DCCC Failure/Lucy McBath Victory

Last year, in a special election to replace Tom Price-- who Trump had named to his cabinet (and soon fired him once it became public he was as crooked as almost everyone else in the cabinet)-- Republican Karen Handel beat Democrat Jon Ossoff 134,799 (51.8%) to 125,517 (48.2%) in the R+8 suburban Atlanta district where Trump had only defeated Hillary 48.3-46.8%. Ossoff's candidacy-- or at least the therory of it had set the national Democratic base on fire. Money flooded into Ossoff's online account and he raised $23,600,861.14, compared to Handel's $4,555,808.76. Outside spending was also through the roof-- for both sides. Trump's America First PAC spent $1.6 million. The DCCC spent around $5 million. Pelosi's SuperPAC sept $1.2 million. Ryan's SuperPAC spent around $3.5 million. The NRCC spent around $2.5 million.

Eyes wide open, Blue America endorsed him. Soon after, I wrote:

The vetting process for Jon Ossoff was shorter than normal for a Blue America candidate. I never met him in person and spent a couple of hours on the phone with him over 3 calls. He wrote a guest post for DWT. He checked out OK. And, no he wasn't going to be the next Pramila Jayapal, Alan Grayson, Ted Lieu, Elizabeth Warren or Raul Grijalva. But he was't going to be a Blue Dog or New Dem and his instincts were pretty good across the whole spectrum of issues we talk with our potential endorsees about. He's pro-choice and opposes discrimination based on all the things conservatives use as excuses to demonize people. On economic issues... he checked out OK, as good as you're going to get in the South, at least as good as his mentors, John Lewis and Hank Johnson. As for the other Democratic congressman in Georgia, David Scott... Ossoff is ten-thousand times better. Find me a more progressive Democrat in the South (in Congress) than Jon Ossoff; I can't think of one. I suppose if it wasn't a winnable special election that could significantly put a check on Trump's legislative agenda, we might have dragged it out longer before endorsing Ossoff. But he really is good enough and under the circumstances, absolutely good enough.

Bernie was more discerning and never did go down to Georgia to help. Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, he said "Some Democrats are progressive and some Democrats are not." Pressed about whether or not Ossoff is a progressive, he, in the words of the WSJ, demurred. "I don’t know."

As his campaign came under the total control of the DCCC I started having second thoughts about the endorsement-- and regretting it. It wasn’t even that he started inching inextricably towards the center really fast, as much as something else I smelled. The DCCC moved in immediately and took over with their crooked money-sucking consultants. Everything I started seeing coming out of the Ossoff campaign started looking bad to me-- the multiple e-mails with no content everyday was an immediate give-away. When I complained, they took me off their mailing list. Every time I asked Jon substantive policy questions for follow-up posts, he wouldn’t respond. By the time he said he opposed single payer, I realized I’d been had by another establishment suck-up. But I generally held my tongue and hoped he’d win just for the message it would send to Republicans wavering in their support for the Ryan-Trump agenda. That was fucked up of me. Because there was another message an Ossoff victory would have sent, one the media would have crowed about endlessly-- how the Democratic Party can only win with centrist candidates who don’t have campaigns based on strong values. "Maybe," I wrote, "Ossoff can now go off and join Jason Kander in whatever he’s doing to push backward centrism on unsuspecting Democrats."

Ro Khanna was kinder: "Until we take a risk as a party in offering a bold economic platform, we're not going to break through in some of these elections. When you try to target things to a lowest common denominator, you run the risk of not having an inspiring message." MoveOn's Anna Galland also grew frustrated with the DCCC Republican-lite approach they saddled Ossoff with: "In the closing weeks of the race, Ossoff and the DCCC missed an opportunity to make Republicans’ attack on health care the key issue, and instead attempted to portray Ossoff as a centrist, focusing on cutting spending and coming out [in] opposition to Medicare for All. This approach did not prove a recipe for electoral success. Democrats will not win back power merely by serving as an alternative to Trump and Republicans."

This morning, the woman who beat Ossoff, wrote that "After carefully reviewing all of the election results data, it is clear that I came up a bit short on Tuesday. Congratulations to Representative-Elect Lucy McBath and I send her only good thoughts and much prayer for the journey that lies ahead for her." These are the results she was referring to:

McBath won on a more progressive agenda than Ossoff's. She wasn't inauthentic or wishy-washy, pulled in different directions by DCCC consultants and staffers dangling millions of dollars. No one would accuse her of being a Republican-lite candidate. Voters seemed to appreciate it.



McBath was vastly outspent by Handel-- around $8 million to just over a million. The DCCC kicked in $134,000, a drop in the bucket, although Bloomberg's Everytown for Gun Safety PACs spent $4 million on the race.

Nationally, the intensity of the feelings for Ossoff and McBath were similar, although Ossoff had far more focussed attention. McBath, after all, was just one candidate of over a 100 who people were excited about. In the district, though... why did McBath win where Ossoff failed? The wave? The anti-Red wave had already begun when Ossoff ran. If anything it had dissipated slightly by last week. The Trump effect? He may seem more horrible now than he did in 2017, but not enough so to move more voters. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think the most important factor differentiating the two campaigns is the authenticity factor. Whatever authenticity Ossoff had-- and having talked to him early on, I can vouch that he did have some-- was killed by the DCCC's overbearing, albeit well-meaning, involvement. By the time they get their hooks into a candidate, the candidate is worthless mush, never more than the lesser of two evils, the DCCC guiding principle. Was that worth all that DCCC money and "expertise?" Ossoff may have been elected without them. McBath was.

Can Russian Steal Elections, Destroy Democracy? Putin Is Certainly Trying-- Next Up: Germany

The GA-06 special election to replace right-wing nut Tom Price race was universally viewed as a referendum on Trump. If Ossoff would have won, the White House and the Kremlin feared that congressional Republicans will abandon Trump and his legislative agenda in droves. So the Kremlin felt around to see if it would be possible steal the Georgia special in similar ways they helped steal swing counties in the Rust Belt. Think I'm kidding? WSB is the biggest TV station in Atlanta. They reported that the FBI investigated a data breach at the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University just before the special election. So? Kennesaw isn't even part of GA-06. It's in the 11th district. But WSB reported that "the state voter data kept by the Center for Election Systems was compromised [and that] the Georgia Secretary of State uses the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State to facilitate elections in all Georgia counties and maintain voting machines... Sources said the breach happened Wednesday night and the hacker made off with millions of voter records."

How big a deal was this? Of course, Putin isn't claiming responsibility. But... a group of technology experts said Georgia should stop using electronic voting machines and switch to paper ballots for the April 18 Special Election. The successfully hacked Center for Election Systems tests and certifies Georgia's voting machines and electronic polling books used to check in voters at polling locations. Employees also format ballots for every election held in the state. In a letter to Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R), a candidate for Governor in 2018, twenty technology experts and computer science professors affiliated with the national Verified Voting organization said paper ballots will preserve voters' confidence in the results of an upcoming special election to fill Georgia's 6th District congressional seat. The letter said using equipment maintained by the center while it is the focus of a criminal investigation "can raise deep concerns."

