Well said:
Democrat Jon Ossoff said “history will condemn us” if President Donald Trump withdraws from the Paris climate agreement, a move that could cripple the 2015 climate change accord embraced by much of the world.
“I agree with our military, our intelligence community, and peer-reviewed science that climate change is a major threat to our prosperity and our security, and if we walk away from this historic agreement now, history will condemn us,” said Ossoff, adding that the “economic potential of clean energy technology” could help create new jobs.
Aides to Republican Karen Handel, his opponent in the June 20 runoff, did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the accords. The two are squaring off in a nationally-watched battle for the 6th District, which spans from east Cobb to north DeKalb.
Trump pledged during his campaign to abandon the landmark agreement, but debate over whether to make good on that promise has deeply divided his administration.
Again, well said. Of course Handel doesn’t have a comment on this. Then again, there’s not a lot of things she wants to talk about. For example, she really doesn’t want her conservative base to know she courted gay Republicans:
Georgia Republican Karen Handel, who is locked in a tight runoff race to represent Georgia’s 6th Congressional district, has repeatedly and intentionally misled voters about her record on LGBTQ rights in an attempt to appeal to anti-equality voters.
When Handel ran for Fulton County Commission Chair in 2002, she courted the LGBTQ community, joining the Georgia Log Cabin Republicans and backing domestic partnership rights.
But by 2010 (the beginning of her string of failed campaigns), Handel was denying it all, claiming that she was “absolutely” against the right of gay couples to adopt children, denouncing same-sex marriage, and opposing federal domestic partner benefits.
And she repeatedly denied ever being a member of the Georgia Log Cabin Republicans. When the group provided proof of her membership—including emails and a member list—PolitiFact gave her a “Pants on Fire” rating for her obvious lie. Still, she kept denying.
Well, we found more evidence proving that Handel was a member of the conservative LGBTQ organization, no matter what she tries to say now.
In July 2006, when Handel was running for secretary of state, Georgia-based conservative commentator Erick Erickson posted on his blog a questionnaire that Handel had filled out for the LGBTQ rights group Georgia Equality during her 2002 Fulton County Commission campaign. Erickson wrote that the questionnaire “could potentially give some socialcons some major qualms about voting for Karen.”
Both parties know that voter turnout is key to winning this race. For Democrats, it’s the African American vote that’s key to winning Georgia’s 6th District:
The folks at fivethirtyeight.com have kindly provided Jon Ossoff, the Democrat in Georgia’s Sixth District race, something to worry about: The continuation of a post-Obama depression in turnout among African-Americans:
In 2016, turnout among whites was up across the country, and in highly educated areas like the 6th District in the suburbs of Atlanta. This redounded to Democrats’ advantage. At the same time, black turnout was down precipitously, from 66 percent in 2012 to 59 percent in 2016.
This black-white turnout gap continued in the first round of Georgia’s special election, where the Democrats got impressive turnout levels from all races and ethnicities — except African-Americans.
The Sixth is divided among three counties: Cobb, Fulton and DeKalb. Black voters are most numerous in DeKalb, where they make up 16 percent of that part of the Sixth. African-Americans make up 12 percent of voters in the Fulton-Sixth. (These stats don’t figure in several thousand new voters recently allowed to register for the contest.)
Sixteen and 12 percent may be small shares, but they’ll be essential if Ossoff is to pull off a victory on June 20.
And Democrats aren’t taking anything for granted:
Democrats see a candidate within reach of a win that would be a powerful sign of Republican vulnerability as the Trump presidency unfolds. They are fervently seeking to enroll new voters, particularly minorities and young people; re-energize the voters Mr. Ossoff turned out in April; and bring into the fold the 0.9 percent of voters who supported other Democrats in that vote.
Republicans say the vote in April merely showed that even a Democrat like Mr. Ossoff, with extraordinary wind at his back, was bound to come up short in suburban Georgia, despite millions of dollars in out-of-state donations and thousands of volunteers turbocharged by their distaste for President Trump.
“Right now, they need every Democrat or independent they can find,” said Kerwin Swint, chairman of the political science department at Kennesaw State University, near Atlanta, referring to the Democrats. “That includes minorities, young people, people interested in social justice, those sorts of things.”
The special election will fill a seat vacated by Tom Price, President Trump’s choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services. A Democrat has not held the seat since the Carter administration, and both sides expect an extraordinarily close finish between Mr. Ossoff and Karen Handel, his Republican opponent. On Wednesday in a downtown Atlanta high-rise, a small squad of get-out-the-vote workers employed by the New Georgia Project, a nonprofit that encourages minority political participation, was sitting around a conference table, stuffing fliers into plastic bags that would soon be hung on the doorknobs of minorities’ homes.
One worker asked a field director, Corbin Spencer, if they should bother to knock on the doors of homes that displayed a Handel sign. Most definitely, he replied.
“You’d be surprised — there’s also husbands and wives who don’t agree who they’re going to vote on,” Mr. Spencer said. “That happened a lot in the 2016 race. People were just divided.”
And early voting is looking good:
A last-minute push to register voters in Georgia's 6th Congressional District before the June 20 special election has resulted in nearly 8,000 new voters in the district as of Tuesday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. That's a big enough number to swing a close election, and polls thus far show the race within the margin of error. It's also an encouraging sign for Democrat Jon Ossoff, the insurgent candidate who topped the first round of voting in the solidly Republican district and is hoping that new voters can put him on top in the June 20 runoff.
The election between Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel has been widely portrayed as a test of the Democratic resistance to President Donald Trump. In the conservative district, Ossoff is trying to peel off Republican voters disenchanted with Trump, particularly white women. But in order to win, Ossoff also needs strong support from the Democratic base and new voters. So when a federal judge reopened voter registration in the district through May 21, groups that target young, poor, and minority voters rushed into the district to register eligible voters. The 7,942 new voters include new registrants and people who moved into the district after the primary and transferred their registration.
The district has more than 521,000 registered voters, so it's unclear whether another 7,942—or about 1.5 percent of that total—will make a difference. Ossoff fell 3,700 votes short of winning an outright majority in the primary on April 18. If the runoff remains a toss-up, these new voters could determine the winner.
Even with all this in mind, let’s take nothing for granted. We let’s seal the deal and win this damn thing! Click here to donate and get involved with Ossoff’s campaign.