“NO RUN-OFF”, exhorted a sign at Jon Ossoff’s campaign office in Sandy Springs. As it turned out, in the special election for Georgia’s 6th congressional district on April 18th—for a seat vacated by Tom Price, now Donald Trump’s health secretary—the Democrat fell just short of the 50% needed to avoid a second round. Mr Trump thus narrowly escaped an ominous rebuke in the sort of place Democrats hope to flip in elections next year.
Mr Ossoff was a somewhat unlikely face for the resistance. Just 30 years old, he has managed a short stint as an investigative filmmaker and a longer one as a congressional aide. Yet, with 48% of the vote, he almost seized what has been safe Republican territory since the 1970s. He was propelled by three big factors, not all of which will apply elsewhere.
First, Republican voters in the district—a stretch of mostly well-heeled, white and well-educated Atlanta suburbs—were never wild about Mr Trump. He only just prevailed there in November, whereas Mr Price, and Mitt Romney in 2012, won it thumpingly. That left the Republicans in the race ambivalent about how tightly to embrace him; the most devoted of them fared...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2oLI2Fd
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