Atlanta
Reminders of campaign glory form a red stripe across the white walls of a cramped conference room in a GOP fundraising office. There is a poster commemorating “NIXON” in colorful all-caps, as well as framed photographs marking the victories of George W. Bush. Cartoons of former first ladies stretch from corner to corner. Missing was any reference to Donald J. Trump. Maybe Karen Handel chose to meet here because it’s the only place in Georgia where he isn’t hanging over her head.
Handel, 55 and businesslike, is the Republican candidate for the state’s Sixth Congressional District, a Texas-shaped glob just north of Atlanta. Given the area’s electoral history, any Democratic challenger should be irrelevant here. Tom Price, who resigned in January to become Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, was reelected here six times without his support dipping below 62 percent. Republican senator Johnny Isakson, Price’s predecessor, won the seat three times by large margins. And Isakson’s predecessor was House speaker Newt Gingrich, who held the seat for 10 terms. But Trump carried the district by only a single point in 2016—where Romney had won it by 23 points four years before. This swath of suburbia is no populist haven, particularly since reapportionment in 2011 concentrated the Sixth in territory closer to Atlanta. Lopped off the district was Cherokee County, which favored the president over Hillary Clinton by 50 points last November. Handel could use a few of the 80,000 votes Trump won there—she’s polling neck and neck with her Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff, who has leveraged anti-Trump energy nationwide into a campaign flush with cash and symbols of “resistance” to the administration.
Ossoff is a documentary filmmaker and a former congressional aide. He hadn’t even turned 30 when he launched his bid in January, and a super-PAC used footage of him dressed as Han Solo during college to remind voters of his youth. Ossoff nearly won the seat outright during the first vote on April 18, coming just two points short of the necessary 50 percent. Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state, bested 10 GOP rivals to advance to the June 20 runoff.
Ossoff is a political Janus, flirting with progressives while campaigning like a moderate. He initially pledged to “make Trump furious,” and a fundraising haul unprecedented for a House race followed: $8.3 million in the first quarter with 95 percent of the donors from outside Georgia. Having quickly overshadowed the rest of his party’s field, Ossoff made the sort of strategic pivot that generally typifies presidential contests between the primary season and the general election. In January, he was calling Trump “an embarrassment and a threat” to Georgians. By April, he was telling Chris Matthews that he only lacked “great personal admiration” for the president. He wouldn’t bite when Matthews goaded him for more. “I’m pragmatic,” Ossoff said, “and one of the things that would be refreshing about representing this district is that it is a pragmatic, moderate district.” Ossoff’s campaign did not respond to interview requests for this article.
The progression of Ossoff’s politicking irks Handel. “The notion that he is somehow going to be this pragmatist is just absurd,” she tells me, going on to use words like “misleading,” “deceiving,” and “deceitful” to describe Ossoff’s sales pitch, which includes eliminating wasteful spending and boosting the district’s tech economy. During a May fundraiser with House speaker Paul Ryan, she quipped that her opponent “talks like a Republican.”
What he talks like is a professional politician, going before the cameras to proclaim that “both parties in Congress waste a lot of your money.” His rhetoric is practiced and precise, and his cadence is familiar—so much so that he seemed to speak with the rhythm and ponderous uhhs of Barack Obama during a televised debate with Handel on June 6.
On the stump, Handel attacks Ossoff’s credibility. “Honestly, from what I’ve seen, the Handel campaign is not about Handel at all. It’s about Ossoff,” Georgia State University political science professor and Sixth District resident Jeff Lazarus tells me. “The thrust of the Handel campaign is that Ossoff is unqualified to be a member of Congress.” It’s true that Ossoff inflated just a tad his national security credentials from his time as a legislative aide to Georgia congressman Hank Johnson. And Handel has tried to tar Ossoff with Johnson’s liberal voting history. Do voters trust his posturing, she asks, or do they see “the most liberal of the left who are the power behind his campaign”?
In a twist, Handel is trying to dodge defending Trump with a professed pragmatism of her own. An Indianapolis Colts fan, she uses a football metaphor to describe her approach to legislating. “The teams that win—generally, their whole strategy isn’t a Hail Mary pass. Their strategy is get first downs, move the ball,” she said. Not too long ago, such an opinion could’ve earned a sitting GOP lawmaker a primary challenger. She’s mindful of the shift and points out that Republicans are in charge of both Congress and the White House.
“I don’t know the exact number, but somewhere close to half of the House Republicans currently have never served under a Republican president,” she notes. “So these are individuals specifically elected to be the vocal opposition. And that’s a different approach than being in a governing mode.” She points to her time in the Republican minority on the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, where she styled herself a “fixer,” not a rabble-rouser. She said she’d do the same in Congress, taking Trump’s agenda “one issue at a time.”
There’s likely no other path to victory for her in what would normally be a safe Republican seat. “I don’t want to completely downplay the role of campaigns and campaign messaging,” Judd Thornton, another Georgia State political scientist, tells me, “but none of this would matter if Trump weren’t so unpopular.”
Chris Deaton is a deputy online editor at The Weekly Standard.
