Tuesday’s special House election in Georgia carries with it an inordinate degree of focus on Donald Trump. The president created the House vacancy in the suburban district north of Atlanta after picking Representative Tom Price to be the secretary of Health and Human Services. Price had won the district handily for years, and had beat his 2016 Democratic rival by more than 20 points.
But Trump, on the other hand, barely won the district, doing just two points better than Hillary Clinton there. So early on, Democrats sought to nationalize the race as a referendum on Trump, finding themselves a young and promising candidate in Jon Ossoff. The 30-year-old Ossoff is a former congressional staffer and Atlanta native, who has presented himself as a moderating force on Trumpism in Washington, though his opponents and Republican super PACs have characterized him as immature, inexperienced, and too reliant on outside money and influences.
On the Republican side, meanwhile, several candidates have been jostling to replace Price. This has necessarily given Ossoff, as the only credible Democrat, a big lead in the polls while the big GOP field has splintered. Ossoff has been polling somewhere between the high 30s and low 40s, and private Republican polls, I’m told, see the same thing for the Democrat.
Republicans haven’t settled on one horse. Karen Handel, the former secretary of state who has run unsuccessfully for both governor and senator, has emerged with a small lead over the rest of the GOP pack and is considered an ally of Price. The expected low turnout and close poll margins suggest one of the other Republicans, most likely businessman Bob Gray or former state senator Dan Moody, could overtake her. (A poll released Monday showed Gray surging into second at…17 percent.)
While Ossoff is selling himself as a check on Trump, the Republicans have more or less embraced the president—some more zealously than others. The campaign manager for Gray, for instance, is the former Trump campaign director for Georgia, Brandon Phillips. Gray has cast himself as the most Trumpian of the candidates. One Gray ad features the candidate in camouflage waders pumping water out of a muddy swamp.
And Moody, who has been endorsed by Georgia senator and Trump ally David Perdue, has his own ad saying he “agrees” with the president on term limits, cutting taxes, protecting the border, and replacing Obamacare. “He has great ideas,” Moody says of Trump in the ad.
There are two critical questions for Tuesday’s election: Will Ossoff get over 50 percent and win the election outright? And if Ossoff is forced into a runoff by only winning a plurality, which Republican will he face?
The president himself hasn’t had much of a direct role until late in the campaign. On Sunday, he tweeted, “The recent Kansas election (Congress) was a really big media event, until the Republicans won. Now they play the same game with Georgia-BAD!” Then on Monday, the day before the election, he offered two more tweets: “The super Liberal Democrat in the Georgia Congressioal [sic] race tomorrow wants to protect criminals, allow illegal immigration and raise taxes!” and “With eleven Republican candidates running in Georgia (on Tuesday) for Congress, a runoff will be a win. Vote ‘R’ for lower taxes & safety!”
Finally, Trump recorded a last-minute robocall, according to the New York Times‘s Maggie Haberman, asking Republicans to “stop the super liberal Democrats and Nancy Pelosi’s group, and in particular Jon Ossoff.” It’s the first time Trump has mentioned the Democratic candidate by name in public, and his late involvement signals one thing: Republicans need a boost in voter turnout to counter the motivated Democratic voters in the district.
The results of Georgia’s race, perhaps even moreso than the surprise nail-biter special House election in Kansas last week, offer a good sense of how Trump and his young presidency are having an effect on our politics. The suburban, well-educated Georgia district is just the kind Democrats will need to win all over the country to take back the House in 2018. They’ll also have to improve their margins in those same places to win back the White House two years after that. If Trump can keep Republican voters coming out and Republican leaners from straying, we’ll get a clue on Tuesday.
