Democrats in distress
Now that Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff ’s overcapitalized congressional campaign has tanked, his Bay Area investors should feel as uneasy as Uber’s — and without the gratifying prospect of firing a wayward CEO, although House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s stock has certainly slumped. The Democrats’ special-election losses this week showed that what they have in freefloating anti-Trump money and angst they lack in strategy, message and candidates.
At one for five in this year’s special congressional elections — the one being a Southern California district where the GOP is moribund — the Democratic batting average is languishing around the Mendoza Line. The party’s most strenuous effort, for the seat Tom Price vacated to become President Trump’s health and human services secretary, yielded its most crushing loss. Republican Karen Handel defeated Ossoff by nearly four percentage points, more than twice Trump’s November margin.
A documentary filmmaker and former congressional aide, Ossoff is the sort of candidate the ossified national party often favors in close races — lightly seasoned, studiously bland and loosely linked to the district, where he doesn’t happen to live. While he avoided casting the election as a referendum on Trump, Democrats clearly hoped it would be. Meanwhile, Handel, a veteran politician, showed partisan tribalism goes both ways. Her supporters aggressively linked Ossoff to Pelosi and “San Francisco values,” even ticking off Muni with an ad featuring a digitally altered cable car.
The Democratic flub may well reinforce Washington’s Republican-ruled status quo, starting with the health care deform that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is crafting under cover of darkness. However, as one might expect under a historically unpopular Republican president, the special elections also revealed unrealized potential for Democratic gains.
Ironically, a Democrat came closer to an upset in Tuesday’s other special election — one the national party hardly contested — in a rural South Carolina district that Trump won by 19 points. Democrats saw similar double-digit improvements over Hillary Clinton’s showing in the year’s other special elections: in Montana, Kansas and California, where the GOP got less than 4 percent of the primary vote, trailing six Democrats and a Green. Even in Georgia’s Sixth (which has seen dramatic redrawings), Ossoff ’s showing was by far the best by a Democratic congressional candidate since before Newt Gingrich won the seat in 1978.
Taken together, the special elections suggested that going into next year’s midterms, the Democrats have not only significant advantages but also an impressive ability to squander them.