GA-6 Special election discussion thread

[GeorgiaModerate]

Ossoff is up with a new ad attacking Handel for cutting ties with Planned Parenthood when she was at the Komen Foundation: http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2017/05/16/georgia-6th-ossoff-ad-slams-handels-unforgivable-komen-decision/.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Georgia 32nd senate district runoff is today. Judson Hill abandoned it to for his failed and pathetic attempt at winning Georgia 6th house of reps. This will be an easy GOP hold, but I will still watch it.

If anyone's interested, an AJC article on this runoff: http://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/runoff-today-cobb-fulton-for-georgia-senate-district/z2nH6mZnVY3x8xckbfd3rO/.

I agree that this should be an easy GOP hold, but if the margin is in single digits it probably bodes well for Ossoff next month.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Georgia 32nd senate district runoff is today. Judson Hill abandoned it to for his failed and pathetic attempt at winning Georgia 6th house of reps. This will be an easy GOP hold, but I will still watch it.

If anyone's interested, an AJC article on this runoff: http://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/runoff-today-cobb-fulton-for-georgia-senate-district/z2nH6mZnVY3x8xckbfd3rO/.

I agree that this should be an easy GOP hold, but if the margin is in single digits it probably bodes well for Ossoff next month.

It's not going to be single digits. A 15-point margin is possible.

The combined R vote in the first round was 60.2%, so a 15-point margin wouldn't be at all surprising.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Georgia 32nd senate district runoff is today. Judson Hill abandoned it to for his failed and pathetic attempt at winning Georgia 6th house of reps. This will be an easy GOP hold, but I will still watch it.

Do you have a results page for it?

It'll appear at the link below in a couple of hours, and there'll also be a link to it on the main page of GA SOS.

http://sos.ga.gov/index.php/Elections/current_and_past_elections_results

Can't find it anywhere yet. I assume it's not up.

http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/69574/Web02-state/#/

[GeorgiaModerate]

Very very early returns in SD-32 (probably early voting):

Triebsch (D) 445 (70%)
Kirkpatrick (R) 191 (30%)

[GeorgiaModerate]

From Eric Erickson:

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[GeorgiaModerate]

Someone on the ground may be able to answer this but is Handel running a poor campaign?

So far both campaigns seem to be quieter than they were before the first round.  I expect this to change as the runoff gets closer.

[GeorgiaModerate]

FWIW, since this might shed some (faint) light on interest/enthusiasm in the region: this week's runoff in SD-32 broke the record for votes in a Georgia special legislative runoff with 32,673 votes.  The old record was 23,214 in 2011.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Ossoff not ready to call for impeachment, although it should be noted that this interview took place before the Comey memo came out.

http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2017/05/19/ossoff-on-trump-impeachment-i-dont-think-were-there/

http://news.wabe.org/post/6th-district-race-talk-democrat-jon-ossoff

[GeorgiaModerate]

House Majority PAC (R) announced $500K TV ad buy and $200K for GOTV.

Oh god more money, and we have a month left until the election.

I have no idea about the cost previous congressional races, but we may end up with the most expensive congressional race in US history?

Already there: http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/09/politics/georgia-6-special-election/

[GeorgiaModerate]

I don't understand why people think it's going to be really close (<0.5). I mean, based on the results of the first round, Ossoff was the favorite and Trump has become even more unpopular now.

The GOP just has a way of always doing better than expected, and they have a tight leash on the one demographic that will cut off their arms to vote.

Except they tend to do worse than expected in democratic waves - few people expected Dems to get the Senate in '06, few people expected Obama to win IN and NC in '08, few people expected Dems to gain 2 senate seats in '12. We definitely seem to be in a potential D wave situation with these specials.

Obama was supposed to flip Missouri and take Montana and the Dakotas, and make Arizona as close as Hillary got it. Anyone else before '08 would've gotten a double digit victory under the circumstances.

'12 was a rare exception.

On election night '08, literally no one expected South Dakota to flip, and even North Dakota is a stretch. You have a point about Montana and Missouri, but still, Obama winning Indiana was a surprise. And even if you negate '08, that leaves me with two solid examples - '06 and '12.

Agreed.  Even the most optimistic projections I saw for Obama at the time said he might get Montana but would probably lose by a few percent, and the Dakotas were out of reach (SD more so than ND).  Missouri was expected to be very close, and the actual result bore that out.  McCain's margin was razor thin: less than 4,000 votes out of almost 3 million.  Multiple third-party candidates each got considerably more than that margin.  It was effectively a tie. 

[GeorgiaModerate]

So what would the GA posters say is the most likely outcome right now? I think there's a good chance that it will go down to the wire, but the momentum is probably with Ossoff, right? I'm beginning to think that Republicans might be wasting a ton of money here and that the race has basically already been decided in Ossoff's favor.

I think it's far from decided.  If the election were held this week, I think Ossoff would have a narrow win, say 52-48.  But there's a lot that can happen in the four weeks. 

[GeorgiaModerate]

The district has registered over 5500 new voters since registration was reopened following a lawsuit, with a backlog of thousands still pending:

http://www.myajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/georgia-6th-district-has-added-500-voters-with-more-coming/JngfyKxyryRWupkDcnTVsN

("500" in the URL is the AJC's typo, not mine.)

Breakdown:

Cobb 1082
DeKalb 1989
Fulton 2461

[GeorgiaModerate]

WHOA

SurveyUSA poll of GA-6: Ossoff +7 (!)