Verified Voting, which closely tracks voting systems used throughout the U.S., and other advocacy groups have long expressed concern with Georgia's reliance on voting machines. Barbara Simons, chairwoman of the nonpartisan organization's board, said paper ballots allow voters to ensure their choices are correct and create a trail if there are any questions about the results. It also lets officials do a hand count of the physical ballots, she said.

"Under the circumstances, the only prudent thing to do is make sure voting is done in a secure fashion," Simons said. "This should not be a partisan issue. Republicans and Democrats both care about secure elections."

Kemp's office rejected their plea and said the special election would use electronic voting machines-- which it did-- even though the cyberattack could easily have infected the electronic voting machines with a virus that could manipulate vote totals.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported a dust-up over this between Kemp, a highly partisan wing nut who could easily be on Trump's or Putin's payroll, and DuBose Porter, chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party, who demanded Kemp accept help from the Department of Homeland Security to get to the bottom of the hack. Kemp, true to form, accused Porter of playing politics while trying to create a "manufactured crisis" to help Democratic candidates. Something of a fascist, Kemp said of the Democrats that "They would love nothing more than for us to flout Georgia law and use paper ballots so they can challenge the results when they lose, but we will not cater to such childish antics."

It turned out to be the most expensive House race in history. The two campaigns, along with outside organizations, spent more than $50 million on the election. Karen Handel won-- 134,799 (51.8%) to 125,517 (48.2%)-- and has turned out to be a terrible congresswoman in every way predicted. ProgressivePunch ties her record for the worst in Congress-- ZERO crucial vote score.

Around the same time that Georgia Republicans were happy to welcome Russian hacking and interference in their elections, Holland was also facing elections. They took a very different approach than the GOP, basically "better safe than sorry."

The tech-savvy country scaled back the use of computers to count votes and opted for an all-paper, all-manual election this month.

...The Dutch government has known about some of the vulnerabilities in the voting software since 2006 and banned electronic voting in 2007, but has been publicly — and frequently — reminded ever since by academics and hackers of vulnerabilities in the software used to count the votes. A decade later, the country still hasn’t come up with a secure tech system to cast and count votes.

It was only after the U.S. blamed Russia for hacking during the presidential election cycle last year that the Netherlands announced it was dropping computers entirely. The country’s almost 13 million voters will line up March 15 at more than 9,000 polling stations to tick the box for their candidate with pencils, and these votes will be counted by hand. It’s unclear how long it will take officials to get it done.

...Dutch officials say the threat extends beyond voting: Politicians’ computers could be hacked and fake news could infiltrate media and blogs, they say.

In early February, Rob Bertholee, head of Dutch intelligence agency AIVD, said his services had identified hundreds of attacks by Russia targeting government systems that were intended to steal confidential documents.

Paper ballots counted manually at every step by volunteers and polling station officials carried final tallies on paper to local communes, which aggregated the tallies by hand and then ran with another piece of paper to one of 20 regional constituency offices, where officials did the same and then rushed to The Hague’s electoral council building to file the results-- on paper.

In the end, Putin's (and Trump's) neo-fascist candidate, Geert Wilders and his party, won just 13.1% of the vote and 20 seats in the 150 seat House. Of 10,563,456 votes cast, Wilder's fascists got just 1,372,941.

The German general election will be in 2 weeks, September 24. The 4 polls released last week showed Angela Merkel's CDU leading the Socialist Party 38-22%, 37-23%, 37-21% and 34-24%. Alexander Gauland's and Alice Weidel's neo-fascist party (AfD) is showing up with between 11% and 9% of the vote. All the other parties have ruled out being in any kind of coalition that includes the fascists, which is being heavily supported by Russians in Germany-- just as Russians in places like south Brooklyn and the Bustleton and Somerto neighborhoods of Philly overwhelmingly backed Trump in the U.S. election. Their loyalties are with Putin, not with Merkel's CDU. Ironically Russian-Germans-- around 2.5 million of them-- were once considered the Christian Democrats’ most loyal constituency. Many have switched their allegiance to the AfD, attracted by its pro-Kremlin stance and hard line on Muslim refugees."

Meanwhile, the Kremlin's propaganda arm, RT, calls Russian meddling in Germany's election "a boogeyman." A recent report from Reuters cited "thousands of cyber attacks from Russian IP addresses." And on Friday the Daily Beast warned that Germany's election software in dangerously hackable.

When it comes to the growing specter of election hacking, there is one form of attack that causes far more concern that the rest: Could hackers access the ballot count itself and directly manipulate the number of votes cast in favor of one candidate?

Security researchers in Germany have found that it’s possible to do exactly that.

The hacking collective Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has uncovered a selection of serious vulnerabilities in some of Germany’s voting software.

“By infecting large-scale, we could have changed every single submitted result,” Linus Neumann, a CCC spokesperson told The Daily Beast. This software is not the same as that used in U.S. elections, but the discovery highlights the serious risk hackers can pose to voting infrastructure as U.S. authorities try to assess the exact damage hackers caused during the 2016 election.

The issues revolve around a piece of software called “PC-Wahl,” which the researchers say Germany has used in national, state, and municipal elections for decades.

PC-Wahl is used for the “recording, calculation, graphical presentation, reporting and statistical follow-up of election results,” according to a Google translated version of the product’s website.

Neumann explained that the researchers were able to take over the server that provides software updates to PC-Wahl and insert a malicious program that manipulates the votes.

“Neither the software itself, nor any of the transmitted results are authenticated properly,” he said. Updating the software is also a mandatory process before each use, Neumann added, meaning that if a hacker surreptitiously inserted a piece of malware, it could rapidly spread to target machines.

Targeting a piece of software’s update mechanism is a novel, but fairly established way of attacking systems. Earlier this year, hackers attatched their own ransomware, which locks down victim’s computers, to an update of Ukrainian financial software. Victims included shipping giant Maersk.

Germany has faced suspected Russian hackers in the past. In 2015, hackers targeted the country’s Bundestag, or parliament. Germany’s domestic security agency said Russian military intelligence was responsible for the attack. Judging by forensic evidence, the hackers behind the Bundestag breach were the same as those responsible for attacking the Democratic National Committee’s servers in 2016. WikiLeaks went on to distribute a cache of stolen emails and documents from the DNC.

In the U.S., likely Russian hackers have also targeted companies and organizations within the election supply chain. In June, The Intercept reported that hackers sent spoofed emails to VR Systems, a Florida-based provider of voting services and equipment, days before the election. Last week, a New York Times report revealed hackers breached at least two other providers of critical election services. During a hearing earlier this year, former FBI Director James Comey said Russian hackers targeted “hundreds” of entities.

There is no convincing evidence that hackers directly manipulated U.S. votes by targeting voting software or machines themselves during the 2016 election. Previous academic research has found some voting machines are vulnerable to malware that could manipulate votes.

During the annual DEF CON hacking conference this year, researchers were given free-rein to dig through and probe a variety of voting machines used in U.S. elections. One hacker successfully compromised a machine in a matter of hours.

