The Off-Year & Special Elections Thread

With 28.7% reporting, Ossoff is at 51% with Handel at 18%. Ossoff would need 50%+1 to win without a runoff.

— Richard Elliot (@RElliotWSB) April 19, 2017

The trend is not favorable. It's odd that the first district reporting was so favorable to Ossoff and literally every update since then has been negative. Surely there must be some big Ossoff precincts left somewhere.

 

The latest county to report was Cobb county the most GOP heavy rich county.

Nate Cohn thinks he'll finish at 48.5 - which is actually pretty awesome

 

All the other Democrats and independents in the race combine for about 1.1% right now. Would be funny if Ossoff lost by that margin. More stuff we can blame on 3rd part types ...

 

This run off is a toss up. Dems may actually end up getting more of the overall vote tonight.

This is nothing BUT a good night if your either a dem or Trump hater. Massive swing towards Democrats, candidates closest aligned with Trump did the worst

 

The latest updates have sort of leveled out. He's at 50.4% now with 53% counted.

 

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This might be the biggest story.

 

I'm hearing that pretty much everything left to count is from Fulton county. Is that good or bad? My understanding is that Cobb was the reddest and DeKalb the bluest.

 

Yeah, it's important to keep in mind that all these special elections (including upcoming ones in SC and MT) are being held because their incumbent representatives were selected for the most right-wing cabinet in recent history. Those kinds of places shouldn't be competitive.

Absent a significant change in the political climate, those Dem moral victories will rapidly turn to actual victories once the election cycle reaches competitive territory.

 

If Ossoff gets a sizeable turnout, he wins or misses by tenths. If Fulton remains close to what it was for the 2016 election, he ends up with 47-48% of the vote.

EDIT: Looking at his general performance in the other two counties, I think Ossoff is going to get very close. I think he may get to 49%.

That looks good for a run off

 

Handel is telling her party that she's headed for a runoff. They must be looking at their internal numbers, because I'm still seeing Ossoff at 50.4% with 54% reporting.

 

So apparently the reason we've been stuck at 54% for the last hour is some technical difficulties in Fulton County. A data error crashed the counting machine. Now they have to manually go back and count a bunch of stuff to find what triggered the data error.

Could it be the Russians?

Oh well. Time to go to bed. Looks like we won't find out until very late.

 

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Apparently Handel didn't mention Trump in her speech.

 

OK ... they found the error that tripped the system. Expect a big batch of numbers being dumped soon. Maybe the whole county at once.

 

So it just jumped from 54% reporting to 84% reporting. And Ossoff fell to 48.61%.

The other Democrats add up to 0.89% ...

 

Adding all the candidates together: R 50.49, D 49.41

— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) April 19, 2017

It will be tight.

 

So...It'll either be a toss up with the tiniest of edges for the GOPs, or Handel is going to suffer as Ossoff ties her to Trump. It won't take much. Handel will either have to defend Trump or deny him. I wish someone from the area like @John Galt or @yossarian could tell us if Handel can handle being Trump's candidate, or the non-Trump candidate, and still win.

THAT, to me, is what is interesting about this race. Basically, the GOPs got the same % as Trump, but it was split between pro and anti Trump GOPers. How will those two factions act in a 2 way race? Because 2018 is going to be a referendum on Trump, the man (since it doesn't seem like he is going to enact many of his campaign promises.). Each Dem will hammer his opponent with Trump, and each GOP is going to have to choose which set of GOP voters he can risk pissing off. Each faction of GOP voter will be large enough that pissing them off will cost the GOPs a ton of otherwise winnable races.

Let's see how GOP voters act without the crutch of being against Hillary to lean on.

 

I think Ossoff's lack of experience may hurt him with Handel. But if I am Ossoff or someone running his campaign, I will do everything possible to bait Donald Trump to come in person to get behind Handel because she is doing everything possible to distance herself from Trump.

If Trump comes down to GA and does something cringeworthy, Ossoff has a shot. Otherwise, the turnout will have to be up for him to win.

 

Here's the problem with the GOP. Turnout will be even higher for Democrats in 2018, and guess who will be running again win or lose in June? Ossoff.

The GOP might not be able to afford to spend to defend him though, because if GA06 is a tossup, then it means the GOP is playing defense in about 100 seats. And they can only afford to lose 24.

That's the real victory already achieved by democrats in these special elections. It doesn't really matter if they win or lose - all these seats are up again in a year. The point is to make them competitive.

 

Bernie is an idiot. This race has been in the news on and off for several weeks. All it takes is some basic research to find out what Ossoff's about. Surely Bernie has better resources than we do. I mean FFS the guy has staffers. Just get one of them to do it.

Bernie needs to decide whether he wants the national spotlight or whether he wants to go back to being just the junior senator from Vermont. You can't demand the spotlight and then not use it for anything constructive.

 

OK, now we can put Georgia behind us for a few weeks.

Here's the next special election on the schedule. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-democrat-shoots-a-tv/?utm_term=.e855e9abe0fc

In a weird reversal of stereotypes the Democrat is a Montana rancher and country singer. The Republican is a New York transplant who moved to Montana 20 years ago.

Here's an ad from Democrat Rob Quist :



Here's an ad by against Quist from an outside Super Pac :



Notice the typical apocalyptic dog whistles in the anti Quist ad. Big gubmint! Muslim invasion!