Today, we’ll finally get some answers after countless articles have been written about the special congressional election in the 6th District of Georgia. The spectacle has turned 30-year-old Democrat Jon Ossoff, an independent filmmaker and former congressional staffer, into something of a rockstar. It’s reported that he’s raised an astonishing eight million dollars for his campaign, much of it coming from liberal outlets like Daily Kos and MoveOn.org.
There are actually several other Democrats running in the jungle primary (where you need 50% to win outright and avoid a June runoff election), but they’ve been blotted out. A last second Clout Research poll shows “former State Senator Ron Slotin, the only other prominent-ish Democrat in the running, pull[ing] only 1 percent.” It appears that the left’s votes will not be diluted.
The Clout poll, as well as an Emerson College survey from last week, shows Ossoff polling in the low forties. In fact, the last nine polls going back to March have been remarkably consistent on their measurement of Ossoff’s support. Even when they push undecideds, none of them get him above 49%.
But that doesn’t mean that he can’t clear the magic 50% number and win the seat tonight. A lot will depend on how many voters are mobilized and also by how well Ossoff has done with his persuasion effort. There are signs that the low-propensity voters are more engaged or self-motivated to vote on the left than on the right, and Ossoff should have an impressive and united ground game.
The Republicans in the race are getting comparatively little attention, even as the eventual owner of this seat is not unlikely to be the winner of second place tonight. Robert Costa of the Washington Post gives us a flavor of the infighting and division in that scrum.
Interactions with Trump’s political brand have veered from hearty embrace (Dan Moody, Bob Gray, Bruce LeVell, Amy Kremer) to support but not always rah-rah (Karen Handel, Judson Hill) to flat-out defiance (David Abroms). Most of the leading candidates have bounced between those poles depending on the day or the latest controversy…
…Endorsements from prominent Republican players have been scattered to the point of muddying the field. [Sen. David] Perdue has backed Moody. [Newt] Gingrich supports Hill, as does Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.). Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski endorsed LeVell. Former senator Saxby Chambliss is for Handel. But the conservative Club for Growth has opposed Handel and boosted Gray. To counter the club, the Ending Spending advocacy group, which is backed by the billionaire Ricketts family, has poured millions behind Handel’s candidacy.
It goes on and on like that further down the line in the state. One group or officeholder goes for Handel, another goes for Gray, another jumps in for Moody or Hill, and Trump supporters of different degrees poke and prod one another on social media.
Unsurprisingly, no one has caught fire, and constant squabbling has remained the thrust of the GOP race.
Obviously, all this internecine combat comes at the expense of focus on Ossoff, allowing the clean-cut Democrat to get a bit of a free ride. If he doesn’t secure the seat tonight by winning 50% of the vote, he’ll face a new climate tomorrow where the Republicans are focusing most of their attention on him.
But it may not be so easy to repair the hurt feelings or replace the depleted resources of this rugged Republican brawl. If a Pro-Trump candidate takes second place tonight, it’s not clear that they’ll be able to unite the anti-Trump factions under their banner. The Clout Research poll has pro-Trump Bob Gray leading Karen Handel 17% to 15%, while the Emerson survey has the situation exactly reversed with Handel leading 17% to 15%. If those polls are close to accurate, neither of them is a lock to win even half the Republican votes tonight. That’s a big pool of people who cared enough about the race to vote but supported a loser. In a runoff, Ossoff wouldn’t need to win many of these potentially disaffected voters, but he would have to win some.
A lot has been invested already in the narrative of this race, and it’s somewhat arbitrary to argue that there will be hugely meaningful differences in the significance of this election depending on whether Ossoff wins outright or barely misses. Either way, this is a seat that Health & Human Services Secretary Tom Price carried by 23 points just five months ago. If Ossoff carries close to 50% of the vote, that will signal a significant erosion of Republican support. On the other hand, if he only carries 40 or 41 percent, that won’t really be that much of a change.
