Last night was probably Democrat Jon Ossoff’s best chance to win Georgia’s Sixth District, and he fell a bit short of the 50 percent vote share he needed to win without a runoff. In an interview this week before the vote, Tom Perez offered the excuse in advance that “Republicans in Georgia gerrymandered the heck out of” the district, so any success by Ossoff would be a moral victory.

This is false to the point of being rather annoying. First of all, it was the Democrats who originally drew this district in 1992 with the explicit aim of concentrating as many Republican voters as possible in one district. There was only one Republican congressman from Georgia at that time, by the name of Newt Gingrich. They made a point of excluding his town from the district in an effort to get rid of him, and so he had to move there to run for re-election.