Posted on 06/22/2017 2:18:22 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Last night’s election in GA-06 has been widely portrayed as a referendum on President Trump. If you do a Google search for GA-06 and “referendum on Trump” you will get over 1.1 million hits. For instance, there is this from the New York Times: High-Stakes Referendum on Trump Takes Shape in a Georgia Special Election. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, it was dutifully and gleefully parroted by many self-described conservatives who have made #NeverTrump a lifestyle choice.
The votes have been cast and if the GA-06 was a referendum on Trump and not simply a congressional race in which the winner was outspent by about $5 million, then Democrats should be terrified about its implications:
(TWEET-AT-LINK)
David Harsanyi, writing in The Federalist, has some great observations:
You can try and grasp at moral victories, of course, as I saw a number of liberal pundits on cable television trying to do yesterday. You can tell yourself that Ossoff had come closer than any Democrat ever in the sixth district. But there are numerous problems with this optimism. For one, there won’t be many red districts were the president is less popular. Democrats are going to have to flip some of these seats to win back a majority. Second, it’s difficult to imagine how the environment could be any worse for the GOP (though, of course, that too is possible.) Moreover, Ossoff spent a record $25 million on a House race, yet Handel still outran not only him but Trump, as well.
More importantly to those people who are chuckling about Trump’s low presidential approval ratings inevitably translating into electoral Armageddon for the GOP:
This last point is mentioned as often as the others, yet it’s probably the most important. Trump’s approval rating in the sixth district is at the national average of 35 percent, which is to say exceptionally low for a Republican area. Trump had won the district by less than two percentage points back in November. According to a recent Atlanta Journal Constitution poll, the majority of Republicans surveyed (55 percent) said “expressing their opinion on Trump wasn’t a factor in their decision-making.”
Now, I realize that neither Ossoff nor Handel mentioned the president much during the race — which, in itself, bolsters the theory that Trump might not be as consequential in these races as Dems hope. But the race was nationalized. Its implications were national. The coverage was national. The parties treated the race as one that would have national implications. Certainly, the money that poured into the race was national. One imagines that every Georgian Republican who went to the polls understood what this race meant for the future of the parties. When you nationalize races, Republicans will take more than the president into account.
Ossoff didn’t win a moral victory last night, he was boat-raced. Trump’s approval rating stands at <40% and he is in the throes of an investigation that is being pushed by every news outlet in the nation along with some daily stupid faux-outrage. If the Democrats can’t win a winnable seat in that climate with those advantages, maybe they need to think twice about how great 2018 will be.
If the Rino’s do not get with the Trump Agenda they may face primary assaults from Trump supporters.
The democrats outspent the republicans by a 7-1 margin.
The democrats had over $45 million more for their negative ad campaign of personal destruction.
And they still couldn’t win.
GA-06 was not a referendum on Trump. Like the November election and Trump’s two scoops of ice cream (while everyone else gets only one scoop), GA-06 was a demonstration of the power of Russian hacking. How else could a carpetbagger funded by Hollywood have lost in a Georgia district that he doesn’t live in?
Trump has a hard-core base of supporters that comprise about 35% of the electorate. You'd probably be surprised how many of them are registered Democrats. This makes it harder for Democrats to fight him (they alienate a lot of their white working-class voters when they do this), but it also makes it less important for Republicans in Congress to throw a lot of support to him.
In the GA-06 race, Handel kept her distance from Trump and ended up outperforming him in her own district -- like most House Republicans did in 2018.
“Trump’s approval rating in the sixth district is at the national average of 35 percent”
That latest poll that had Trump at 50 percent approval seems to have been successfully buried.
What will liberals do, now that their policies are hated and their only 2 political weapons no longer work?:
1) money from Hollywood and from former Clinton Foundation foreigners - for TV commercials that lie about conservatives
2) media establishing the believe-ability of the lies
Now, if the Democrats had kept their spending down to a reasonable level, would not the Democrat have far more money in their coffers? Compounded with their folly of spending far too much on a race they had only a marginal chance of winning, considering the candidate, they are now faced with dwindling contributions.
Negative campaigning (”We aren’t Trump”) has reached the point of diminishing returns. Critical thinking has left the room.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is a wasting disease. You can’t beat somebody with nobody.