CCC hackers who worked on the German software released a selection of tools so others may be able to replicate or build on their results. One tool can be used to swap votes for one party to another.

The Trump Regime has downplayed Russian electoral threats and have been-- at best-- "unconcerned."

Is The DCCC A Racket? You Bet Your Sweet Ass It Is!

Gone-- but the stench was left behind

Last week Roll Call reported that the DCCC hit a record-breaking fundraising number-- over $9.3 million in May… and that most of it came from grassroots contributions. A DCCC robot read a prepared statement: “The huge enthusiasm gap between Democrats and Republicans has shown up in special elections, primaries, and with record-breaking small-dollar fundraising. Democrats are unified heading into the 2018 midterms, and we will continue to channel grassroots energy towards flipping seats on the largest House battleground we’ve seen in a decade.”

According to the fundraising figures, the DCCC raised $6.55 million through its grassroots programs, with $4.5 million coming from online donations, with an average donation of $19.

…The committee also reported that over the first five months of the year it has received online donations from 167,000 first-time donors, and added 2.4 million people to its email list.

Also over the last five months, the committee has raised nearly $22.3 million in online donations, surpassing its total online donations for the entire year in 2015.

What a shame so many sincere grassroots Democrats fall prey, not just to endemic DCCC incompetence, but to the overwhelming corruption that drives the organization and determines every decision. That link goes to an exposé from 2010 that delineates DCCC corruption and how it works… and DCCC corruption has, if anything, gotten much worse in the interim. Thursday night we looked at a real-time sale of a nomination in a very winnable Orange County seat that the DCCC is willing to write off in exchange for some fat checks from an ambitious lottery winner. But that isn’t even the kind of corruption I mean. Gaius hit on it earlier on the same day here, the systemic kind of corruption which should send small dollar contributors fleeing.

Let’s take the Ossoff race for example. One of the consulting firms the DCCC saddled him with-- the kind of thing corruption organizations like them and EMILY’s List do with all their candidates-- is owned by former (and future?) DCCC staffers, Greg Berlin, Jake Lipsett, and Charles Starnes, who pocketed-- as in personally pocketed-- $3.9 million. Some of that was money I contributed! You too? Nd that was just one of the many DCCC-connected consulting firms on the Ossoff gravy train. You know all those dull and ineffective TV ads? The DCCC encourages that kind of garbage, not because they win elections-- they don’t-- but because they are commissionable and the ex/future staffers make millions off them (personally make millions, becoming very wealthy-- regardless of whether a candidate wins or loses… and most-- the vast majority-- lose).

Solution? Never, never, never, never contribute to shady organizations like the DCCC or EMILY’s List. Always and exclusively make your contributions directly to candidates who stand for the issues you want. Chances are if the DCCC solicits money by touting popular progressive agenda items-- like single payer health care, for example-- whatever money doesn’t get pocketed by avaricious staffers, goes to prop up conservatives who vehemently oppose the very policies they hoodwink donors into thinking they’re advancing. When an organization with a massive overhead like the DCCC, End Citizens United or EMILY’s List encourages you to give your money to them, rather than the candidate, that money is more likely to go towards defeating what you want than to advancing what you want. Trustworthy operations like Blue America, DFA, the PCCC, Daily Kos, etc encourage you to contribute directly to candidates for whom they make substantive cases. That’s where you should be contributing, not through rackets like the DCCC.

Bernie Won The Wisconsin Primary, 567,936 to 432,767. Trump Won Wisconsin Too... With Just 531,129 Votes

I spent about an hour or so, spread over a couple of phone calls, with Jon Ossoff right after he declared. I was impressed with his energy and verve, his dedication to oppose Trump and the House Republicans and his eagerness to do what’s necessary to win. He didn’t come across as a Bernie Sanders or a Pramila Jayapal or Elizabeth Warren but he did come across as kind of progressive. Blue America endorsed him, I contributed some money to his campaign and we started raising money for him.

It didn’t take long before I started regretting it. It wasn’t even that he started inching inextricably towards the center really fast, as much as something else I smelled. The DCCC moved in immediately and took over with their crooked money-sucking consultants. Everything I started seeing coming out of the Ossoff campaign started looking bad to me-- the multiple e-mails with no content everyday was an immediate give-away. When I complained, they took me off their mailing list. Every time I asked Jon substantive policy questions for follow-up posts, he wouldn’t respond. By the time he said he opposed single payer, I realized I’d been had by another establishment suck-up. But I generally held my tongue and hoped he’d win just for the message it would send to Republicans wavering in their support for the Ryan-Trump agenda. That was fucked up of me. Because there was another message an Ossoff victory would have sent, one the media would have crowed about endlessly-- how the Democratic Party can only win with centrist candidates who don’t have campaigns based on strong values. Maybe Ossoff can now go off and join Jason Kander in whatever he’s doing to push backward centrism on unsuspecting Democrats.

Right after the votes were countered and people started asking themselves what happened down in Georgia, Matthew Yglesias took the opportunity to propose that this might be a good time for the Democrats to stop trying to expand their Big Tent to accommodate every Republican who isn’t a neo-Nazi and instead come up with a coherent and substantive agenda. Imagine that!

Ossoff falling short-- while coming closer than Rob Quist-- and Jeremy Corbyn’s surprisingly strong showing in the recent UK election suggest a possible synthesis of these views.

Corbyn’s electoral map, in the end, turns out to look a lot like Hillary Clinton’s. He did well in the most diverse and most educated parts of the United Kingdom and worst among older voters. Whites with college degrees, in short, weren’t secretly dreaming of socialism. At the same time, running on a bold progressive policy agenda didn’t stop him from picking up support in exactly the kind of upscale precincts that the Democratic establishment has been trying to target. And it did succeed in doing what post-Obama Democrats have failed to do-- engage young voters and encourage them to come to the polls.

But perhaps most of all, running on a bold policy agenda helped focus voters’ minds on policy rather than on the (extremely long) list of controversial Corbyn statements and associations from past years. Pundits had long expected Corbyn to get crushed at the polls, and had Theresa May succeeded in running an election focused on the Falklands War, the Irish Republican Army, and unilateral nuclear disarmament, she would have won. But instead, the UK ended up with a campaign about promises to nationalize utilities, eliminate university tuition, and raise taxes.

Ossoff’s effort to stay bland and inoffensive let hazy personal and culture war issues dominate the campaign-- and even in a relatively weak Trump district, that was still a winning formula for Republicans.

A chief of staff on Capitol Hill observed to me Tuesday morning that absolutely every faction in the Democratic Party-- from Third Way to the Berniecrats-- thinks Democrats “need a positive economic vision,” and not just to talk about Trump. The DCCC’s analysts agree.

“But when the rubber hit the road,” the chief of staff said, “we didn't produce a positive alternative on health care.”

