Voters in suburban Atlanta head to the polls Tuesday for a special House election contest that offers an early test President Trump’s political standing, with Democrats sensing an opportunity.
Both parties are monitoring the results in the Republican-leaning 6th district for clues to the emerging 2018 playing field. Traditionally, the midterm elections are overwhelmingly influenced by voters’ level of satisfaction with the president.
The previous three midterms delivered massive gains for the party not in control of the White House. On Monday, the president’s job approval rating clocked in at 42.4 percent in the RealClearPolitics average.
“Democrats need to make inroads in suburban districts like Georgia 6 if they want to flip the House,” said a Republican official, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.
Special elections can be unpredictable. Sometimes, they are harbingers of what’s to come in the general election, sometimes not. Turnout rarely reaches that of a regular general election.
But to gain seats and threaten the Republicans’ control of Congress, the Democrats are going to have to push the GOP in affluent, conservative-leaning seats like this one near Atlanta, and in swing districts with a similar voter profile.
Republicans have held the 6th district since New Gingrich, who rose to become House speaker, captured it in 1978. It opened in January when Tom Price joined the administration as Health and Human Services secretary.
Price won re-election with 62 percent of the vote; Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton there by just 1.5 percentage points.
For the president, the result was emblematic of a pattern of weakness for the president with white collar, suburban Republicans, and among the reasons why the Democrats have poured so many resources into this race, as opposed to last week’s closer than expected special election in Kansas 4th district. Trump won that district by 27 points in November; the winning Republican in the special election won by less than 10 points.
If Democrats, amid Trump’s subpar ratings, can’t attract suburban GOP voters in upscale Atlanta, and motivate low propensity Democrats there who are less likely than Republicans to vote in midterm elections, the party’s prospects for reclaiming the House might be dim. House Republicans hold a 24-seat majority; the GOP is defending 23 seats that voted for Clinton over Trump last year.
“Democrats are trying to figure out how to turn out low propensity voters, but most Democratic candidates aren’t going to have as much money as Ossoff, so they’ll have to be more efficient and creative next year,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor and publisher of Inside Elections, a nonpartisan political forecaster.
Democrat Jon Ossoff is on track to finish first, though short of the 50 percent threshold required to avoid a runoff. A recent poll pegged the 30-year-old former congressional aide’s support at 42 percent.
A crowd of Republicans is fighting for second place, led by businessman and former councilman Bob Gray; former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel; businessman and former state legislator Dan Moody (who was endorsed by Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga.) and state Sen. Judson Hill.
The Republican nominee would be favored in a runoff.
Win or lose, Democrats are excited because round one provided them evidence of a return of progressive energy. The party didn’t meet turnout projections in key states in 2016, but motivation to oppose Trump seems to have awoken the Left.
Ossoff, unknown before running in this race, collected more than $8 million in the first quarter of the year, with money, and boots on the ground to turn out the vote, pouring in from all over the country.
Democratic insiders will be watching how close Ossoff gets to 50 percent.
Privately, they concede he is headed to a runoff. But operatives say that in a district where the Democrat typically ends up in the 30s, they’ll be satisfied with anything north of 40 percent, hopeful that it will position Ossoff to compete in the runoff.
“If Jon Ossoff can win — or even outperform previous Democratic candidates — it will be due to him winning over Republican voters in a Republican district,” said Ed Espinoza, a Democratic strategist based in Austin. “That is a very bad sign for both the White House and [House] Speaker [Paul] Ryan.”
The Republicans are spending millions to hold Ossoff below 50 percent. The National Republican Congressional Committee has been active in the race; so has Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Ryan.
But rather than prove the GOP’s weakness, Republicans say they were simply forced to even the playing field after so much money flowed to Ossoff, and he was running virtually unopposed while the Republicans attacked each other scrambling for a spot in the runoff.
Plus, Republicans caught the Democrats in the chase for early votes, signaling that GOP field operations have had an impact and that conservatives might not be as complacent some of the polling, and the results in the Kansas special election, suggested.
Republicans concede that the results in Georgia 6 could have an impact on fundraising and candidate recruitment. A stronger finish by Ossoff, even in eventual defeat, could boost both for the Democrats going forward. Of course, the opposite outcome could have the same effect on the GOP.
And, similar to Gonzales’ analysis, the Republicans point out that the Democrats in 2018 won’t have the luxury of investing more than $10 million in every House race.
That the Democrats had every financial advantage in Georgia, and an early field advantage, and still appeared unlikely to win, is comforting Republicans that they are weathering Trump’s early missteps and chaotic style, positioning their party to hold the majority.
“It’s one thing to gin up a new conventional wisdom about liberal enthusiasm but ultimately they need to put a win on the board in order to justify an argument that the environment has shifted,” Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist, said.
