This past Tuesday, the special election for Georgia’s 6th congressional district came to a disappointing conclusion, with Republican Karen Handel beating Democrat John Ossoff by 52% to 48% of the vote. It was the most expensive House race in U.S. history, with a total of $60 million spent between the two parties. Republicans have held the seat for decades, but when Donald Trump chose Representative Tom Price as his secretary of Health and Human Services, the Democrats saw an opportunity in this district where Donald Trump beat Hilary Clinton by just the barest of margins. Ossoff won 48% of the vote in the first round, missing the 50% threshold needed to win outright, and leading to a runoff against Handel.
This article gives a taste of some of the intra-party recriminations that have followed Ossoff’s loss; but it seems to The Hot Screen that the notion that Ossoff’s loss proves the Democrats are permanent losers is to put too heavy a burden of symbolism on a single race. Yes, a loss is a loss; but we still have the remarkable fact that a Democrat nearly took a deep red Republican seat.
First, this seems to provide some pretty solid evidence that Donald Trump is creating a serious drag on the Republican Party; again, yes, close is not the same as winning, except it can still be quite meaningful. In this case, it would seem incredible not to attribute the swing in the direction of a Democratic candidate to the unpopularity of Trump among so many Democrats and moderates. And though Democrats did spend a tremendous amount of money in this race, so did the Republicans, which to our mind would seem to mean this election was something of a wash in terms of advertising.
We should also not ignore the fact that Ossoff had at least medium-sized baggage that could not have helped in such a media-blitzed race as this. He wasn’t a resident of the district he sought to represent, and it seems probable that all the outsider money pouring in only accentuated perceptions that he was a sort of carpetbagger. We would feel much more worried about Democrats' future prospects if he had been an amazing candidate. We also can’t help feeling that many Democrats have a misperception that having spent so much money, they had earned a victory — that, needless to say, is not the way the world works, and also seems to misunderstand what money can and should do in an election, at least if you’re from a progressive movement that holds as one of its fundamental beliefs the corrupting influence of money in politics.
Ossoff ran as a moderate Democrat; as Robert Borosage writes at The Nation, “He presented himself as a centrist, speaking boldly against government waste and federal deficits, and talking, as his opponent put it, ‘like a Republican.’ He championed civility and decried partisan division. He explicitly opposed Medicare for All and tax hikes on the rich. He wouldn’t even commit to voting for Nancy Pelosi as the leader of his party. He chose not to make the election a referendum on Trump.” Andrew O’Hehir more provocatively savages Ossoff as a candidate, though we don’t agree with his dark conclusions about what this means for the future of the Democratic Party (our post is in fact partly a response to some of the points O’Hehir makes, and we invite folks to check out for themselves whether his points have more validity than we believe).
So yes, Ossoff’s loss suggests that the moderate-center Democratic playbook may not be sufficient to appeal to disgruntled voters, including moderate Republicans — but to say this automatically means it’s time to put on our dancing shoes and boogie over the Democratic Party’s grave is silly. The Hot Screen is all in for an unabashedly populist Democratic party that puts the fight against economic inequality front and center; but it's also possible that a candidate who fielded such views would not have fared as well as Ossoff in what is, after all, a district that is doing well economically overall, and that has been, it bears repeating, in Republican hands for many years. Indeed, as milquetoast as he may have been, and as much as we want to see Democrats pushing left, Ossoff's platform doesn't seem to have been nuts given his particular context.
But because he did indeed lose on positions that were more Clinton than Sanders, and even though it was close, I don't see how this loss doesn't strengthen the hand of those who are arguing for a more populist direction for the Democrats overall (and we recommend the Borosage article for its overall argument that favors this point of view). Again, though, this raises the important point that this was just one race, in one specific district; Ossoff's loss is suggestive, but does not provide clear and decisive evidence for any particular viewpoint. In our opinion, the case that Democrats need to generally embrace an egalitarian populism is overwhelming, and we see nothing in this race that refutes this.
Significantly, the outcome in Georgia corroborates results in other special elections to fill the seats of representatives who have joined the Trump administration. In the race to replace then representative, now CIA director Mike Pompeo, the Democratic candidate lost by a far smaller margin in Kansas' 4th Congressional District than in previous elections, despite very limited Democratic resources put into the race. Even more intriguingly to The Hot Screen, on the same day that Ossoff was edged out, a Democrat managed to come even closer to taking South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District, losing 48% to 51% — and this in a district Donald Trump won by more than 18 points, and where the Republican incumbent had won re-election in 2016 by a 20-point margin.
It sucks rotten eggs that the Democrats were not able to win these special elections; but then again, as Talking Points Memo notes, Donald Trump picked representatives for posts in his administration who were not coincidentally from strongly Republican districts. That the Democrats were not able to pick amazing candidates on relatively short notice, or didn't spend more money in races where it might have made a big difference (in the Kansas and South Carolina races), are hardly signs of a doomed party.
But there is one great cautionary lesson to draw from the Georgia results. Despite the very real energization of Democratic voters in opposition to Trump, the feral and proto-authoritarian pro-Trump movement remains very much alive, and perhaps equally energized by Trump’s victory and his determined unsettling of the American political order. You need look no further than Virginia, where a couple weeks ago both parties held their gubernatorial primaries, and where a Trumpian figure named Corey Stewart just barely lost to establishment Republican Ed Gillespie. Among other things, Stewart riled up supporters by defending monuments to the Confederacy, memorably tweeting that “Politicians who are for destroying the statues, monuments and other artifacts of history are just like ISIS” (to which we have to respond: "Sort of like," sure, we could see that — but “just like”? We Yankees cry foul, Mr. Stewart, oh, we do cry foul!). In their enthusiasm for the sordid Dixie dog-whistling of this vile candidate, Virginia Republicans uttered a primal scream all too reminiscent of the nationwide one we all heard back in November.
