Within the Margin

Appropriately enough for an election that was effectively a Dem-versus-Rep showdown but won’t yield a winner for another two months, yesterday’s special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district feels like a split decision, with a mixed bag of takeaways in terms of political momentum.

Let’s start with the positive for Democrats. This has been said many times elsewhere but cannot be repeated enough: it’s amazing that we’re talking about a special election in GA-6. Comparisons across the decades are difficult in metropolitan Atlanta congressional districts, because rapid population growth means the districts look very different from decade to decade (oh, and Georgia’s propensity for mid-decade redistricting sometimes changes them even faster than that). For example, this seat was really GA-4 in the 1980s, with Republicans capturing it in 1984 and losing it amid scandal four years later. When it became GA-6 in 1992 as part of a redistricting plan to defeat Newt Gingrich, the future Speaker of the House prevailed. But broadly speaking, Democrats lost this seat decades ago and have never won it back. Usually, the winning Republican margin has been 30-40 points, when Democrats have bothered to contest it at all.

Beyond that, this is terrain where Republican candidates for statewide office and president have also typically cruised, including in very competitive races…until Trump came along. And so that was part of the test in this first round of balloting: would the district’s disdain for Trump extend to other Republicans, particularly those who ran as outright Trump supporters? The answer is clearly yes: GA-6 is not yet comfortable with this president, and is willing to elect a Democrat or a Trump-skeptical Republican (making the runoff behind the easy Democratic winner Jon Ossoff was Karen Handel, who ran as a conservative Republican but not necessarily a Trump Republican).

To sum that up: for the first time in decades, Democrats have GA-6 as a pickup target. The playing field has been expanded, whether Ossoff wins in June or not. And unlike KS-4 a week earlier, where Republicans were left scrambling in the final days as a much redder district showed signs of competitiveness, GA-6 offers two data points for “expanded playing field status:” this result, and the November presidential result. It’s possible but still unlikely Jim Thompson could make KS-4 competitive again in midterms, but it’s almost certain that Democrats will pursue GA-6 in 2018 even if Ossoff goes on to lose the runoff this June.

So…what are the negatives? I indicated above that this was a mixed result. And it surely is, because first off, Democrats didn’t quite pick up the seat. Getting closer than ever is progress, but I’m familiar enough with parliamentary procedure to know that you don’t get a vote in Congress for the seats you almost win. More significantly, this election didn’t see nearly as large an improvement over Hillary’s 2016 performance in the district as we’ve seen in almost every other special election held in 2017 for a Congressional or state legislative race. There have been ten special elections so far in 2017 at the state legislative or Congressional level – excluding “jungle primaries” like CA-34 earlier this month and GA-6 yesterday. In eight of the ten, the margin improved in Democrats’ direction. This didn’t actually flip any seats, because these were mostly either blue districts getting bluer or red districts getting purple, but not quite changing over. All told, the average change in margin in those ten districts was 10.9% in the Democrats’ direction, which would of course be a dramatic gain: if Democratic Congressional candidates outran Clinton’s margin by 10% in the 2018 midterms, they would gain a huge number of seats. For what it’s worth: in the CA-34 jungle primary, Democratic candidates combined to improve substantially on Clinton’s 2016 showing.

Yesterday’s result saw Ossoff himself outrun Clinton by about 1.3%, and the total combined Republican margin over the combined Democratic margin was about the same as Trump’s edge of Clinton in November. And that gives me pause: this district had an incredible level of investment and energy on both sides, and that allowed Dems to fight it to a draw, and to get another shot in two months (by which time the Pelosi/Trump attacks from the respective sides may well have so exhausted voters that they don’t show up).  And that’s huge progress for this district…but more progress is needed, or this is just another almost-seat for Democrats, which doesn’t actually change the numbers in D.C. What we’ll find out in the meantime is whether it changes the governing calculus: put all the nuance aside for a second, and ask yourself if it’s a good day to be a marginal Republican in a place Democrats already knew was competitive, if places like this are now seemingly competitive in the long term, too? And then throw in the fact that we’re not quite sure what Trump’s most ardent supporters will do: the Washington Post noted that when defeated Trumplodyte candidate Bob Gray asked supporters at his election night gathering to get behind Karen Handel, not a single person applauded. Party unity is a complicated thing in the Age of Trump.

When viewed as the collection of all these dynamics, it becomes clear we still don’t fully know what’s happening in this district. But in two months we should have a much better idea, when we get our next data point from these northern Atlanta ‘burbs.