The biggest test yet of the evident and increased Democratic voter enthusiasm will come in April, when voters in new HHS Secretary Tom Price’s old House district — Georgia’s “Fighting Sixth” — vote in the first round of the election to replace him.
Trafalgar Group, an Atlanta-based Republican pollster whose state-level polls were surprisingly accurate as to the November result, has a new poll of the race with some interesting findings. For one thing, President Trump’s approval numbers are vastly better today, at 51 percent and 10 percent net positive, than the 1.5-point margin by which he carried this district on November 8.
And then there’s the House ballot. For the moment, it shows an unclear race that’s headed to a runoff. The top several Republican hopefuls, on aggregate, enjoy a substantial but not decisive advantage of about 42 to 21 percent.
18.31% Jon Ossoff (D)
17.98% Karen Handel (R)
13.42% Bob Gray (R)
7.98% Judson Hill (R)
3.05% Amy Kremer (R)
2.82% Ron Slotin (D)
2.11% Dan Moody (R)
0.45% Bruce LeVell (R)
33.90% Other/undecided
All of these candidates will square off April 18 in a jungle primary. If no one gets 50 percent, the top two (regardless of party) will advance to a June runoff.
Robert Cahaly, the Trafalgar Group’s senior strategist, pointed to the poll as evidence that SuperPAC ads against Ossoff, implying that he’s padded his resume, are working. This is hard to say, given that there are no reliably comparable earlier results to compare it to, but what polls there are do point to Ossoff being in the 20s rather than the teens.
His statement of Republican SuperPACs’ goal here — that they want to get into an all-Republican runoff situation— seems to make sense in that context. Cahaly points out in his memo that, among older voters, Handel and Gray both finish slightly ahead of Ossoff. The thing is, this doesn’t account for what’s been happening in most of the special elections held at the stat legislative level since November. Unusually high Democratic turnout has not so far handed any race over to the Democrats, but it has created narrower Republican wins and larger Democratic ones than usual.
Also, the leading Republican candidates are sure to attack one another, given that it is not in their interest to get into an all-GOP runoff. Any Republican’s chances of making it to Congress improve in a runoff against a Democrat.
This Cobb County district typifies two major trends — first, the gradual re-emergence of Georgia as a state where Democrats are competitive (they haven’t been since they lost their grip on power in 2002), and second, wealthier and suburban voters’ rejection of Trump specifically, evidenced by Trump’s extremely poor performance within its boundaries compared to Mitt Romney in 2012.
For his part, the conservative Price always won easily with more than 60 percent of the vote. The seat is Republicans’ to lose, but Trump’s narrow win shows that it isn’t a lock in a low-turnout special election where highly motivated Democratic voters could turn out disproportionately.
