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.
What the Democrats did back in the early 1990s was indeed “gerrymandering,” so in that sense Perez is making a valid point. But subsequent redistricting or “gerrymandering” by Republicans in 2005 and 2011 has in fact deliberately made the seat more competitive, not less.
And that’s the entire point of “gerrymandering” as it’s done today. The party in power — either party — tries to make its own seats and districts less safe when drawing the map so as to give themselves better opportunities in other districts. And that’s why more Democratic areas in DeKalb County were added into Georgia’s Sixth District after the last census. If your own party’s members win re-election with 90 percent of the vote, then you’re missing opportunities elsewhere.
Incidentally, this is precisely where President Barack Obama, the DNC and everyone else using rhetoric about “gerrymandering” polarizing the electorate is either wrong or deliberately exploiting public ignorance. Republican gerrymandering has not created the Freedom Caucus or government shutdowns or any other such thing. In Republican hands, the power of drawing the map is a very modest force working against Republican ideological intransigence (perhaps not working hard enough), because it makes Republican House members a bit less safe in exchange for making the party more electorally competitive in more places even if the current incumbents leave.
If the current maps of the 50 states, most of them drawn by Republicans, have created ideological intransigence, it would tend to be among Democrats. Republicans have tried to make Democratic seats safer on purpose so that there will be fewer of them, just as the Democrats in Georgia once tried to do to the Republicans. And maybe there is an argument to be made that this has contributed to the Democratic Party’s current extremism and insularity, but I don’t think it’s an argument most Democrats want to make.
Georgia’s 2002 election was the classic example demonstrating that a gerrymander can only do so much for you. Democrats, then in power, got very greedy. They created far too many leaner districts for themselves at all levels. Then the election turned out to be a statewide Republican wave, and they got crushed everywhere. The state Senate Majority Leader (Charles Walker, currently a federal inmate) created a House seat for his son. The son lost, the dad lost his re-election, and the Democrats lost both houses of the state legislature for the first time since Reconstruction. Democrats cleverly redistricted themselves out of power.
In the case of Ossoff and the Sixth District, it may well be that Republicans similarly overreached, although not as dramatically, when they drew this seat in its current form ahead of the 2012 election. Maybe last night’s result is just what you get with the unusual turnout that special elections bring. But maybe the Republicans made it too competitive for their own good, and their “dummymander” is only catching up with them now.
We’ve never seen a real contested two-party congressional race in this district. With Democrats facing far more obviously realistic pickup opportunities elsewhere, and facing pressure to defend other seats in general elections, former Rep. Tom Price consistently ran against non-entities, including a candidate whose very existence was doubted by some people in 2016.
A special election turns out an unusual mix of voters, but it also puts all the national spotlight and both parties’ attention on one seat. It’s quite possible that Georgia’s Sixth District is a bit more competitive than people had assumed, and all it took was a highly energized anti-Trump Democratic base and a chaotic 18-candidate field to lay the truth bare.
I wouldn’t write off Ossoff in the June 20 runoff. But I would note that he enjoyed an advantage in Round One that he won’t have from here out. Republicans basically had to convince the faithful to come out and vote against him without having a positive message or a single flag to rally round. Now they have an actual candidate (Karen Handel) instead of a dozen of them, and if she can now make the case for herself in an uncluttered environment instead of just being against someone, the Republicans have a realistic chance of performing better in June than they did last night.