The hope on the left is that districts like this will begin to move their way. Trump carried the district by a single point, showing a massive gulf between how the district felt about him and how they felt about the man he would tap to lead his effort to dismantle Obamacare. If that gulf is erased tonight to the Democrats’ benefit, it could be a true indicator of a political realignment in tony suburbs all over the country.
Yet, as I have tried to point out repeatedly, this realignment won’t really benefit the left in the long run if the flip side of it is that the more exurban and rural districts move even further in Trump’s direction.
To give an illustration of what I’m talking about, when President Obama ran for reelection in 2012, he suffered a ten point loss in the percentage of his two-party support in just two Pennsylvania counties (midwestern Cambria and Elk). In 2016, Hillary saw a 10-point reduction in two-party support compared to Obama’s 2012 performance in 23 Pennsylvania counties, and in 45 counties when compared to 2008. In 2008, Obama carried 50% of the vote in southwest Greene County, costing him 60 net votes against John McCain. In 2016, Clinton won 29% of the vote in Greene County, costing her 6,367 net votes against Donald Trump. A 10% or greater drop-off in support in 45 counties compared to 2008 explains why Clinton lost even when bringing in more net votes combined out of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh than Obama ever did.
This same basic story also occurred in many other states, some of which, like Virginia, Clinton held on to win. On the whole, this realignment disfavors the left by making them uncompetitive in most of the counties in the country, meaning that it’s hard to find state legislative districts that elect members of both parties. This is not a realignment that should be embraced or accelerated, even though it could pay near-term benefits by helping the Democrats win back a very narrow and perilous majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
If the Democrats can win over the tax-averse well-educated white professional vote and carry affluent suburban districts, that’s great. But they need to do it without at the same time going from 50% to 29% in places like Greene County, Pennsylvania.
The answer is simple. Run more socialists.
Wrong question.
The most important question is how does it effect the French election?
.
If the Democrat wins, it will cause consternation at the White House and cause Trump to seek a diversion by attacking North Korea.
If the GOP wins, it will embolden Trump to attack North Korea.
I wish that were more obviously not true.
OK,
You win the day.
.
Ossoff needn’t win over Republicans disaffecting in the first round disagreements. He just needs some to stay home for the second round.
I don’t really understand why you’re so fixated on the rural vote. We don’t need it to control Congress. We can easily get Congress by 2020 with just current swing districts and states. The real rural vote is only 15% of the population now – it’s too small to be determinative.
I’m not familiar with state legislatures in detail, but the problem in places like Pennsylvania is more likely the extremity of gerrymandering, not the urban-rural divide. The problem is that in the more extreme gerrymanders we need to win states by 60-40%, not that there’s any particular need to carry rural districts.
Maybe you should consider the possibility that I know what I’m talking about.
First of all, gerrymandering is a problem that is both exaggerated and exacerbated by not having control of any state legislatures.
What happens when the Democrats lose 10-20% support in 45 of 68 counties in Pennsylvania?
Well, obviously, a Democrat can win a state legislative seat if the top of the ticket is losing by 60 votes. They can’t do it when the top of the ticket is getting 29% of the vote.
Greene County is extreme, seeing the second most dramatic swing in the state. But the phenomenon is the same in 44 other counties representing most of the legislative seats, and certainly the majority of the ticket splitting areas.
Here, take a look (and sorry that the formatting is hard to read):
Currently, the Republicans hold a 34-16 majority in the Senate and a 121-81 majority in the House.
I think you’re being led astray by the area maps the Republicans love because they make their rural support look so important. Pennsylvania is only 21% rural by population – slightly more than the country as a whole with 19%. If the districting were fair, that’s only 21% of districts, and no matter how atrocious our performance there it couldn’t shut us out of state government. That’s not a reason to abandon them – I agree that campaigning in rural areas and addressing valid rural issues are great ideas – but the rural vote is not in general a must-have.
