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.
Democratic candidate for 6th congressional district Jon Ossoff adjusts his microphone as he concedes to Republican Karen Handel at his election night party in Atlanta, June 20, 2017. (AP/David Goldman)
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Democrat Jon Ossoff was the next Barack Obama. Hollywood friendly, neo-liberal, beta male hipster, ready to do everything and anything for the globalist agenda.
He then lost the election in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District in stunning fashion to Trump-backed Karen Handel.
Georgia has provided further proof if any were needed that the Russiagate scandal is failing to gain traction with the US public.
Over the last few two months a frenzied campaign has been underway in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, which the Democrats have been hoping to win in the expectation that the US public is turning against President Trump and the Republicans.
There were reasons why the Democrats had particularly high hopes of this district. It is a well off, well-educated suburban district with a demographic profile expected to favour the Democrats.
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.
Here at DWT, we spend a lot of time fretting about the future of a very divided Democratic Party, in which grassroots progressives are fighting to prevent the party from wandering off in the same old disastrous neoliberal direction its elites insist on in return for the financing they provide to bolster the careers of the elected officials who dominate the party's decision-making process. But not today.
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.
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:
