John Brummett

from Atlanta. It was one of the great original suburban white-flight districts, thus Republican, a little like what Saline County and Faulkner County have been on a smaller scale in the 2nd District of Arkansas.

But the nation’s immediate and original suburbs are changing. The new flight is more distant—exurban, they call it.

The immediate suburb’s inhabitants are becoming more diverse demographically. Women in these immediate suburbs tend to be offended by Trump and sensitive to health-care injustice and child-care needs.

These suburban women’s first instinct remains Republican. But polling showed them moving in decisive numbers to Hillary Clinton because they took great offense at Trump. But then, in the last week, they came home unenthusiastically to Trump because of James Comey’s unfair late-stage innuendo about Clinton that fertilized their general distrust of her.

Now, seven months later, these suburban women have gotten a full load of Trump as the madly tweeting clown-president and a full load of worry about what the Republicans may do to health care—and maybe to the climate, and maybe to immigrants, and maybe to poor people and for rich people.

Will they decide to cast a Democratic congressional vote just this once—in an isolated instance? Or will

There is one other telling dynamic in the polling. People under 30 in this suburban Atlanta district favor the Democrat Ossoff by more than 80 percent.

They say an averaging of credible polls show Ossoff with a lead, but not one outside the margin for error. That sounds like Hillary’s late polling lead.

They say early voting patterns indicate that Ossoff has banked an early lead. That sounds like Hillary’s early voting advantage.

One other factor: A Republican group has entered the race late with a television commercial blaming Ossoff and his supposed “unhinged rhetoric” for the mad baseball-practice shooter in Alexandria, Va.

It’s the height of cynicism, hypocrisy and breathtaking outrage for Republicans, whose personally destructive rhetoric has been at least as unhinged as that of Democrats in recent years, to try to cash in on such a tragedy.

Handel has denounced the ad, perhaps understanding it could backfire in a race in which the least new latestage dynamic could be decisive.

Here’s what it all comes down to: By late tonight, based on a few thousand Atlanta suburban votes, either Republicans will be chortling that Democrats can’t even win when the pump seems primed for them, or Democrats will be buoyant that an anti-Trump, pro-Obamacare tide has turned for them even in the South.

—––––– –––––— Arkansas Democrat-Gazette,