GA-06 and SC-05 election day & results thread

[Person Man]

True, but my concern is that many of my friends for example (especially those who were anti-Hillary or reluctantly Hillary) will take a losing result as a sign that the DNC has permanently and irreparably failed.

Probably. Whenever I talk to people about this offline I tend to mention that it is a district that isn't even supposed to be competitive, and is only having a special election now because Trump's team thought it would be filled by another Republican due to its previous voting behavior.

The fact that Democrats have made this district a toss-up should be cause for celebration on its own imo. Further, despite the huge price tag, which is troubling, it has also shown that while money does help, esp the further downballot you go, it really can't just buy a district that is not favorable to your party. Candidates and partisan leanings still matter.

He needs to find a way to win.

It also goes with this narrative--Democrats can't get nice things.

Think about the Scott Brown election in MA for example. I wasn't even old enough to vote yet in 2010 but I still remember the sting of Coakley losing to Brown. If I recall correctly, Brown did not even squeak by. He won solidly by like 5 points ~100,000 votes. That's a 17 point swing from a state that had a D+12 PVI in 2010. Many of us are waiting for Trump to have that embarrassing moment. I think, pretty objectively, even among many Republicans I know (incl. Trump supporters), no one deserves a humbling moment more than Trump does.

I just want to see the twitter trigger tantrum. It will make covfefe seem sterile as a breeding ground for memes.

[Person Man]

It isn't enough to have Ossoffs in congress. We have to have Quists. That's the benefit about being unpopular in the beltway. You can run both Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts candidates. One that appeals to people in the professions and others that appeal to tradespeople.

[Person Man]

16,500 votes in Fulton County by 12:30. They are expecting 36,000 today.
https://mobile.twitter.com/TopAtlantaNow/status/877243954001047556

36K in Fulton, which has over half the district's voters, doesn't seem like that much.  Wasn't overall Election Day turnout expected to be in the 100K neighborhood?

I could be totally wrong, but this seems like bad news for Handel. She needs a robust Election Day turnout.

Let me correct myself here...actually Fulton doesn't have quite half of the registered voters in the district.  It's Fulton 48%, Cobb 29%, DeKalb 23%.  And in the first round, the distribution of votes was Fulton 45%, Cobb 32%, DeKalb 23%.  However, in the early vote Fulton was 53%, Cobb 26%, Dekalb 21%.  So the trend then was for Fulton to have less of an Election Day turnout (relative to early vote) than the other two counties.  If that trend continues, then maybe today's turnout will be something close to 100K after all.

And that would benefit whom and how much?

[Person Man]

Well, Romney isn't president now. Trump is, and he only won the district by 1. But you are right, this seat is more about the narrative anyway. My point was that I seriously doubt that many Democrats will be happy if Ossoff loses only by 1 or 2 instead of 10. They have set their expectations so high that anything other than a win would be a disappointment IMO.

However, isn't it significant if Ossoff finishes with 49% of the vote or something, and implies a sea shift in the college educated electorate?

Then it just means we are holding steady at '16 levels in terms of the demographic change of college-educated whites; but we don't need that special election to confirm that; we already see this pattern in cross tabs for public opinion polls.

That means Trump's trade of ties for hard hats is trickling down the ballot. If Ossof gets past 49%, countering Trump's GOP simply means going after the voters he's taking for granted. Otherwise, Democrats are stuck with waiting for a down turn and running Sanderistas. The entire schtick of "Republicans can take their voters for granted, Hillary wasn't liberal enough, and PP should say Roe went too far" then holds true. A vote for Ossoff is a vote against that.