Not exactly because Democrats don’t have any ideas of how to make the American health care system better. But because in some respects they have too many ideas-- ranging from small tweaks to improve the functioning of the Affordable Care Act to the idea of radically transforming the entire health care system by having taxpayers foot the bill for everyone’s insurance. The easiest way to maintain party unity was to stick with what Democrats could agree on-- that financing an enormous tax cut for the rich with stark cuts to Medicaid and deregulation of the insurance industry was a terrible idea.

Still, it should be sobering to Democrats that a CBS News poll released Tuesday morning filled with devastatingly bad approval numbers for the Trump administration found that only 31 percent of voters thought a Democratic takeover of Congress would make their lives better.

If your opponents are unpopular enough, it’s certainly possible to win elections this way. But especially for the party that has a more difficult time inspiring its supporters to turn out to vote, that’s an ominous sign. Right now on health care and many other issues, Democrats suffer from a cacophony of white papers and a paucity of unity around any kind of vision or story they want to paint of what is wrong with America today and what is the better country they want to build for the future. And until they do, they’re going to struggle to mobilize supporters in the way they need to win tough races.

And that brings us right to the candidates who are very much not Jon Ossoff-- not children of privilege, not bland, not malleable, not puppets. Wednesday, Will Bunch asked if a mustachioed ironworker from Wisconsin save the Democratic Party from itself. “I used to think,” he wrote, “the pain of being a Philadelphia sports fan was something unique to Philly-- until I started mulling the current state of the national Democratic Party. I mean, the Phillies have only been in rebuilding mode since 2013 or so. What can you say about a political party that’s been trying to retool, in one form or another, since 1981…if not longer? In fact, I’m starting to get confused between the agonizing rebuild of my beloved Phillies (feel free to substitute the Eagles/76ers/Flyers/Union) and the muddled state of a political party that-- for all its myriad flaws-- is the last remaining bulwark against totala-Trumpism. Why didn’t they call up Scott Kingery to run in South Carolina-05? When will Jon Ossoff learn to hit the curve ball? Why did they just reward Nancy Pelosi with a long-term contract?”

The glass is not empty for the Democrats. Their candidates in the four special elections over-performed the party’s expected norm by about 8 percentage points, and a similar showing in 2018 would-- according to the pundits-- probably be good enough to re-take the House. Districts that aren’t blood red but reddish purple-- like the seats held by GOPers Pat Meehan, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ryan Costello in the Philadelphia suburbs-- would be prime candidates for flippage 17 months from now. But the glass isn’t even really half-full… maybe closer to 40 percent full, at best. After all, partisans have been shouting from the mountaintop that Trump is an epically bad president of historical proportions-- either inept or a proto-dictator or both--and that the GOP on Capitol Hill will kill you with climate change if losing your health insurance doesn’t strike you dead first. Shouldn’t that produce a political tidal wave? So where is it?

…[T]here’s a lot of talk today that the Democrats can’t win if all the party stands for is being against Trump. That’s true-- but it’s even worse than that. In Georgia-06, the Dems didn’t even try to do much with the president’s rising disapproval numbers.

Jon Ossoff was a very sincere candidate, and he seems like a nice young man. Running for office in today’s climate is a brave thing. But I listened to an interview that he did with NPR on Tuesday morning, and by the end I practically wanted to gouge my eyes out. It was the some of the most insipid, focus-group-tested-and-consultant-approved meaningless happy talk I’ve ever heard from a Democrat, which is saying a lot. He wanted to bring tech jobs to Atlanta, and cut wasteful spending. Health care needs to be-- somehow-- “affordable.” Ossoff and the Democrats couldn’t have run a more effective “show about nothing” if Seinfeld’s Larry David had been their show-runner. No wonder voters curbed their enthusiasm.

The Democrats won’t truly emerge from rebuilding mode until they have the courage to stand for something. One role model-- sort of-- for this emerged from across the pond, in the UK’s recent national election. True, Labour’s fiery leader Jeremy Corbyn-- somewhere to the right of Che Guevara (barely) and to the left of Bernie Sanders-- didn’t win, but no one expected him and his party to do nearly as well as they did, and, given the shaky status of Tory Theresa May’s government, Corbyn may yet become prime minister sooner rather than later. They achieved this by doing something that would terrify America’s Democrats. They published a manifesto of bold, uncompromising measures that the Labour Party stood for. The party called for eliminating university tuition, raising the minimum wage, boosting spending on infrastructure, and undoing school budget cuts. Britain’s political pundits pontificated that the platform spelled doom for the left-leaning party, but the document instead energized young voters, who turned in droves for Corbyn earlier this month. And I believe a similar-style Democratic Party manifesto here in the U.S. could have the same type of electrifying effect.

I don’t think Corbyn clone would do well here-- but America doesn’t need one. We have Randy Bryce. A longtime ironworker with a solid 6-2 frame, an Army vet, with Mexican and Polish ancestry (with a mustache that looks like what you’d see if you stumbled into the wrong 1970s movie house, if you know what I mean), Bryce sent shockwaves this week by announcing his plan to challenge House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose congressional district in southern Wisconsin is not nearly as solid red as one might expect. In comparison to many mealy-mouthed Democrats, listen to what Bryce-- @IronStache on his Twitter feed that is exploding with new members-- told the Payday Report:

“Being an ironworker, I have seen some things that, unless I have seen them with my own eyes and been part of it, I would say you can’t do that-- that’s impossible,” says Bryce. “You know, you are gonna walk up on a two and half inch piece of metal, you are gonna be up three hundred feet in the air and walk across and carry something to get to a place to wield– that’s impossible…When ironworkers hear somebody say, ‘We can’t, it means ‘I won’t.’”

“Let’s trade places,” Bryce quips. “Paul Ryan can come work the iron and I’ll go to D.C.”

Now, watch his ad (and compare it to Ossoff’s spot). This is truly one of the best political commercials that I’ve ever seen-- and it casts Bryce as someone who will fight for health care and the rights of workers:



Look, I know what people will say-- that Bryce’s challenge is a political death trap, a suicide rap. If the polls show an even remotely close race, the powerful House speaker Ryan will call in every chit with every hedge-fund guru and insurance company CEO that he knows, and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to save his job. (And, yes, Bryce has run for office before, and lost… but not with a killer ad like this). Maybe that’s not the point. The spirit of what this man called @IronStache is doing here-- taking a stand on the high ledge of politics, with no fear-- is that spirit that the Democratic Party will need in all 435 House districts and a 33 Senate races if Trumpism is to be stopped now rather than later. There’s a reason that voters in suburban Georgia fell for something-- and it’s because the Democratic Party didn’t stand for anything.

What Happened With Those Special Elections Down South Yesterday?

The Democrats will never win with this running the show

The Democratic candidates in 2 deep red, Deep South Republican districts lost, albeit very narrowly, to Republicans. One way to look at it is that they lost. Another way is that they did incredibly well in those districts. Karen Handel won the GA-06 seat 134,595 (52.6%) to 124,893 (47.4%) and Ralph Norman won the DSC-05 seat by a narrower spread-- 44,889 (51%) to 42,053 (48%). Both Democrats ran centrist campaigns, although Ossoff started out as a progressive until the DCCC got their hands on him and turned him away from Medicare-for-All and away from a fairer tax system in their unending quest to force Democrats to sound more like moderate Republicans.

