Last year, in a special election to replace Tom Price-- who Trump had named to his cabinet (and soon fired him once it became public he was as crooked as almost everyone else in the cabinet)-- Republican Karen Handel beat Democrat Jon Ossoff 134,799 (51.8%) to 125,517 (48.2%) in the R+8 suburban Atlanta district where Trump had only defeated Hillary 48.3-46.8%.
The GA-06 special election to replace right-wing nut Tom Price race was universally viewed as a referendum on Trump. If Ossoff would have won, the White House and the Kremlin feared that congressional Republicans will abandon Trump and his legislative agenda in droves. So the Kremlin felt around to see if it would be possible steal the Georgia special in similar ways they helped steal swing counties in the Rust Belt. Think I'm kidding? WSB is the biggest TV station in Atlanta.
Gone-- but the stench was left behindLast week Roll Call reported that the DCCC hit a record-breaking fundraising number-- over $9.3 million in May… and that most of it came from grassroots contributions.
I spent about an hour or so, spread over a couple of phone calls, with Jon Ossoff right after he declared. I was impressed with his energy and verve, his dedication to oppose Trump and the House Republicans and his eagerness to do what’s necessary to win. He didn’t come across as a Bernie Sanders or a Pramila Jayapal or Elizabeth Warren but he did come across as kind of progressive.
The Democrats will never win with this running the showThe Democratic candidates in 2 deep red, Deep South Republican districts lost, albeit very narrowly, to Republicans. One way to look at it is that they lost. Another way is that they did incredibly well in those districts. Karen Handel won the GA-06 seat 134,595 (52.6%) to 124,893 (47.4%) and Ralph Norman won the DSC-05 seat by a narrower spread-- 44,889 (51%) to 42,053 (48%).
Today’s the day in GA-06. The most recent poll shows Ossoff up but within the margin of error, as most polls have shown. This one has Ossoff winning with 49.7% to Handel’s 48.0%, despite Ryan and Trump pouting tens of millions of dollars into the race. Many see the race as a referendum on Trump. 91% of Ossoff voters have an unfavorable opinion him and 78% of Handel voters have a favorable opinion.
My neighbor keeps complaining to me that Trump isn’t been impeached yet. She wants to know when it will happen. She doesn’t want to hear that the most obvious answer is in 2018 when theDemocrats take over the House. So I explain to her that if a time comes when more Republicans in Congress feel their own jobs are in jeopardy from supporting Trump than from abandoning Trump, that’s when they could possibly move. The problem, of course, is that all those national numbers showing Trump’s cascading approval numbers are not spread evenly across districts.
Thursday one of the Trumpist dark money front groups, America First Policies, dumped another $1,339,990 into GA-06 to smear Ossoff and bolster the failing Republican candidate, Karen Handel, after her stunningly bad debate performance. Republican dark and dirty money groups, like Paul Ryan's shady SuperPAC and America First Policies, have rushed something like $30,000,000 to GA-06 so far-- they will spend much more by Tuesday-- and they have no choice.
The GA-06 special election is June 20th-- three weeks from yesterday. And yesterday was the first day of early voting there. The ad up top was just put up on local TV to the tune of $500,000 by Pelosi's SuperPAC. Or more important, who is it speaking to? Who is it not saying a word to? Patrick Ruffini had an interesting post up yesterday at FiveThirtyEight: Black Voters Aren’t Turning Out For The Post-Obama Democratic Party.
A new poll of GA-06 voters is a dire warning to congressional Republicans. Paul Ryan's SuperPAC has put more money into the campaign on behalf of Karen Handel than any outside group has ever spent on any congressional race in history. And those millions and millions of dollars appear to have been wasted as Jon Ossoff has pulled ahead:
