In a disappointing result for Democrats, investigative filmmaker and former congressional aide Jon Ossoff lost the hotly anticipated special election runoff for Georgia's 6th Congressional District on Tuesday night by a 52.6-47.4 margin to Republican Karen Handel, a former secretary of state. At the same time, in another special election that had received far less attention, Republican Ralph Norman, a former state representative, defeated tax expert Archie Parnell, the Democratic nominee, in South Carolina's 5th Congressional District by a far closer-than-expected 51-48 spread.
This seat, which is in the northern part of the state, went in the wrong direction last year, going from 55-44 Romney to 57-39 Trump. But the opposite was true in Georgia’s 6th, which Democrats hoped offered a potential pickup opportunity because Trump only carried this affluent, well-educated district in the Atlanta suburbs 48-47—a huge drop from Romney's 61-38 win here four years earlier. Thanks to an early endorsement from Daily Kos, Ossoff caught fire with progressives nationwide, who were eager to send a message to Trump and filled Ossoff's coffers with unprecedented sums of money.
That enthusiasm, combined with a disciplined campaign by Ossoff, allowed him to win 48 percent of the vote in the April primary, when all candidates from all parties ran together on a single ballot. Handel, as the runner up with 20 percent, advanced to the second round and was able to consolidate almost all of the GOP vote that had gone to her rivals. Polls regularly showed Ossoff with a small edge, but in its waning days, the race appeared to tighten into a dead heat.
While countless post-mortems will be written about this race, in the end it's simply likely that this district's historical Republican lean—there had never been a close House race here before, ever—was too much to overcome.
But even though Ossoff and Parnell both fell short, these contests once again fit into a pattern we've seen in special elections across the country ever since Trump's election: Democrats have been outperforming Obama's 2012 numbers in seats where Trump improved on Romney, while taking a comparable amount of support as Clinton in seats where she did better than Obama.
A similar phenomenon happened in South Carolina. Unlike in Georgia, where spending was through the roof (thanks to Ossoff's enormous grassroots support and to a huge influx of GOP dark money to prop up Handel), very little outside money came in to South Carolina, and there was little sign the race would be close. The only recent poll, for instance, showed Norman with a comfortable 53-44 lead, making the final result a major surprise.
Undoubtedly there will be plenty of Monday morning quarterbacking over the decision by Democrats and progressives everywhere to go all-in for Ossoff while largely ignoring Parnell, but the fact remains that neither of these seats should have been remotely competitive in the first place. Indeed, there's a reason why Trump's team picked cabinet members from solidly red districts—they weren't about to give Democrats any easy pickup opportunities.
Republican flacks and lazy reporters will undoubtedly deride any serious analysis of the results as liberal efforts to spin losses into moral victories, but that can't erase the fact that there are dozens of districts that are considerably bluer than these that will be up for election next year—not to mention the fact that Trump will continue to provide daily fuel for the resistance. Republicans can't afford more wins like this come 2018.
And while Ossoff fell short, Team Blue should be encouraged that the race was as close as it was in a seat where Republicans not named Donald Trump have routinely romped to victory. A number of other historically Republican districts also swung against Trump while still electing GOP candidates further downballot last year. In 2016, voters made a distinction between Trump and local GOP politicians, but the Georgia result is at least a sign that these voters won’t be so forgiving in 2018. A loss is a loss, but if the normally Republican voters who turned against Trump turn against the rest of the GOP, it could spell a whole lot of trouble for Team Red in the 23 Clinton seats they hold.