A few days earlier, Franklin Foer, writing for The Atlantic, talked about how the conflicted elite centrists in control of the Democratic Party have turned it into a stinking pile of shit. The Democratic Party has gone from the proud vehicle for the legitimate voices of the working class to some kind of values-free Republican-lite amalgam that barely knows what it is. Not even Trump or the Ryan-McConnell overreach can change the a dried up turd into the vibrant and unstoppable winning machine it should be.

The careerists who have wrecked the Democratic Party would rather keep their grasp on power within the shrinking party than see it expand in a progressive direction foreign to their own tastes… and agenda. Foer wrote that “Leaderless and loud, the Resistance has become the motive power of the Democratic Party. Presidential hopefuls already strive to anticipate its wishes. Elected officials have restructured their political calculus to avoid getting on its wrong side. The feistiness and agitation of the moment are propelling the party to a new place. But where? The question unnerves Democrats, because the party has no scaffolding. All the dominant leaders of the last two generations-- the Clintons, Barack Obama-- have receded. Defeat discredited the party’s foundational strategy—or, at the very least, exposed it as a wishful description of a more distant future, rather than a clear plan for victory in the present. Resistance has given the Democrats the illusion of unity, but the reality is deeply conflicted. Two of the party’s largest concerns—race and class—reside in an increasing state of tension, a tension that will grow as the party turns toward the next presidential election.”

By the spring of 2016, one top Clinton adviser explained to me, the campaign’s own polling showed that white voters without a college degree despised Clinton. The extent of their loathing was surprising-- she polled far worse with them than Obama ever had, especially in states like Ohio and Iowa. Trump compounded her challenge. From the moment he announced his candidacy, he aimed his message at the white working class. He pursued that group with steadfastness. The threat that he might capture an unusually large chunk of it persuaded Clinton to pursue professionals with even greater intensity in an attempt to offset Trump’s potential gains.

With hindsight, it’s possible to see the risks of her strategy. Her campaign theorized that dentists, accountants, and middle managers needed to fully understand how Donald Trump surrounded himself with bigots and anti-Semites. “From the start,” she argued in a sharply worded speech in August, “Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia.” Her campaign ads against Trump emphasized his misogyny. The attacks highlighted Trump’s greatest weakness, but also played to his greatest strength. Trump had spent the entirety of his campaign trying to foment a culture war, and Clinton zealously joined it. He talked endlessly about political correctness—trying to convince his voters that they weren’t just losing the debates over gay marriage or immigration, but that the elite wanted to banish them as bigots if they even dared to question the prevailing liberal view. Clinton boosted that cause when she told donors in September, “To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’” It was meant to be a sotto voce comment, but that’s never how it works, as Mitt Romney could confirm.

The current politics of the Democratic Party make it less likely than usual that the nominee will be a centrist in the traditional mold. During the Democrats’ long losing streaks in the late 20th century, the party ritualistically engaged in postmortems that propelled it toward the center. That was the natural cycle of politics: Getting repeatedly clubbed by conservatives suggested trekking in a more conservative direction. But as a candidate, Trump placed little priority on traditional conservative positions, and often flouted them. His victory suggests a very different set of lessons, lessons in tune with the mood of the Democratic Party’s base.

Since 2008, energies have been building on the left—fueled by growing inequality, mass incarceration, and the inevitable frustration with a party that held the White House for eight years but couldn’t deliver everything activists wanted. Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter arose. A self-proclaimed democratic socialist captured 43 percent of the primary vote. Then Trump was elected, an event that was received by the party as a catastrophe and that has extended the activist spirit to a far broader audience.

Anger and activism are an opportunity for Democrats to grow their nucleus of supporters motivated to vote in midterm elections. The main question is whether those energies will be channeled in a way that reinforces the long-building demographic divide in American politics or in a way that—at least to some extent—blurs it. Or to put it another way: whether the Democrats accept the continued outflow of the white working class into the arms of the GOP as a fait accompli, or whether they try to stanch it.

There are in fact two different lefts in bloom today, with differing understandings of American politics. One strain practices what its detractors call identity politics-- it exists to combat the bias and discrimination that it believes is built into the system. What it seeks isn’t just the protection of minorities’ and women’s rights, but the validation of minorities and women in the eyes of the national culture, which it believes has marginalized them.

The cultural left was on the rise for much of the Obama era (and arguably, with the notable exception of Bill Clinton’s presidency, for much longer). It squares, for the most part, with the worldview of socially liberal whites, and is given wind by the idea that demography is destiny. It has a theory of the electorate that suits its interests: It wants the party to focus its attentions on Texas and Arizona-- states that have growing percentages of Latinos and large pockets of suburban professionals. (These states are also said to represent an opportunity because the party has failed to maximize nonwhite turnout there.) It celebrates the openness and interdependence embodied in both globalization and multiculturalism.

While this cultural left has sprung into vogue, the economic left has also been reenergized. It has finally recovered from a long abeyance, a wilderness period brought on by the decay of organized labor and the libertarian turn of the post–Cold War years. As the financial crash of 2008 worked its way through the Democratic Party’s intellectual system, the economic left migrated from the fringe protests of Occupy Wall Street to just outside the mainstream. While the cultural left champions a coalition of the ascendant, the economic left imagines a coalition of the despondent. It seeks to roll back the dominance of finance, to bust monopolies, to curb the predations of the market. It wants to ply back the white working-class voters-- clustered in the upper Midwest-- whom Greenberg deemed persuadable.

Neither strain of activism has much disagreement with the broad goals of the other. On paper, they can peaceably coexist within the same platform. But political parties can have only one main theory of the electorate at any given time-- and the prevailing theory tends to prioritize one ideology. The Republican Party’s pursuit of the South shaped its view of race; the Democratic Party’s wooing of professionals led it to embrace globalization.

The tensions between the cultural left and the economic left were evident in the last Democratic primary, and they have persisted. In a November talk after the election, Bernie Sanders railed against identity politics with an abandon that would have been foolish on the campaign trail. “It is not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman, vote for me,’” he complained. In a way, this squabbling is a prelude to the next presidential primary, a contest that will be packed with candidates, each attempting to show him- or herself as the truest champion of minorities or women or the working and middle classes. Seeking victory, candidates will accuse their competitors of not authentically believing in the cause they themselves elevate most highly.

…[Elizabeth] Warren is most focused on the concept of fairness. A course she taught early in her career as a law professor, on contracts, got her thinking about the subject. (Fairness, after all, is a contract’s fundamental purpose.) A raw, moralistic conception of fairness—that people shouldn’t get screwed-- would become the basis for her crusading. Although she shares Bernie Sanders’s contempt for Wall Street, she doesn’t share his democratic socialism. “I love markets-- I believe in markets!” she told me. What drives her to rage is when bankers conspire with government regulators to subvert markets and rig the game. Over the years, she has claimed that it was a romantic view of capitalism that drew her to the Republican Party-- and then the party’s infidelity to market principles drove her from it.

