The Columbus Dispatch

Bitter primary in 2016 could haunt the Democrats

- DOYLE MCMANUS

After strong showings in two special elections for congressio­nal seats, Democrats are beginning to believe they have a real shot at winning control of the House of Representa­tives next year. But if they hope to succeed, they’re going to have to stop fighting one another.

The first straw in the wind came in Kansas, where a virtually unknown Democrat came within a few percentage points of winning the House seat that Mike Pompeo, now President Trump’s CIA director, won by 32 points only six months ago.

“That threw a scare into us,” a top Republican strategist in Washington confessed. “Even in conservati­ve districts, there’s a backlash against Trump.”

Even more tantalizin­g was last week’s primary election in the suburban Atlanta district once held by Tom Price, Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services. A 30-year-old Democratic newbie named Jon Ossoff took 48 percent of the vote and almost won the seat outright. Now Ossoff faces a tough runoff in June against a wellfunded Republican, Karen Handel, who wisely distanced herself from Trump.

In a district owned by the GOP for the last 37 years, Ossoff rode a wave of antiTrump enthusiasm and raised an astounding $8 million from Democrats around the country. He had help from a long list of progressiv­e groups, too, with one exception: Our Revolution, the political action committee founded by Bernie Sanders.

Why didn’t Sanders pitch in for Ossoff? “He’s not a progressiv­e,” the Vermont senator told the Washington Post.

By Sanders’ yardstick, that’s true. In a district Trump won narrowly in November, Ossoff ran as a generic moderate-to-liberal Democrat — a Hillary Clinton Democrat, in effect. A Bernie Sanderssty­le progressiv­e, he wasn’t.

But Sanders’ brusque dismissal of the Democrats’ hottest new face produced anguish even among some of his allies. “What was Bernie thinking?” a member of the Congressio­nal Progressiv­e Caucus moaned to me. “That’s going to make it harder for Ossoff to raise money for the runoff.”

On Friday, Sanders relented. “It is imperative that Jon Ossoff be elected,” he said in a written statement. “I applaud the energy and grassroots activism in Jon’s campaign.” But the episode revealed a problem for the Democrats: They seem trapped in an endless loop of their bitter 2016 primary campaign.

Intraparty squabbles normally wouldn’t matter much in a nonelectio­n year. But in addition to Georgia, House seats are up in Montana and South Carolina, conservati­ve states where Democrats need to cast a broad net.

Their strength in the Kansas and Georgia contests have led many to believe that they have a better-than-expected chance to gain 24 House seats in 2018, the number they need to gain a majority. “Georgia showed that the House is in play,” Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster and strategist, argued. “That was a huge turnout for a special election. Democrats are energized and mobilized.”

Still, the House remains an uphill battle, in part because redistrict­ing has made few seats susceptibl­e to change. And Democrats have a chronic problem turning out voters in a non-presidenti­al year. “Democrats underperfo­rmed the last two midterms by about 20 percent,” warned Doug Sosnik, a former aide to President Clinton. “Can they change that? Maybe, but just opposing Donald Trump won’t be enough.”

In Georgia’s sixth district race, for example, even though Ossoff came in first, he drew only a slightly larger percentage of the vote than Hillary Clinton did last year. DNC Chair Perez noted that at least 30,000 Democrats failed to turn out in the special election. Ossoff would have won outright if 5,500 of them had shown up.

In other words, to win a majority in the House, Democrats will have to do everything right. Running Sanders progressiv­es in every district is probably not one of those things. Democratic strategist­s have targeted 23 districts with Republican incumbents where Clinton won the presidenti­al vote. Most of those seats are in the Sun Belt, seven in California alone.

Many of the up-for-grabs districts are not natural progressiv­e territory, Mellman said: “The winning coalition in Georgia 6 is not a Bernie Sanders coalition.”

The Sanders-Perez notready-for-unity tour suggests that Democrats have a long way to go before the wounds of 2016 heal. They hope to change the party and change control of Congress, too. The choice before them is: Which do they want to do first?

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