Granted, with the massive gerrymandering the rural vote is probably more important than its proportion. But you need a different message for that, which is that with extreme gerrymandering we have to peel off some part of the Republican coalition to win. That’s a different message both morally and practically that “we have to do much better in rural areas”.
I think you just have a basic misunderstanding of the difference between geographically sorting and gerrymandering. And it’s devastating to your understanding of the nature of the problem.
The Democrats have two main Philly-based districts in the House, both of which give them more than 80% of the vote. Some of that vote can be redrawn into adjoining suburban districts to make all of the area seats more competitive, but it’s not really a problem of gerrymandering. We’re talking about five or six seats that might be made more even, but only perhaps three that would thereby be truly competitive. The problem is that Philly Co. nets the Democrats about 450,000 to 500,000 votes in a high turnout presidential election, and that those votes aren’t evenly distributed though the more than a hundred state legislative districts.
One way of looking at it is to pretend that the Dems are assured of a certain amount of votes (they aren’t) and then to ask how they’d want those votes distributed statewide. Our strategy is good for making us win the seats we’re already winning by more while losing the seats we’re losing by more, and then the clincher is that a bunch of seats move from competitive to noncompetitive, but they’re all seats that wind up red.
Our only tangible gain is to win a handful of competitive seats that we were losing more often than winning. But the cost is the loss of dozens of competitive seats that are no longer winnable.
Your point is well taken but I think it’s important that we don’t let the issue of gerrymandering drop off our radar. The 2010 redistricting was the first time computer drawn districts were adopted in a big way as a partisan weapon. The difference between modern big data gerrymandering and the traditional practice is substantial.
even the free online tools around in 2010 still assumed precincts would remain intact when in fact it got done at the house level instead
Booman is right though too, we gerrymandered ourselves by mainly living in cities. So we need 2 strategies one to speak to our base and one to speak to rural voters in a way that doesn’t betray either
I don’t agree with Boo to the degree that he puts in the rural vote but lean in his direction based on what I’ve seen on the ground here in Missouri.
First lets talk Federal, Congressional, then statewide Fed races. Yes, Congressional districts are gerrymandered, some states are worse than others. In terms of winning those races, agreed, not much we can do about it. But when it comes to statewide Fed races, it’s vital that Dems run “out here” (I live in what was the reddest county in MO only to lose out to another by .03% last year). True, no statewide Federal Dem candidate will ever win my county and countless ones like it. But they have to cut the margin of defeat by at least 10 points so that the blue areas carry the day. The Popular Vote Loser won 82% of the vote here last year. That’s 5% more than Rmoney got in 12. Rmoney in turn got 5.5% more than Gramps McCain. Our demographics haven’t changed one iota in terms of both ethnicity and numbers.
Of all people, Feckless Claire McCaskill understands this based on her thumping when she ran for governor. She goes out and campaigns in rural areas she knows she ain’t gonna win. But that sends a message to otherwise meh Dems and Dem-leaning indies.
There’s how your rural/urban divide plays out. We don’t need to appeal to the already-voting Reps out here, we simply need to appeal to the rest to make the difference.
State legislature districts are not necessarily gerrymandered to death and here’s where state party machinery rules and alas, the Dem party has failed in many states. That more than anything else is why we don’t compete rurally at the state legislature level.
It’s worth noting that, in some states, like purple VA, there is a growing number of vote-eligible minorities in exurbia, especially, but also in rural areas. Whether they actually do vote is another issue but they could, over time, start diluting the extreme conservatism of those areas.
I’m still concerned that there will be some serious electoral ratf*cking of this election by the GOP.
Things are more complicated but I can give you a little bit of a demonstration of your point in the data.
The Philly suburbs are made up of four counties (Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester).
Among these, Chester is the moving from exurban to suburban. Delaware is more working class but also has a large city (Chester) that skews it Democratic. Montgomery is the most diverse suburb. And Bucks is the least diverse with the most working class white folks.