Trump managed to exploit populist anger in part because he could go places ideologically that no Democrat would ever travel. As a matter of politics and policy, Democrats will never be the party of economic nationalism. Its voters are, on balance, more globalist than the Republican base. They tend to live in places that have prospered from trade and technology. They typically support immigration. But Warren has begun to outline the possibilities of a new center-left populism—one that gets beyond wealth redistribution alone.

At the core of Warren’s populism is a phobia of concentrated economic power, an anger over how big banks and big businesses exploit Washington to further their own interests at the expense of ordinary people. This fear of gigantism is a storied American tradition, descended from Thomas Jefferson, even if it hasn’t recently gotten much airtime within the Democratic Party. It justifies itself in the language of individualism—rights, liberty, freedom—not communal obligation.

There’s a growing consensus among center-left economists that the dominance of entire industries by a few enormous companies is one of the defining economic problems of the era. The issue has gravitated toward the mainstream of Democratic Party thinking partly due to the work of Barack Obama’s in-house economist, Jason Furman, a protégé of former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Furman revolted against the behavior of business leaders who came to call at the White House. Many of them didn’t seem especially committed to capitalism. With their privileged access, they groveled for favors that would further their dominance. “They were like the Chinese,” he told me recently. “They craved certainty. They wanted everything planned.”

Everyone can plainly see the lack of competition in many sectors-- the way that there are five big banks, four big airlines, one dominant social-media company, one maker of EpiPens. What’s more, a small set of institutional investors-- BlackRock, Fidelity, Vanguard-- holds stock in a vast percentage of public companies, so even sectors that look somewhat competitive are less so than they appear. CVS and Walgreens, for instance, have a strikingly similar set of major shareholders. The same is true for Apple and Microsoft.

Furman argues that such business concentration is a leading cause of inequality and wage stagnation. Warren has come to believe in this same idea. As a senator, she can see how the ills of finance-- the industry’s concentration, its abuse of political power-- have been replicated across the American economy. Last June in Washington, she gave an important speech, naming a long new list of enemies-- oligopolistic companies like Comcast and Google and Walmart, which she blamed for sapping the life from the American economy. “When Big Business can shut out competition, entrepreneurs and small businesses are denied their shot at building something new and exciting.” In making a Jeffersonian argument, she has begun to deploy Jeffersonian rhetorical trappings. “As a people, we understood that concentrated power anywhere was a threat to liberty everywhere,” she argued. “Competition in America is essential to liberty in America.”

Warren has not committed to running for president, either publicly or, according to close associates of hers, privately. But if she does run, she will likely seek to channel working-class anger toward behemoth firms, their executives, and the government officials who coddle them. It’s not a terribly complicated case to build, since the headlines are so packed with the rent-seeking exploits of those firms: the continued predations of banks on their own customers; airline overbooking; life-saving allergy injections that cost hundreds of dollars; cable companies exacting ever-higher fees; the exposure of low-level workers to such erratic hours that it becomes impossible to establish a daily routine; a broad indifference to consumers.

The approach exudes a Trumplike hostility to Washington elites, but not necessarily to government. And nearly the entire Democratic agenda can be justified through its prism: Obamacare preserves freedom and loosens corporations’ grip on their employees, by allowing workers to switch jobs without fear of losing health insurance. Criminal-justice reform is an effort to secure liberty and equality from an abusive apparatus of the state.

A turn toward populism will never be enough to win back a state like West Virginia, which is now deep-red. And there are legitimate questions about whether a strident former Harvard professor, no matter her Oklahoma roots, can effectively purvey that message to a sufficiently broad audience. But Warren’s brand of populism could help cool white-working-class hostility toward the Democrats and persuade the likes of Greenberg’s focus-group members to switch allegiance again. Empathy with economic disappointment, and even anger over the status quo, might reduce the sense that Democrats are perpetrators of the status quo. And liberal populism would take the party beyond ineffectual arguments about Trump’s temperament. A populist critique of Trump would point to his fraudulence as an enemy of the system, a fraudulence that perfectly illustrates everything wrong with plutocracy.

…To win again, the Democrats don’t need to adopt an alien agenda or back away from policies aimed at racial justice. But their leaders would be well advised to change their rhetorical priorities and more directly address the country’s bastions of gloom. The party has been crushed-- not just in the recent presidential election, but in countless down-ballot elections-- by its failure to develop a message that can resonate with people beyond the core members of the Obama coalition, and by its unwillingness to blare its hostility to crony capitalism. Polling by the group Priorities USA Action shows that a stunning percentage of the voters who switched their allegiance from Obama to Trump believe that Democratic economic policies favor the rich-- 42 percent, nearly twice the number who consider that to be true of Trump’s agenda.

The makings of a Democratic majority are real. Demographic advantages will continue to accrue to the left. The party needs only to add to its coalition on the margins and in the right patches on the map. Doing that does not require the abandonment of any moral principles; persuasion is a different category of political activity from pandering. (On page 60 in this issue, Peter Beinart describes how Democrats might alter their language and policies regarding immigration to broaden appeal without sacrificing their principles.) A decent liberalism, not to mention a savvy party, shouldn’t struggle to accord dignity and respect to citizens, even if it believes some of them hold abhorrent views.

Victories in the culture wars of the past decade seemed to come so easily to liberals that they created a measure of complacency, as if those wars had been won with little cost. In actuality, the losers seethed. If the Democrats intend to win elections in 2018, 2020, and beyond, they require a hardheaded realism about the country that they have recently lacked-- about the perils of income stagnation, the difficulties of moving the country to a multicultural future, the prevalence of unreason and ire. For a Democratic majority to ultimately emerge, the party needs to come to terms with the fact that it hasn’t yet arrived.

This is how Democratic consultants get rich-- selling meaningless pap to frightened, easily manipulated candidates. This TV buy was never going to sway a single vote.

Eric Levitz, writing for New York Magazine yesterday offered one path: an iron worker with a great mustache coming for Paul Ryan’s seat. “Bruce Springsteen’s discography,” he wrote, “has taken on human form-- and now it’s trying to kick Paul Ryan out of Congress.” David Atkins, at the Washington Monthly, was right out of the gate within minutes of yesterday’s losses with the lesson the DCCC will never learn, at least not while Pelosi and Hoyer control it: the path forward lies in winning back Trump voters, not in courting Romney voters.

In July of 2016, Senator Chuck Schumer made a statement that will go down as one of the greatest political miscalculations in modern history: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

This strategy undergirded every decision of the doomed Clinton campaign, from ignoring the white working class in her Rust Belt firewall, to chasing suburban Republican women in Missouri and the South. It is a strategy that establishment Democratic operatives continue to pursue to this day.

That same strategy may well have cost Democrats a House seat in last night’s special elections, where Democrat Jon Ossoff underperformed expectations in a loss in Georgia’s 6th district, while the more ideologically aggressive Democrat Archie Parnell dramatically overperformed expectations in a loss in South Carolina’s 5th.

