Jon Ossoff’s failure to take the 6th Congressional Distirct in Georgia last month was a tough loss, no doubt about it. I went down there for two days. I know, losing is just hard. What is incredibly important, however, is that lessons are learned from such defeats. And, as importantly, they need to be lessons based on the particular facts and circumstances of this campaign. We shouldn’t apply the broad brush of past campaigns to this result.
Starting with Candidate Recruitment
The Georgia 6th has historically been an exceptionally red district. In the 2012 presidential election, it voted for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by 23 points. In the absence of Donald Trump, this district would never have made anyone’s list of places Democrats needed to challenge first. But this district had one of strongest aversions to Trump in the country, shifting the margin from Romney plus 23% to Trump by about 2%. A similar collapse was seen in a decent number of similarly well-educated districts across the country. (Depressingly, they were matched by a corresponding large drop in rural districts with less educated voters.)
The appointment of the 6th’s Congressman, Tom Price, to be Health and Human Services Secretary created an opening. Complicating this opportunity, however, was the fact that the first round involved a top-two election, meaning that if Democrats did not quickly coalesce around a candidate Republicans might get two candidates in the runoff.
This, more than anything else, explains how Jon Ossoff came to be the Democrats’ candidate. We needed a candidate quickly. Democratic Congressmen John Lewis and Hank Johnson, from nearby Atlanta and who together speak for a large part of the Georgia Democratic Party, stepped in and chose Ossoff. For them, he fit the model of a winning candidate: young, articulate and with broad experience, including having worked for both of them as a congressional aide. Ossoff also seemed likely to be able to stay relentlessly on message – which he did. Yet, Ossoff, who was without a doubt from the Georgia 6th, was a liberal, not the type of solid Republican voter who dominated the district before Trump. The simple fact that Atlanta Congressmen chose Ossoff didn’t help either. White flight out of Atlanta created the North Fulton based district in its current form.
National Democratic groups, from the DCCC to Daily Kos, quickly ratified the choice -- Jon Ossoff was our guy. He had to be. Local Democrats, in addition to Lewis and Johnson, accepted the overwhelming national decision. But to some degree they also had no choice if they hoped to have a candidate in time for the runoff. As a result, the party bypassed almost entirely the kicking the tire phase of the campaign. Ossoff was driven off the lot because he was the only car Atlanta Democrats knew and could trust
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The Right Message and Strategy but a Problem with Execution
Jon Ossoff came incredibly close to winning this race. In the first round, he took 48% of the vote, less than 10,000 votes away from wining outright. In the second round, he was just about 9,200 votes short of winning. Between April 19th and June 20th, his campaign added 33,000 votes to his total. Purely from the perspective of an Ossoff candidacy, it feels like not a lot more could not have been done. (Admittedly, getting some of those 33,000 people in the first round might well have been enough to win then. Playing to get 50% in a field with a large number of candidates does seem a little nuts on its face, however, even if it ended up being best strategy.)
In terms of execution, to appeal to what was at its core a red district, Ossoff had to run a cautious campaign and not really say much. Many on the left are arguing that this was the cause of his defeat. But this argument does not really hold up to scrutiny. To carry the argument that a bolder message would have gotten more base Democrats to vote, there have to have been more base Democrats to turnout. There likely weren’t. Turnout in this special election was considerably higher than it was in the 2014 midterm election. Although turnout didn’t quite get to presidential year levels, that was true on both sides. In fact, Democratic turnout was higher than Republican turnout; there just are not as many Democrats. In addition, despite what some have been saying, the Ossoff campaign made youth and non-white turnout a priority and met with success in those communities rarely seen in a Congressional campaign, let alone a special election.
For those who claim Bernie Sanders’ message would have done better here, as DFA in particular articulated in a post-election memo, it is worth pointing out that Sanders competed in the Georgie 2016 primary and got just shy of 23,000 votes in the district, a far cry from the 125,000- plus votes that Ossoff received. The Sanders voter in the Georgia 6th is just 20% of the Democratic vote. There were likely there as many Romeny-Ossoff voters in the district as Sanders-Ossoff voters. The Sanders campaign ran on a message urging progressives to come out, come out wherever you are. When more progressive don’t come out, as they didn’t in the presidential primary, it’s fair to conclude they probably don’t exist.
The Democratic Party establishment fares no better here. Ossoff was without a doubt a product of that machine. Although in his rhetoric he tried to bite the hand that fed him (more like a nibble), he was not particularly convincing. A problem with running a young candidate without a serious track record, such as Ossoff, is that the opposition can turn him into whatever they wish. The specter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi made that task even easier. It should be said here that Pelosi has done a very good job. She deserves tons of credit for among other things getting the ACA passed. The problem is that after a billion dollars of negative ads, her brand is damaged. It becomes easy to attach her battered image to a candidate who has no brand.
Even more disturbing is that the DCCC ran this race as a chance to raise money for itself, including ostensibly soliciting money for Ossoff the day of the election long after it could do any good. It also ran its regular play book without considering the context of the campaign. Democratic field operatives continued to believe that a phone call was a phone call and a door knock was a door knock and that 900 out-of-state canvassers were a good idea. The Handel campaign’s core message more than anything else was that “outsiders” were trying to tell Georgia what to do. The Ossoff campaign didn’t really try to block that shot because so much of its money did come from outside of state (including some of mine). The national Democratic Party needs to turn down the presence and the noise in places where we frankly are not popular. The opposite happened in the 6th
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Despite all of this, it did almost work. Still, if we do not learn to be more local, more adaptable, and less insistent on using tactics that once worked but now probably don’t, it will be hard to win all the places we need to to retake the House in 2018 and save our democracy. Voters need to see themselves in our candidates. That can be particularly challenging when decisions are made from Atlanta in this case (not the district) and from D.C. more broadly.
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