I know that there are a bunch of people out there who are trying to claim a moral victory because Jon Ossoff only lost by about 5% in the special election, after burning through something around $25 million (€22.4 million, £19.5 million, or $Zimbabwe 9.3x1023), we must remember that in November, the Democratic nominee Rodney Stooksbury got more votes than Jon Ossoff did, and he might not actually exist:
As far as I know, Rodney Stooksbury is an actual living human being. I have even spoken with someone who has spoken with someone who swears he exists.
Certain people, however, are convinced that Rodney Stooksbury does not exist. This is because, even though Rodney Stooksbury was the 2016 Democratic congressional candidate in Georgia’s 6th District, nobody could ever actually seem to find a photograph of the guy. Or a campaign website. Or any campaign material. Or anyone who has actually met Rodney Stooksbury. News outlets tried to track down Stooksbury, to no avail. According to one investigation, “when reporters went to his town house in Sandy Springs, no one answered the door. When they inquired with the neighbors, no one had heard of him. He apparently had run no campaign, and had raised no money.” Stooksbury, if not a literal ghost, might as well have been one. In November, shortly before leaving to become Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Republican incumbent Tom Price was re-elected with approximately 62% of the vote. Rodney Stooksbury, whoever he was, came second. He received 38% of the vote.
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Clearly, though, these Democrats have never heard of a certain Rodney Stooksbury. (They are not alone in this.) One good reason why Tom Price beat his last opponent by 23 points was that his last opponent was functionally indistinguishable from a corpse or a bag of lettuce. Stooksbury spent precisely $0 on his campaign and has never been seen in public. Jon Ossoff had the entire national Democratic Party pulling out the stops for him, and flooded Atlanta television with ten million dollars in advertising. Drastically improving on the Stooksbury numbers should be no dazzling feat. (Although, somewhat hilariously, Stooksbury actually got more total votes than Ossoff, 124,917 to Ossoff’s 124,893. Granted, special elections have lower turnout, but good grief.)
……
The Rodney Stooksbury situation is only one small exemplar of larger problems in the party that have made them unable to take advantage of Donald Trump’s unpopularity. They lack both a political strategy and actual likable candidates, and are fumbling aimlessly in their attempts to resist. (It might help if they developed an actual platform beyond “Something Trump something something Russia something.”)
The point here is not that Jon Ossoff was a horrendously awful candidate, though this campaign ad indicates that he was:
My point here is that all the big bucks that came to his campaign made ads like this, but had to rely on perennially underfunded local group for the get out the vote effort.
Also, whoever did this ad should never work in politics ever again.
Ossoff could have won if the Democratic Party had not spent the last few decades running the title character of Weekend at Bernies in the district, and instead had been building infrastructure in GA-6, or for that matter, any other generally hostile district.
We are devoting way too many resources to shit that does not work, and enriching the most incompetent political consultants on the face of the planet earth.
The way that the Democratic Party, and its consultants, wage politics is dysfunctional, and needs to be fixed.