The two districts in play last night that could not have better mirrored the dilemma facing Democrats over whether to pursue Trump-averse Republican suburban voters, or working class whites and Obama-Trump switchers. Georgia’s 6th District is full of the former: a traditionally heavy Republican district, it veered away from Donald Trump because its residents are less attuned to Trump’s economic populism and—it was believed—his appeals to bigotry. These are the very voters Clinton and Schumer salivated over, and the national Democratic Party pushed very hard for the seat, spending upwards of $5 million.

South Carolina’s 5th district is much more rural and hardscrabble, and was much more favorable to Trump. Establishment Democrats mostly ignored the race, spending no money there.

In GA-06, Jon Ossoff ran a deliberately anti-ideological campaign. Centrist think tank Third Way bragged that Ossoff used a “centrist message aimed at attracting disillusioned Republican voters.” South Carolina’s Parnell, despite his Goldman Sachs background, ran a much more hard-charging campaign of Democratic values.

…The lesson of the special elections around the country is clear: Democratic House candidates can dramatically outperform Clinton in deep red rural areas by running ideological, populist campaigns rooted in progressive areas. Poorer working class voters who pulled the lever for Trump can be swayed back to the left in surprisingly large numbers-- perhaps not enough to win in places like Kansas, Montana and South Carolina, but certainly in other more welcoming climes. Nor is there a need to subvert Democratic principles of social justice in order to accomplish this: none of the Democrats who overperformed Clinton’s numbers in these districts curried favor with bigots in order to accomplish it.

But candidates like Clinton and Ossoff who try to run inoffensive and anti-ideological campaigns in an attempt to win over supposedly sensible, wealthier, bourgeois suburban David-Brooks-reading Republican Romney voters will find that they lose by surprisingly wide margins. There is no Democrat so seemingly non-partisan that Romney Republicans will be tempted to cross the aisle in enough numbers to make a difference.

The way forward for Democrats lies to the left, and with the working classes. It lies with a firm ideological commitment to progressive values, and in winning back the Obama voters Democrats lost to Trump in 2016 without giving ground on commitments to social justice. It does not lie in the wealthy suburbs that voted for Romney over Obama in 2012, or in ideological self-effacement on core economic concerns.

Do you agree? So do we. Tap that thermometer and contribute what you can to candidates like Randy Bryce, Matt Coffay, Jenny Marshall, David Gill-- men and women who are values-driven and aren't likely to be swayed by DCCC centrism and cowardice, not now, not ever.

Election Day In Georgia's 6th District-- The End Of The Trumpanzee Agenda?

Today’s the day in GA-06. The most recent poll shows Ossoff up but within the margin of error, as most polls have shown. This one has Ossoff winning with 49.7% to Handel’s 48.0%, despite Ryan and Trump pouting tens of millions of dollars into the race. Many see the race as a referendum on Trump. 91% of Ossoff voters have an unfavorable opinion him and 78% of Handel voters have a favorable opinion. About 140,000 people have already voted-- a gargantuan number which favors Ossoff.

Ossoff has a 15-point lead among self-described early voters in the Opinion Savvy poll, a 13-point lead in a poll from The Trafalgar Group, a 14-point lead in a SurveyUSA poll conducted for WXIA-TV in Atlanta and a 9-point lead in a WSB-TV/Landmark Communications poll. Then there is the Atlanta Journal Constitution poll, the only live-caller poll, where Ossoff led by 31 points among early voters.

The key to winning these kinds of races is field-- something the DCCC opposes, since none of their crooked staffers can funnel money into their own pockets-- but, thankfully, Ossoff has poured millions of dollars “into an unprecedented ground game to turn out new voters and those who haven’t voted in non-presidential elections previously.” If that reporting is accurate, he’ll win.

GA-06 voters are divided on Trump-- 50% approve and 50% disapprove. Tom Cole (R-OK), former chair of the NRCC told the NY Times that “first and foremost, this is a referendum on the Trump presidency. The stakes here are not just for the House, the stakes are for the Trump presidency.” But there’s another important factor voters will be using today: TrumpCare, which divides the 2 campaigns and which the voters oppose.

The GOP is in a bad situation. If Handel wins, all she did was win a deep red district that Tom Price won last year by 23 points-- and at a cost of over $40 million. Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin wrote that “Republicans, weighed down by Mr. Trump’s growing unpopularity, must demonstrate they can separate themselves from the president enough to hold suburban districts that only now are becoming battlegrounds.”

The DCCC hacks they spoke with for their piece emphasized that a win by Ossoff will help the DCCC recruit more candidates. That’s something that should scare all progressives, since DCCC recruitment-- led by 2 conservatives, multimillionaire New Dem Denny Heck (WA) and wretched Rahm Emanuel protégée Blue Dog Cheri Bustos (IL)-- means wealthy self-funders, “ex”-Republicans, corrupt careerists and, first and foremost, dull conservatives who will take orders from leadership and not rock the corporate, donor-driven boat.

Republicans, weighed down by Mr. Trump’s growing unpopularity, must demonstrate they can separate themselves from the president enough to hold suburban districts that only now are becoming battlegrounds.

…An outright win in Georgia would serve as validation of the party’s overall strategy. Democrats have been recruiting aggressively in Republican-leaning seats-- including in Michigan, Illinois and New Jersey-- and party officials expect a wave of new challengers to announce their candidacies after the start of the next fund-raising quarter in July.

The stakes are highest for Republicans, who have held the district since the Carter administration without much of a challenge to speak of. Ms. Handel, the well-known former board chairwoman of the state’s most populous county, Fulton, and also a former Georgia secretary of state, is facing Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old Democrat and former congressional aide who does not even live in the district.

“It’s a race that we have to win,” said Georgia State Senator Brandon Beach, a Republican whose district includes part of the terrain being fought on here.

Republican officials worry that if Mr. Ossoff wins, it would send a resounding statement about the intensity of the backlash to Mr. Trump, prompting incumbents to think twice about running for re-election, slowing fund-raising and, most significantly, further imperiling their already-stalemated legislative agenda.

“It’s not just symbolic-- we really can’t afford to lose any seats at this point,” said Representative Tom Rooney, Republican of Florida, noting that “the factions” among congressional Republicans make their majorities more tenuous in practice than they may seem on paper.

In a district that was once nobody’s idea of “swing,” the parties themselves have elevated the stakes. The two candidates and outside groups have now spent more than $51 million.

Republican Party leaders thought having total control of Washington would end the gridlock of the Obama years. But with lawmakers unable to put a single piece of significant legislation on Mr. Trump’s desk and the president threatening the party with his unceasing Twitter eruptions and intervention in the investigation surrounding his campaign, Republicans fear that losing in Georgia may hasten the sort of every-man-for-himself acts of self-preservation that typically do not come this early in an election cycle.

And if vulnerable lawmakers turn inward, that could make passing controversial legislation, like an overhaul of the health care or tax system, even more difficult.

Such a vicious cycle, retrenchment ensuring inaction, could only further demoralize grass-roots Republicans, deteriorating the party’s standing even more. That malaise has already hobbled Republicans in Georgia, forcing national super PACs to spend heavily to aid Ms. Handel while Mr. Ossoff has raised over $24 million on his own, mainly with support from small donors.

