AND A CLOSER VIEW OF THE GEORGIA RACE – AT 10:28 A.M. ET:  You gotta know the territory.  Seems the voters of Georgia's Sixth C.D. were not interested in what the Democratic Party was selling.  From Fox: 

Turns out…money can’t buy you love. Or a House seat in Georgia’s 6th District.

Democrats pulled out all stops in their effort to show that the #Resistance isn’t just about marches and slogans and insulting the president, but also about flipping the House in 2018. They poured tens of millions of dollars into what became the most expensive House race ever, trying to elect 30-year-old nonentity Jon Ossoff to fill the seat of HHS head Tom Price. They cast the race as a referendum on Donald Trump, and a bellwether for 2018. Republicans will be elated with the outcome, and hopeful that both those claims are true.

What is undoubtedly true is this: despising Donald Trump is not much of a platform.

Ossoff, who received gobs of money from outside Georgia and doesn’t even live in the 6th District, started his campaign by exhorting voters to “Make Trump Furious.” But more recently he backed off that attack line, and ran what even the New York Times called a “milquetoast” campaign. He portrayed himself as a centrist, with a platform about as thin as his resume. Apparently he came to realize that those activists sending contributions from LA and New York would not be showing up in the voting booth, and that he had to win the hearts and minds of Georgia Republicans.

Democrats’ eagerness to put Trump in the middle of the race may have been a misstep, but they were  swayed by the president’s declining approval ratings and by his narrow victory in the district in November. He won the 6th by only 1.5 percentage points, while Mitt Romney had a 23 point margin four years earlier and Tom Price had been reelected by 24 points last year.

But it turned out that suburban Atlanta’s voters had other things on their minds, including possibly hoping for a candidate better able to serve their interests than the youthful former congressional aide and documentary filmmaker. Despite a torrent of ads casting the election as a way to vent their disapproval of President Trump, the largely Republican district came through for Karen Handel, who has worked her way up through state politics and was a reliable middle-of-the-road candidate. 

COMMENT:   I think that's very accurate.  The Dems put up a candidate whose candidacy made no sense.  They should have put up a giantkiller, but instead ran a perfectly respectable young man with nothing much to offer.  And he could have taken an apartment in the district, just to show some respect.  The fella couldn't even vote in his own election. 

Also, President Trump may not be as unpopular as some polls show.  Remember that he consistently underpolled during the election campaign.  His current Rasmussen approval number is 45%, which is about where Obama spent most of his presidency.  A recent poll showed that he would still beat Hillary Clinton.  Never underestimate his political skills.

June 21, 2017