Two questions from GA06
There are two open questions from GA06 - one is for the Democrats and the second is for the Republicans.For a primer on this please read Nate Silver's blogpost.
A lot has been said about how much out of state money came into this race. That only happened in the run-off election. It doesn't explain what happened in the first round where Ossoff narrowly missed victory by 4700 votes.
1) Why did Ossoff lose? - There is one basic answer to this - voters are not there yet.
a) My personal thoughts are that the GOPers are yet to fully sour on the Trump scam. The election of a black man gelded their consciousness, they are so absorbed in that sense of injury to note that Trump is much more substantially castrating them. At some point they will realize they have been taken for a ride by a New York City conman, but that time has not yet come. For historical comparison, it took a economic collapse in 1930 before white male voters woke up to the reality of the "outsider" Herbert Hoover. It'll take something massive to move the needle with traditional GOP voters, they are too heavily programmed not to question the party leadership.
b) Peter Dreier suggests that is was a failure on the part of the Ossoff campaign to reach out to black voters earlier. This may be true. As with any liberal platform that emphasizes stitching together visibly diverse populations, a small piece in the quilt missing creates a major problem. It may be that the Dems need to up their outreach to black voters and define a set of clear agendas that attack problems faced by black voters. It may be recalled that historically black voters have plenty of reasons to be completely disenchanted with the elections. They were denied and then systematically robbed of their right to vote. The only reason they turned up in droves in 2008/12 was because they saw Obama as a black man. If you run white candidates, you are going to run in to apathy and alienation issues with Black voters.
c) The leadership of Nancy Pelosi is being held out as a possible reason for Ossoff's failures by certain observers. It is difficult to see how this could be true, but perhaps there is some merit in the suggestion that elections are fought on local issues and the DNC imposing its nationwide goals on a local operation. I can see how that might have caused a problem, but simultaneously I am inclined to believe that the DNC's overall political goals are probably driven off very different strategic considerations. IMHO - the DNC's grand plan is to bait the GOP into expensive local fights that is wins only at extremely high costs.
2) Why did Karen Handel's lose so many votes? - this unfortunately has only one answer which the GOP can't bring itself accept - Trump did this.
Trump has lost his electoral mojo. The white independents who were pulled into the Trump orbit by his vague promises are realizing they have been had. Viewed against the backdrop of the 2016 election when Trump's electoral pull was extremely high, Karen Handel has lost 67000 voters. They simply didn't turn out to vote for her.
Additionally Handel was only able to gain sufficient support within the GOP in the first round of the election by distancing herself from Trump. She also relied on an extremely large GOP driven cash infusion to secure her victory in the run-off. She rarely gave public speeches, she engaged small groups of well modeled Republican voters. By making them promises that none of the others are aware of - she was able to ensure that they turn up to vote.
If each race is this hard fought, then the likelihood of the GOP surviving the 2018 elections is very slim. The rational thing to do at this point is for the GOP to support impeaching Trump. Given how relieved they are at not losing the seat, they will put off the difficult and painful task of excising Trump from the GOP ranks.
posted by maverick @ 5:51 AM
3 Comments:
Ossof lost because he ran a national/globalist issues campaign instead of a local issues campaign....... here is his mission statement on his website.......
https://electjon.com/about-jon/
nothing local....at all....no support to fight crime.....no support on any issue essential to the beliefs of the local citizens......jobs....nothing.\
what an ignorant loser.
2 local issues that should have resonated in Georgia
half of all newborns are paid for by federal medicaid, prolly even more in Georgia and most of senior citizen nursing homes are also paid by medicaid and the GOPers want to cut it!
where was the passion? where was the heat in the election?
Yes - but I am at a loss to explain why a major national issue like TrumpRussia and the impending HC catastrophe didn't swing voters out of their local mindsets.
I suspect that there is another very big steep hill that one is walking up vis-a-vis elderly voters in the US.
Elderly voters know they are going to die. Nostalgia distracts them from these thoughts, debates about healthcare make them confront those things.
Making healthcare the focus of the electoral debate builds into itself a unique kind of backlash. Forced to confront the staggering costs of their continued survival, older voters in the US will zone out and swing to Trump's nostalgic psychobabble.
Much as I would like to agree with "Rank and File" Dems about the importance of "meat and potatoes" issues like HC, I wonder if these are as much of an electoral fishhook among boomers as the Dems hope.
This may be at work in the Ossoff election.
I should probably explore this in a separate post.
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