by WorldTribune Staff, June 21, 2017
Campaign appearances in Georgia’s 6th House District by several high-profile Trump-bashing celebrities, plus a boatload of money, couldn’t save a “terrible candidate” in Democrat Jon Ossoff from sinking under the weight of the “Obama effect”, an analysis said.
Republican Karen Handel, who spent about $30 million less on her campaign than Democrats spent for Ossoff, rolled to victory with 52 percent of the vote to Ossoff’s 48 percent in a district President Donald Trump “carried by only one point last fall,” The Hayride Southern Politics & Culture said in its June 21 analysis.
The Hayride’s takeaways from the most expensive House race in history include the following excerpts:
“The Obama effect: At the end of the day, Ossoff’s defeat was completely foreseeable, and not just because he was running in a district that has been Republican for 40 years. He was, for all the money he raised, a terrible candidate.
A job as a staffer for a congressman who publicly expressed concern that stationing more Marines on Guam would tip the island over is not a killer app where a resume for public office is concerned, and Ossoff’s current job as a filmmaker doesn’t exactly scream of qualifications for political power.
Worse, he didn’t even live in the district, and Ossoff’s various excuses for that didn’t persuade the voters.
Candidate recruitment in competitive districts is beginning to be a serious problem for Democrats, and it has been ever since 2010. Call that the Obama Effect, owing to the slow-moving electoral apocalypse the former president’s hard left turn has inflicted on that party. Democrats have seen their competitiveness in smaller races like state legislatures, county commissions, statewide officials and so forth decline very badly outside of safe areas like inner cities and college towns, plus their power bases on the East and West coasts ….
The waste: …. The Democrats went through $31 million in trying to get Ossoff elected and he got just under 125,000 votes, meaning they spent just under $250 per vote. Getting the Samuel L. Jacksons, Alyssa Milanos and Chelsea Handlers to provide appearances in the district on Ossoff’s behalf isn’t even counted in that. …
We like to say that the modern Democrat Party is the single most effective tool for the destruction of wealth in the history of mankind. That’s been something of a joke, but at this point it’s a bit more serious. After all, look at the cities the Democrats run and see the blight and poverty they’ve wrought. Now, with the Ossoff race, they’ve inflicted that on their own donors.
Trump-bashing doesn’t work: Another thing we like to say around here is that the Left in this country has lost the ability to persuade the persuadables, and has largely given up on that endeavor. That’s one reason so much of what you see from the social justice warrior crowd and the Bernie Sanders/Liz Warren Axis amounts to an attempt to crush dissent and silence those with whom they disagree, rather than to actually win arguments, and it also perfectly sums up Black Lives Matter and Antifa. …
Republicans, when they’re running good races, will beat up Democrat candidates fairly viciously. Those attacks usually work when they do two things – paint the Democrat as culturally out of touch with normal folks, and show voters the negative results of policies the Democrat favors. Instead, Ossoff’s campaign and the third-party messaging of his allies focused on little more than what a jerk President Trump is, and it didn’t resonate.
The larger lesson which might be applied to 2020 is that it doesn’t really matter what Trump’s approval rating is if people hate Democrats more. That’s the same lesson 2016 should have taught, but they’re not learning it.
Watch the Democrats eat their own: Squabbling among Democrats and liberals began before the final results were in from Georgia.
‘One important lesson is that when they go low, going high doesn’t f**king work,’ Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress, wrote on Twitter.
Neera Tanden is a moron, of course, for two reasons – first, you really don’t get to characterize your side as ‘going high’ when half of you are gleeful about Steve Scalise lying in a hospital and the other half are suggesting maybe his getting shot is karma for his political sins. Second, exactly what, given the above, would Tanden consider ‘going low?’ Handel campaign volunteers were spit on, her neighbors and herself were mailed threatening letters with a suspicious white powder inside, her campaign signs were routinely stolen and the campaign on the streets devolved into lots of F-bombs and middle fingers delivered by Ossoff supporters to the opposition. Does Tanden suggest more James Hodgkinsons? Scenes from Gangs Of New York?
The fact that they don’t realize imposing a culturally dissimilar, unaccomplished 30-year-old who doesn’t live in the district and is backed with 95 percent of his funding coming from outside the state of Georgia on the voters is a bad idea is why they lost.”
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