So, let’s look at how these performed in the last three elections:
BUCKS -26084 -24841 -1243
CHESTER 2156 -23941 26097
DELAWARE 3138 -2658 5796
MONTGOMERY 5510 -28866 34376
Now, here’s what you’re looking at:
The first number is how many fewer (or more) net votes Clinton got than Obama’s 2008 performance. The second number is how many votes Obama lost in his 2012 reelection bid relative to 2008. And the third number is how many fewer (or more) votes Clinton got compared to his weaker 2012 performance.
Looking at the middle number, you can see that in 2012 Obama bled previous support in all the suburbs except Delaware Co.
Looking at the third number, you can see that most of the damage in Bucks had already occurred before Clinton ran.
What you can see is that Clinton repaired the damage done in 2012 in Chester, Montgomery and Delaware Cos. and even modestly improved on Obama’s 2008 performance. She pulled more (net) votes out of the suburbs than Obama had in his landslide election.
Let’s look at the same thing for the two big cities (Pittsburgh is in Allegheny County):
ALLEGHENY 6331 -11158 17489
PHILADELPHIA -3482 13580 -17062
Here you can see from the third number that Clinton actually got about 400 more net votes out of the cities when compared to Obama’s 2008 landslide performance despite not doing quite so well in Philly.
She also really improved on his performance in Pittsburgh.
To your point, increasing diversity in the Philly suburbs probably helped Clinton, but erosion with the white working class explains why Bucks remained an outlier.
Bottom line: Clinton hit her targets and even exceeded them in both the cities and the suburbs, doing better than Obama in 2008. And she lost.
She lost because the rural and exurban counties turned against her with a vengeance.
I need to make a correction.
She did not pull more votes out of the suburbs than Obama did in 2008. She did that in three of the four counties, but the were more than wiped out by losses in Bucks.
She did, however, pull more votes out of the suburbs than Obama did in 2012.
I have thought of the comparison of Bucks (you know PA far better than I) to this race, and to Oakland County in Michigan, Wake County in NC (RTP) and maybe Hillsborough in Florida.
GA-06 has a very educated population. 60% of the district has a college degree, and 65% of whites have college degrees. You can argue it was educated that defined the swings in 2016.
The race is an interesting test of Democratic ability to win upscale districts.
My fear is we improve, but not enough to win these seats. And as you point out, we continue to bleed rural votes (as we did in KS-04)
It feels like the Democrats are being set-up here. Clinton vastly outperformed other Democrats. Barksdale’s numbers in the Senate race in these counties were about the same as Obama’s numbers in 2012. (As were Estes numbers to Roberts in Kansas-04 ) GA-6 includes only a portions of Cobb, and Dekalb and Fulton but the point is the Democratic performance in other races in that area wasn’t close to Clinton’s.
Ossoff is polling at about the midpoint between Obama’s performance in ’12 (38%) and Clinton’s performance (47). Notably the EV doesn’t suggest Ossoff is likely to get 50% (see Michael McDonald’s numbers) and in 2016 Democrats performed 7% better in the EV than on election day (In the house race the Dem got 42% of the EV in GA-6 versus 35% on election day).
The runoff will be a completely difference race. Ossoff’s money advantage will allow him to go negative in a very big way against whomever his opponent is, but at the end of the day this is a pretty big hill to climb.
If Ossoff is able to get close to Clinton’s number it would suggest Trump has damaged the GOP brand generally in a way I don’t think we saw in KS-04.
Republicans have the edge in money and spending:
Hopefully this reflects the need by GOP candidates to make the second round, and Ossoff is conserving some of his 18 million.
8 million – not 18..
I posted this last year. It is tough to read, but the point was the swings within Bucks Counter were interesting in and of themselves. Clinton did better in Obama in the places with higher income. She also did better among those with better education.
The swings to Clinton in the high income high education towns is very similar to GA-6,
A thing to remember here is that Bucks is a highly anomalous result in the overall picture. Your data helps explain why, but it also isn’t of tremendous use for explaining the state as a whole.
