SURPRISE OR NOT?
by Sharon Rondeau
(Jun. 20, 2017) — Two seats vacated in South Carolina and Georgia, respectively, will see Republicans replacing their predecessors of the same party in the U.S. House of Representatives after special elections on Tuesday.
In South Carolina’s Fifth Congressional District, Republican Ralph Norman won over Democrat Archie Parnell to occupy the seat left open by Mick Mulvaney, who became President Donald Trump’s Office of Management & Budget (OMB) Director.
Democrats had hoped to win the seat after Norman won the Republican primary by only 221 votes, although the district has been firmly Republican since 2010, when Mulvaney was first elected.
The race in Georgia’s Sixth District was much more closely watched as Democrat donors, most of whom live outside of Georgia, poured tens of millions into the campaign of Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old political newcomer. The contest was called for Republican and former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel at approximately 10:07 p.m. EDT by CNN.
The seat was vacated by Dr. Tom Price, who was confirmed as Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary in February.
Many in the media touted the Georgia race as a “referendum” on Trump’s performance in the White House thus far. CNN had called the race a “high-stakes special election.”
At 10:19 p.m., Fox News’s Bret Baier declared the Georgia Sixth race as “the most expensive House race in U.S. history” with $50 million spent. A number of other sources had predicted that to be the case as early as last month.
Ossoff was widely said to be leading in polls leading up to Tuesday’s vote. On June 16, the website forward.com published an article titled, “Republicans Panic as Polls Show Ossoff Pulling Upset.”
Polls taken during the 2016 presidential election favoring Hillary Clinton over Trump proved to be inaccurate, although Clinton won the popular vote. Trump has claimed that the number of illegal aliens voting in the election could have accounted for that pyrrhic victory for Clinton.
The most important take away from this race is that, somehow the $30 million Osoff (barista lookalike-D) spent bought 15% of the vote. The GOP must slice and dice the results of this race with a very sharp knife. It is very hard to believe that so many voters who were for Trump in November were against him in June.
Going from a 19% margin of victory in November to a 5% margin in June would appear to be the result of the dems going into overdrive on getting out the vote. Anyway, I await the analysis. IF, and only IF, this is evidence of how much better the dems can do by really bearing down on get out the vote, then that is a huge warning to the GOP. At this time, on the face of it, this means a lot of GOP victories with narrow margins from the last election are in danger of going the other way. — The few remaining realists in the democrat party will know that they need to focus their resources only on the most vulnerable races and think in terms of a ten year time frame. But right now, their ideas are economically self-destructive. It won’t be until they find another set of compelling ideas that they will find their way out of the woods.