‘Cookie-cutter’ campaign crumbles
As GOP hails Ga. victory, Dems vow to pick up pieces
WASHINGTON — As battered Democrats assess their loss in Tuesday’s House race in Georgia, they are finding that the path back to power, which they hoped had been opened up by voter discontent with President Trump, is full of tricky obstacles.
The loss in Georgia was bitter, after Democrats, in the most expensive House race ever, invested tens of millions of dollars in a political newcomer, Jon Ossoff, who lost to Republican Karen Handel.
Blame fell on House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and on the cautious neophyte candidate. The complaints about muddled strategy were exacerbated by the results from the special election in South Carolina on the same day, a race which Washington had all but ignored. The Democrat there came closer to victory than Ossoff.
But even as Trump crowed about the failure of Democrats to win a single special election in a GOP district since he was elected, nonpartisan analysts said the returns in all those races, including the one in Georgia, should trouble him. In districts where Republicans have long been all but guaranteed victory, they have lost considerable ground. Their advantage at the polls in districts in Georgia, Kansas, Montana and South Carolina has shrunk in several cases by more than 20 points compared with races before Trump was elected.
And special elections can Supporters of Republican Karen Handel, who beat Democrat Jon Ossoff in a special House election, celebrate Tuesday. mislead. Republicans lost seven such races in a row after President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, including a costly battle for what seemed a vulnerable Pennsylvania House seat for which the GOP mobilized. After defeat in that race, the Republicans looked lost — until they rode tea party momentum just months later to pick up 63 seats and take control of the House in the 2010 midterms.
Some Republicans are warning their colleagues not to take too much comfort now.
The residents of heavily Republican suburbs north of Atlanta who went to the polls this week are not wild about Trump — he carried their district by less than two points — but enough of them clearly resented the move by national Demo- crats to make an example out of the region.
The Democratic Party is straining to hit on a message that motivates voters without irritating disaffected Republicans to the point where they come to the polls just to vote against the Democrat running.
The Georgia race did nothing to solve the internal debate raging among Democrats about how hard to go after Trump in their campaigns. Ossoff avoided attacking him.
“He tried to run as an independent, as a neutral, almost nonpartisan candidate, to de-emphasize the party label,” said Kerwin Swint, a professor of political science at Kennesaw State University. But in doing so, Swint said, “you’re going to turn off a lot of your base.”
Ossoff had no political accomplishments. He grew up in the area but spent much of his short career on Capitol Hill. He came off more Georgetown than Georgia. He did not even live in the district, opting to keep the apartment he and his girlfriend shared in Atlanta.
All that made it easy for Republicans and outside conservative groups to persuade voters that the candidate was a creation of Pelosi, who is reviled by voters in the district. This, after all, is the district that elected Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Tom Price, and, before him, GOP firebrand Newt Gingrich.
“Democrats’ bold claims to compete for GOP-held suburban seats blew up in their faces in Georgia,” said Jack Pandol, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee “Running cookie-cutter, nationalized campaigns … won’t cut it.”
But i n next year’s midterm elections, Democrats will be fielding candidates in many districts who have much deeper experience and impressive resumes. Many have already started to step forward to run in districts around the country where the erosion of GOP support has been more intense than in the Atlanta suburbs.
There are 70 seats held by Republicans where the makeup of the electorate is more favorable to Democrats than it was for Ossoff, Democratic analyst Steve Schale wrote in a blog post. The loss in Georgia highlighted how Democrats need to redouble their efforts to find top-tier candidates he said.
It is a point not lost on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In a memo Wednesday, the committee’s chair, Rep. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico, stressed a recruitment push, vowing to “take the time to find people who fit their districts.”
Lujan noted in his DCCC memo that the president’s approval rating is particularly poor in the battlefield districts targeted by Democrats and that the party of first-term presidents loses 28 seats on average in midterm elections — four more than Democrats need to take the House.
Yet, he said, “Wehave our work cut our for us.”