It would only have been a referendum on Trump, if assoff had won it. Since Karen Handel won, it was just a simple congressional election with no significance.
These msm idiots actually believe that us deploreables, know nothing, remember nothing, and whatever they print or say, right now, is the word from GOD.
“If the Rino’s do not get with the Trump Agenda they may face primary assaults from Trump supporters.”
Primary challenges sound great, but McCain, for example, has beaten back several. The incumbent has name recognition, Franking privilege, a working, winning campaign machine, connections and has passed out many favors. The challenger has to overcome that home team advantage and surpass it. If the challenger is really good the party can find a way to coax several challengers into the race. People who are going to vote for the incumbent will likely still do so, but the many challengers split the vote. Time and again the challengers accomplish nothing. By the time a challenger returns to normal life he has been royally smeared and is now, likely, tainted goods. I would love to lose men like McCain, but it’s a hard, hard job to be rid of them.
The Repubs will pick up seats in 2018 since Trump is far more popular than those fake polls claim.
Perhaps the ‘rats could burn through a billion dollars to capture the mayorship of Hell, Michigan...
GTH deceitful commie ‘rat socialist SCUMBAGS
So true.
Am I right that Ossoff ran ads making “conservative” talk? Didn’t he try to sound like a moderate or conservative Dem? So they lie about conservatives and lie to sound conservative. Nice.
Yes. Jack AssOff ads talked about reducing the budget, saving money, cutting waste, etc., etc., but I seriously doubt that anyone [sane] believe his line of BS, especially when it quickly came out that he was SanFran Nan's handpicked "boy".
Call me the Time Traveler. :-)
I'm not so sure about that. As the article suggests, Trump apparently wasn't very consequential in the election.If the Rino’s do not get with the Trump Agenda they may face primary assaults from Trump supporters. - urbanpovertylawcenter
In the GA-06 race, Handel kept her distance from Trump and ended up outperforming him in her own district like most House Republicans did in 2018.
You make a good point. But.People who assume that Trump voters - and even neverTrumpers - were born yesterday should examine their premises closely. A lot has happened since Nixon resigned in 1974:
If the Paul Ryan types who sat out the presidential election think they will get a pass for allowing the Democrats to abuse the Trump Administration, they are courting primary challenges and, if they do win the primary, defeat in the general.
- The Republican Party got murdered in the 1974 congressional election.
- Bill Clinton was impeached for lying in court, was acquitted by the Senate, and subsequently lost his law license because he was guilty of the charge. Notwithstanding those facts, no Democrat Senator paid any price for contempt of the rule of law.
- The Obama maladministration. Pen and phone. Fast and Furious. Eric ("white people are cowards") Holder. Benghazi coverup, “awful video.” Intelligence operations directed at the party out of power during a presidential campaign. Lois Lerner (retired with pension).
Paul Ryan gave lukewarm support (at best) to Donald Trump last year, and won both his primary race and the general election handily. And yet Donald Trump won Ryan's home state of Wisconsin -- which Mitt Romney couldn't even do in 2012 with Ryan on the ballot as his running mate.
Trump won in 2016 by cobbling together a coalition of support from all over the political landscape. There is a lot of overlap between Trump's base of support and the supporters of GOP members of Congress, but it's probably a lot smaller than you might think.
Trump’s campaign was a hostile takeover of the Republican by, basically, the Reform (Perot) Party.But, as I outlined in my prior post, any Republican who supports or facilitates a Democrat coup attempt like Watergate is ignoring the knowledge of the Republican voter that - judged by the standards which apply to a Democrat - the Nixon removal indubitably was a coup.
And “a thousand journalists saying I was right” will not change that. Because in 2017 respect for journalism is not what it was in 1974. Not remotely. There are people who take journalism at face value, mostly Democrats and not all of them. The fact that Trump “isn’t your father’s Republican” does not mean that the people who voted for Trump are persuadable. IMHO very few of us are.
Doesn’t mean I approve of everything Trump - but Justice Gorsuch is worth the vote, right there, and Trump wants to unleash our economy. Which is to say, he wants to unshackle American society. He went to a lot of trouble and expense to get into a position to do that. And Republicans who think he’s not good enough for them are not good enough for me, someone who has voted Republican through thick and thin for two generations.
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