Bucks is anomalous because it’s a suburban area that didn’t swing back Clinton’s way. It’s also a district where the bulk of erosion took place four years earlier than in the rest of the state. Why that is, I’m really not sure.
There are other counties like Bucks in other states, as you point out, so it’s useful to look at.
But the general trend was toward a modest erosion in rural/working class areas between 2008 and 2012, followed by a massive devastating loss between 2012 and 2016.
At the same time, most of the suburbs swung back to Clinton and even performed modestly better for her than they had in 2008.
So, this is the shitty realignment I am referring to, which is not a good tradeoff even if the absolute numbers even out. So far, they don’t, but even if they did it would be a bad trade because it helps the other side win more state and local races overall, and it’s generally bad for House races.
I don’t think the trade can net to zero. In other words you can’t make up the vote you lose in rural America with districts like GA-6.
And that is before you get to considerations like gerrymandering.
We have to win some of the rural votes back: no two ways about it.
Which in some ways makes the argument about WHY we lost irrelevant. Democrats cannot move on issues like gay rights or abortion. You may be able to split the difference in immigration in some minor way, but you will never get to Trump’s right and you will never be able to move off the moral principles that the Party stands for on the issue.
So there really isn’t any alternative but to try and make populist economics work.
There are just not enough districts like GA-6.
The nightmare that I fear is the GOP wins back the losses in place like GA-6 and holds on to the rural voters.
We agree completely.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it summed up better.
Booman–you had been wondering about details on some of the Indiana regional wins. This is the first bit I have seen with more detail on the campaigns…
https://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2017/04/important-why-blue-america-supports.html
“These local elections are important– every one of these races occurred in the 6th Congressional District where my opponent, Peter Roskam, won by 18 points against his Blue Dog opponent last fall. These local victories were not just Democratic victories– these were progressive candidates who won seats in historically Republican held territory.”
Stoller says he thinks the Georgia candidate is actually better than his campaign. It seems to be pretty traditional DCCC tropes…
Er, Illinois. My bad.
We may want to consider if the Democratic brand is too badly damaged to even get consideration for rural voters do we want to try something a little more drastic.
Could we create a splinter party that would be part of the voting coalition in Congress and at state legislatures. It could even have the same platform as Dems but focus more on the the parts that matter to rural voters.
The trick would be that Democrats could not run candidates at all in these districts.
Not sure if this has been covered elsewhere but from issue polling I’ve seen there is always a disconnect between the policy that people support and the candidates they support. That signals to me a branding issue along with a message issue.
No. Even if its a viable idea (maybe) the dem leadership will be willing to put all its resources into crushing this and likely succeed as they usually do.
It would have to come from Dem leadership otherwise it wouldn’t work
My pet fantasy is that all Democrats reregister as Republicans.
If it was all-white, it would work.
Of course, then it wouldn’t even be stealth-Democratic.
isn’t it kinda that way in MN, I know they kind of merged at this point but a farmer’s party or some sort of eqivalent
Aside from the fact that the math doesn’t work, the problem with writing off rural areas for tony suburbs is that the Dems will steer away from economic populism to carry those areas. If the leftmost party is the party of the wealthy, everyone else is trapped. The Sanders movement, above all, was a movement back to economic issues, which Clinton barely suppressed with the whole party apparatus behind her. People are not going to tolerate continued economic stagnation and increasing inequality, and if the Democrats insist on pandering to the “tax-adverse”, someone else will take those votes.
The problem with relying on economic populism to carry rural areas is that there is zero evidence that economic populism delivers rural votes. In fact there’s a good deal of evidence to the contrary, for example the rural response to Obamacare or previously to traditional Welfare.
The tendency to see people as “us” and “them” is hardwired by evolution into the human brain.
People who have learned that white churchgoers are “us” and that the GOP is the party for “us” are not going to be receptive to reasoning as persuasion to change.