There was a small silver lining for Democrats Tuesday night, after they lost a highly anticipated special congressional election they seemed likely to win weeks ago.
Democrats came much closer than anyone expected to winning another special congressional election in South Carolina, which wasn’t a major focus of either party.
Republican Ralph Norman still won the race for South Carolina’s 5th Congressional District, so it won’t reduce the House Speaker Paul Ryan’s majority. But Norman received just 51.1 percent of the vote to Democrat Archie Parnell’s 47.9 percent.
Former GOP Rep. Mick Mulvaney, who resigned earlier this year to run the Office of Management and Budget under President Trump, won the seat by more than 20 points in November.
The race that was never supposed to be close ended up going to further down to the wire than the Georgia dogfight everyone anticipated.
Democrats have failed to win any of the special elections for Congress they have contested this year, despite a wave of anti-Trump anger and fundraising success. But they have overperformed in each of the mostly Republican districts where they have taken place.
In Georgia’s 6th Congressional District Tuesday night, Republican Karen Handel beat her highly touted Democratic opponent Jon Ossoff. But she won less than 53 percent of the vote while former GOP Rep. Tom Price, who resigned to become Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services exceeded 60 percent of the vote.
Both Price and 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney won the suburban Atlanta district by more than 20 points while Handel won by just 5.4 points. She did outperform Trump, however — he only carried the 6th by 1.5 points over Hillary Clinton in November.
It is possible all the districts that were in play this year have been too Republican in their underlying political sympathies to make a Democratic upset likely unless it comes by total surprise, as almost happened in South Carolina’s 5th. Republican underperformance could still be a bad sign for 2018, because there are less GOP-friendly districts in play — the party holds 23 districts won by Clinton last year and Democrats need to gain 24 seats to retake the House.
There are other factors in play in this race. Ossoff was young at age 30 and did not live in the congressional district. The Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party is likely to point out he was relatively centrist. Republicans spent millions tying Ossoff to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the liberal former speaker, anyway.
No one knows what the impact the attack on Republicans practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game, in which House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was seriously wounded, may have been as well.
At the same time, few Democrats are going to be able to raise the $23 million that helped make Ossoff competitive in a district that has been Republican since former House Speaker Newt Gingrich took office as a freshman congressman back in 1979.
This election also came at a point where Trump has been struggling with everything from the Russia investigation to the Republican legislative agenda, with approval ratings stuck around 40 percent nationally.
Nevertheless, Democrats looking for reasons for optimism and Republicans trying to remind themselves can look beyond Georgia to South Carolina.