Jon Ossoff - 51%
Karen Handel - 44%
Undecided - 6%

http://www.surveyusa.com/client/PollReport.aspx?g=e944d747-cc05-4608-90db-ed0527267059

Didn't someone recently post that the GOP was more worried about Montana than Georgia?

[GeorgiaModerate]

I'm going to take this with caution, but I do believe Ossoff would win 51-49 if the election were held today, by June 20th however, Handel should win 52-48.

This is certainly possible, but what do you expect to happen that would cause it to flip like that?

[GeorgiaModerate]

But Democrats did perform well in the primary - in fact, iirc, they exceeded original expectations. Why would it be different now? He is clearly capable of getting very close to 50%+1 in a district that has traditionally been heavily Republican, so I don't see why it's that unlikely that he could get it exactly, or even a bit over.

+7 is probably too much to ask, but given the previous results, 0.01% - 1% isn't.

Democrats might've even won had there not been a strange mixup involving some of the voting machines in Cobb County. Voting machines were stolen in a few strong Democratic precincts so they only ever reported the early vote.

Citation?  I live in metro ATL and have followed the race closely, and this is the first I've heard of such a mixup.

[GeorgiaModerate]

But Democrats did perform well in the primary - in fact, iirc, they exceeded original expectations. Why would it be different now? He is clearly capable of getting very close to 50%+1 in a district that has traditionally been heavily Republican, so I don't see why it's that unlikely that he could get it exactly, or even a bit over.

+7 is probably too much to ask, but given the previous results, 0.01% - 1% isn't.

Democrats might've even won had there not been a strange mixup involving some of the voting machines in Cobb County. Voting machines were stolen in a few strong Democratic precincts so they only ever reported the early vote.

I did hear about the machines being stolen, but I never heard about it actually effecting the election. I'm not denying it, but if you could give a source or something, I'd love to read it. I'm just curious, that's all.

Well if you look at the NYT map here https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/georgia-house-special-election-district-6 you'll see that there are 4 precincts in Cobb county which only reported early votes. In 2016 Clinton got more than 4500 votes from those 4 precincts, they were majority Dem leaning precincts. Had the machines not have been stolen even 3000 votes may have tipped the scales. Can't say whether or not he's have won but it would've right down to the wire had it not happened.

You've got to do better than that.  How about posting the specific precincts and what the official returns from them are?  If you're talking about the incident described at http://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/police-honored-for-swift-work-recovering-stolen-voting-equipment/aHfJCsd0UEaSEGl70EjKHL/, it had no effect on the actual vote count.

I'll also point out that Ossoff's official vote total was 92,673 out of 193,981 total cast.  It would be necessary to give Ossoff an additional 8,636 (with none for anyone else) for Ossoff to have received a majority.  (Source: http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/GA/67317/Web02-state/#/)

Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for Ossoff in this race.  But the burden of proof is on the person who makes this claim; otherwise it's just another conspiracy theory.  Do you really believe that if this was really an issue that the Democratic party wouldn't have been litigating it to high heaven?

[GeorgiaModerate]

My favorite thing about Karen Handel is when you explain who she is to people and you mention the Susan G. Komen thing and the response is usually "Oh wait that was her? F**k that lady."

What is this story?

Handel's Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Handel) has a good summary:

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[GeorgiaModerate]

Fulton County Department of Elections is suddenly changing voting locations for a dozen precincts in advance of the June 20 run-off. When asked why, their answer was "unforeseen circumstances".

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For the record, the April 18 partisan breakdown of these combined precincts was 55.3% GOP, 44.7% Dem.

Freedom Fighters!

Voter suppression is voter suppression. The only solace is that the good guys aren't victims for once...and its still very wrong.

There is no solace in less people voting, especially in an off year election where there are less voters anyway. They're picking someone to represent them for like a year and a half, not just a change in the shade of red or blue on a map of house districts.

Also, they've known about this election for a while. (1) Why would the locations have "scheduled events" on election day when they knew when the election was and (2) why would they only announce the changes now. It's not like the first round was yesterday; it was five weeks ago. How were these changes "unforeseen" (unless this is only being done to suppress voter turnout).

If they were really trying to suppress voter turnout, there are precincts that are a lot more Republican than these to relocate. They could have come up with a dozen precincts in Fulton County that voted 65% or more for Republican candidates on April 18. The fact that these are slightly more Republican than the district as a whole (just 4% more - 55% vs. 51%) is well within the range of pure coincidence. Seems much more like incompetence.

With Fulton County, incompetence is fairly likely.  I've lived in several metro ATL counties, and the Fulton government was the most inefficient and difficult to deal with.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Regardless of party or position, this is the kind of approach to politics that we could use more of:

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[GeorgiaModerate]

Early voting is now open: http://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/early-voting-underway-georgia-6th-district-runoff/bUPI7JeIMN2rFnMAP3W33N/

[GeorgiaModerate]

First day of early voting:

https://twitter.com/ElectProject/status/869650342220374018

[GeorgiaModerate]

First day of early voting:

https://twitter.com/ElectProject/status/869650342220374018

Those are just mail in absentees, not in person voting. We'll get that data in about 15 minutes.

Ah, thank you for the clarification.

[GeorgiaModerate]

What do y'all make of this?

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The thing that jumps out to me is the 32% who voted in neither R nor D primaries before, a much higher percentage than in the overall EV so far.  So I'd assume that many of these are newly registered.

[GeorgiaModerate]

Ossoff and Handel to have four debates (maybe): http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2017/05/31/georgia-6th-handel-ossoff-to-square-off-in-four-debates/