bill from time to time, he overall preferred a message emphasizing his credentials on cutting spending.
Handel, meanwhile, claimed in an interview with Breitbart News that the GOP health bill “hasn’t been that much of an issue on the ground.”
Perhaps the affluent sixth district of Georgia was never the most likely place to rebel against Republican plans to slash Medicaid. And this doesn’t preclude a backlash against the bill should it actually be signed into law and start affecting Americans’ lives. But at the moment, “hey hey hey, goodbye” certainly seems premature.
3) Democrats haven’t found a winning formula
Over the ensuing months, Democrats will furiously debate how much of Ossoff’s loss was because of his inherent shortcomings, how much was due to his messaging choices, and how is due to the quirks of this particular district.
It’s long been clear that Ossoff had some serious weaknesses as a candidate. Months ago, a Democratic political consultant told me that he thought Ossoff would lose because, as a 30-year-old former congressional staffer who didn’t even live in the district, he lacked both the résumé and the local ties that most successful candidates should have.
Still, he was a fresh-faced outsider, he was easily the strongest Democratic candidate actually running in this district, and he caught fire among the party’s grassroots donors, who showered him with cash. Democrats hoped that this enthusiasm, combined with a hoped-for backlash against Trump and the GOP, could carry him to victory despite those flaws. Now, however, some will surely argue that candidates with more traditional résumés — not youngsters inspired by anti-Trump animus — are better-suited to winning.
Then, there will clearly be some second-guessing about Ossoff’s messaging choices. He didn’t focus overwhelmingly on President Trump or the GOP health bill (two topics that Handel also largely avoided). And he certainly didn’t run as an economic populist.
Instead, he emphasized his willingness to cut wasteful spending, and criticized Handel for her role in a five-year-old controversy in which the Susan G. Komen foundation, where she was a top official at the time, cut off breast cancer screening funding for Planned Parenthood.
Ossoff surely had consultants who took polls and conducted focus groups that together suggested that this was the message that worked best in this district. Perhaps that’s the case. But now that he’s lost, Democratic candidates will face increased pressure to try something different in the races to come.
Finally, there’s the matter of whether districts like the Georgia 6th are the best pickup opportunities for Democrats.
Since Trump’s victory, there’s been a debate among Democrats about whether the party’s best chances for retaking power lie in improving their performance in areas full of educated, well-off white suburbanites, or whether the party is better off making a case to the white working class. To oversimplify, the Hillary Clinton wing of the party tends to like the former theory, and the Bernie Sanders wing tends to prefer the latter.
Ossoff’s disappointing performance is a blow to the Clinton wing’s theory. Despite Trump’s sinking approval ratings, the Republican candidate still won an affluent suburban district that Trump himself barely pulled it out in.
But the Sanders wing doesn’t have the clearest-cut counter-theory either. Sanders-friendly candidates like Rob Quist in Montana and James Thompson in Kansas have done better than Hillary Clinton did in their respective districts — but so did Archie Parnell, the former Goldman Sachs employee who lost the South Carolina race Tuesday night.
All special elections are on different turf and have different issues and candidate dynamics at play. The one thing that is clear, though, is that Democrats haven’t found a winning formula for victory yet.
Not too surprisingly, the author appears to think that the Georgia results indicate that the Dems should move further left. Napoleon counsels us, “Never interfere with your enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself.”
Trump Broke his campaign promise: I’m still not tired of Winning!
I have yet to see a Vox article where the solution to any problem faced by the Dems is to go Further to the left. As you said, so far they have only destroyed themselves even more.
>Not too surprisingly, the author appears to think that the Georgia results indicate that the Dems should move further left. Napoleon counsels us, “Never interfere with your enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself.”
Indeed. On reedit tonight I was harvesting liberal tears and mining salt and of out of the probably 1000+ comments I read only one had a reasonable suggestion of connecting with the white middle and working class to start winning again. That person got -25 downvotes. Every other comment was rage at Georgia, rationalization about the loss, or calls to go further left.
One should always “sugarcoat” a big sh*t sandwich. It makes it easier to swallow. Go for it libs!
When you stand back and look over the landscape...with all the negative Trump-talk, the suggestion of impeachment, lack of fired up GOP-activity in DC....it didn’t matter. The district is color-coated GOP and it stayed that way. In some ways, I think it’s amazing that they were willing to spend up to around 50-million on such a lost cause. I would add....the fact that the guy wasn’t a resident in the district...might have cost him 10,000 votes in the end. I wouldn’t vote for a Republican who wasn’t a resident in the district either.
Ossoff’s mistake was starting out honest. He started with the hate Trump, pro-Sanders kind of stuff and then modified his positions when that didn’t work. He got enough people to overlook his initial stances to make a respectable showing.
If Demonrats run in suburban congressional races as Bernie Sanders clones, even in some otherwise liberal places they will lose.
If I were the republicans and I saw this happening I’d be tempted to run some RINO or semi-RINO candidates against several demonrat hard leftist. This is a place where social moderates or conservatives who are willing to (lie and)run as moderates might be preferable. Tie all demonrats to the hard left. If their candidates distance themselves from the hardline the demonrat national committee will cut their funding off. If they run like Bernie they’ll lose.
Example of a lying position: A person that that believes that abortion should only be done to save the live of the mother (Against better than 99% of all abortions) has in the past often ben called pro-life. Run as pro-abortion and make demonrats defend the more gruesome position. There are several positions that could be done this way.
Better yet. File and run as a democrat. win the election and then change parties. This might be the only plan that would work in California
Destroy the demonrats as a party. Then go RINO hunting.
INB4 one of the MSM’s blames the loss on the ‘sympathy factor’ from the Scalise shooting.
The difference between the two parties is that when a Jim Jeffords does that to the Republicans they just whimper, but if you try it on the Dems, they'll kill you, and I mean literally. It's sort of like apostasy is to Muslims, it's a one-way street.
I agree with your assessment, though, about Sanders. Hillary losing the working class was a stunning blow to a party that took the working class vote for granted, and now they're scrambling to get it back. All they have to offer is socialism, and that won't get the job done. If it ever does, we've got problems.
I like that their idiotic party is splintering into exile. Didn’t Bernie Sanders splinter away from the democrat party to form his own party recently?
Winning back the white blue collar vote is key for them, but they can't do it. By the 2018 elections, President Trump will have a solid record on delivering for the blue collar people, from apprenticeships, to jobs in construction and infrastructure. No democrat could believably promise to deliver more.
Secondly, their base won't let them. (those -25 down votes) Right now, the democrat party is just trying to hold themselves together. They can't even begin to come up with a coherent strategy. The rage they are displaying now is half real, half contrived to keep the base energized and the party from dissolving.
In 2018 they will continue to be in the minority, they will even lose ground, and their rage might overflow into a crack up of the democrat party.
We need to take those rust belt states we won and focus on state elections in order to uproot the democrat party there.
outspent her 5-to-1.
They can’t buy a seat.
And this was one of HUNDREDS of Representatives’ seats.
Maybe Georgia voters questioned just how inappropriate it was for Californians a continent away to try to buy influence in their local election.
The grass roots did not give that child $30M.
I don’t understand why more people don’t vote for the party whose only message is that of a 2 year old toddler having a never ending temper tantrum.
The democratic platform for the blue collar person seems to be fight for $15 a hour and Obamacare. That is not very appealing for someone that was making $25 a hour with benefits.
The ‘Rats are still Loosers, bigly....
The ‘Rats are about Make America Like Venezuela.
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