“We actually have to have victories,” Mr. Rooney said.

Notably, Mr. Ossoff has made opposition to the American Health Care Act, the health care bill approved by House Republicans last month, a signature issue of his campaign. And while Mr. Ossoff has run on a centrist message over all, Democrats have run advertisements targeting liberal-leaning voters, especially African-Americans, with appeals to send a message to Mr. Trump: Republicans on Saturday circulated a picture of a truck parked in the district with a sign reading, “Hold Donald Trump Accountable, Vote Tuesday, June 20.”

…On the Democratic side, elected officials and party strategists say that Mr. Ossoff’s campaign has already served as a galvanizing force, spurring small donors into action and focusing the attention of voters and activists on the battle for the House. The notion that Mr. Price’s once-safe seat could be in play, strategists said, has helped encourage Democrats in other conservative-leaning seats.

Should Mr. Ossoff win, it could spur another wave of Democratic candidates to run in challenging districts.

Citing Georgia as a model, Andy Kim, a former national security official in the Obama administration, said he is likely to enter the race against Representative Tom MacArthur of New Jersey, who vaulted into the national spotlight as an architect of the House Republicans’ health care bill.

“We want that same energy,” Mr. Kim said. “We want people around the country to focus in and say: This an opportunity for us to push back and hold MacArthur accountable for his actions.”

In Arizona, Randy Friese, a trauma surgeon turned state representative, said he has watched the Georgia race as he weighs a challenge to Senator Jeff Flake. Mr. Friese, who said he is leaning toward running, noted that Mr. Ossoff’s message-- casting him largely as a nonpartisan candidate-- had resonated with both Democrats and independent voters.

“Voters need people who have the political courage to stand up for their values and not just bend to the will of the party,” said Mr. Friese, who entered politics after treating Representative Gabrielle Giffords for a near-fatal gunshot wound in 2011.

Among the Democrats likely to announce campaigns in conservative-leaning districts, according to party strategists, are Matt Longjohn, a physician who is the Y.M.C.A.’s national health officer, against Representative Fred Upton of Michigan; Brendan Kelly, the St. Clair County, Ill., state’s attorney, against Representative Mike Bost; and Nancy Soderberg, a former ambassador, against Representative Ron DeSantis of Florida. Elissa Slotkin, a former Defense Department official, is moving toward a campaign against Representative Mike Bishop of Michigan.

All would be running in seats that tilt clearly toward the Republicans and where Democrats typically struggle to enlist strong candidates.

And in California, Gil Cisneros, a Navy veteran who won $266 million in the lottery, has been meeting with strategists about a challenge to Representative Ed Royce, according to Democrats familiar with his preparations. Mr. Royce has already drawn a promising Democratic opponent in Mai Khanh Tran, a pediatrician and former refugee.

Democratic officials argue that even a razor-thin defeat for Mr. Ossoff should be taken as an encouraging sign, but the party is under pressure to win. House Democrats only reluctantly, and minimally, competed in special elections earlier in the year in Kansas and Montana. But they poured millions into this race, even as Mr. Ossoff largely ran from the party’s agenda and leadership.

“My concern is that we might raise the bar too much, the expectations,” said Representative Michael E. Capuano, a Massachusetts Democrat. “Look guys, these are seats we shouldn’t even be playing in.”

Republicans are not even bothering to play down the consequences of losing.

“We all know this is a harbinger of national politics,” Mr. Perdue said, “and the world is looking, the nation is looking.”

Wow, enough identity politics in there to make you want to puke your guts up. Early today, I saw some well intentioned woman candidate from Houston babbling on twitter that the solution to the country’s problems was getting more women into Congress. I was happy to point out that though the best voting record in the House belongs to a woman-- Pramila Jayapal (100%)-- the worst Democrat, by far, also belongs to a woman-- Blue Dog nightmare Kyrsten Sinema (10.0%). How about kf we look at the quality of candidates instead of the identity politics bullshit?

Nate Cohn did a fascinating piece for the NY Times yesterday that listed the 15 best educated districts in the country-- best educated in terms of college degrees-- and correlated the list with congressional representation. All but 2 are represented by Democrats and of the two represented by Republicans-- GA-06 and VA-10-- only one was won by Trump last year, GA-06, very narrowly. They’re the only districts where at least half the adults have degrees. “The list,” he wrote, “includes plenty of caricatures of the liberal elite: ‘limousine liberals’; ‘Hollywood liberals’; ‘latte liberals’; ‘San Francisco liberals’; ‘Massachusetts liberals’; and the ‘D.C. establishment.’ It also includes Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, where a special election on Tuesday has been held up as the first big litmus test of Democratic strength in the Trump era. Education explains why the race is competitive at all.” The list includes some of the most committed and effective progressives in Congress-- Ted Lieu, Ro Khanna, Jerry Nadler, Pramila Jayapal, Jamie Raskin and Katherine Clark. It would be nice seeing a Georgia district on a list like that!

The district has been staunchly Republican for a generation. Mitt Romney won it by 23 percentage points in 2012-- larger than his margin of victory in Alabama or Kansas.

But President Trump won it by just 1.5 points, and Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old Democrat, won 48.1 percent of the vote in a big field in the first round of voting. Of the 15 best-educated districts in the country, this is the only one Mr. Trump won in November.

…If Mr. Ossoff wins the election, Republicans can argue-- with some credibility-- that Georgia’s Sixth was a particularly ripe opportunity for Democrats at a time when Mr. Trump’s ratings among college-educated voters have sunk into the low 30s.

But even if he loses, Mr. Ossoff’s strong performance has already demonstrated that Republicans in well-educated but traditionally conservative areas now shoulder the burden of Mr. Trump’s weak performance. It suggests that previously safe Republican incumbents in Orange County, Calif., or the suburbs of Dallas and Houston could face serious challenges next November. And most important, a close race in Georgia’s Sixth suggests that control of the House is in play, regardless of which candidate comes out on top.

I couldn’t find much on the group that started running an ugly and divisive negative ad campaign on Sunday-- only on Fox News-- blaming Democrats and Ossoff for Steve Scalise’s shooting. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the Principled PAC “bills itself as a group that only supports ‘principled conservatives who have the backbone to stand up to the Washington elite’ but is a bit player in the political world and has faced staunch criticism from conservative leaders.” Ossoff called on Handel to ask the group to take down the ad. Her campaign issued a statement saying the group “should be ashamed” but refused to ask them to take down the ad. The PAC appears to be a scam operation and Laura Ingraham once urged people NOT to heed their call to contribute to her own short-lived Senate campaign through them, calling them trolls. The only records I was able to find for the Principled PAC previous to this buy was some small contributions to some fringe candidates no one has ever heard of and a $5,000 contribution to the North Carolina Gun Rights PAC last year. Kind of ironic.

Today will come down to turnout. I’m betting Ossoff’s gamble on investing heavily in field and GOTV will give him the edge. We’ll know in a few hours.