The special election runoff in Georgia’s 6th district is now history.
As you may remember, in the initial round of voting, Democrat Jon Ossoff – a young, dynamic left wing candidate – got 48% of the vote and Karen Handel – a not especially dynamic career politician who was competing with several other well known Republicans, came in second with 20% of the vote.
Democrats saw this as a golden opportunity, not only to pick up a congressional seat per se, but to show that momentum had turned away from Republicans/Donald Trump (who won this district by only about 1.5% last November).
To this end, contributions to the Ossoff campaign poured in from all over the country. In fact, Mr. Ossoff wound up with about 6 times as much campaign funding as Ms. Handel did – especially from California.
How big was this race to the leftist crowd? Here’s a clue: the nine San Francisco bay area counties alone, sent Ossoff 3,063 donations. By contrast, he got a total of 808 donations from Georgia – which, you may recall, was where Ossoff was running.
And what was the result? Ms. Handel won the election, 52% to 48%.
Ms. Handel achieved her 4% victory by embracing Donald Trump.
Mr. Ossoff achieved his 4% defeat by attacking Donald Trump and running against his policies.
There are lessons to be learned here, about how people view huge amounts of campaign $$$ coming from out of state…and especially about people feel about Donald Trump – not in the polls but when they actually vote.
I wonder which politicians – Republicans as well as Democrats – will and will not learn those lessons.
Since you are likely to be attacked or fired or have your grades suffer if you are a student for liking Trump, I believe many people say they don’t support him when they actually do. Same for just about any R candidate.