GA-6 Special election discussion thread

[Adam Griffin]

Ossoff will make a statement tomorrow that by winning, Dems will be able to net seats in ruby red states like GA and can win the  back in 2018, that Dems have failed in 2014 and 2016

Thank you for your truly game-changing overanalysis of one special election. Also, there are no other competitive house seats in the state of Georgia - even the 7th and 12th are pipe dreams.

The 1st was as competitive as the 12th in 2012: Obama got the exact same vote share in both. If anything, the 1st is now even more competitive than the 12th was simply because of the types of people who live there (disproportionately larger numbers of "moderates", for instance). I'm not sure where it ranks against the 7th, though.

[Adam Griffin]

Trafalgar has Handel +2, having found Ossoff +3 last week.

Isn't Trafalgar sort of...well, really bad?

The only pollster to get MI,PA,WI right in 2016

There's a difference between being right coincidentally and actually being right. If I correctly calculate the odds of a quarter landing on heads three times in a row, then that makes me right. If I correctly guess that the quarter will land on heads three times in a row, then that makes me lucky.

That's why there are so many "pollsters" in each election cycle who get bestowed with the title of "[one of the] most accurate pollsters of the election cycle", and then proceed to being hilariously wrong in future ones (just like they were in the past). In most cases, their methodologies haven't changed; they just lucked out. If a pollster predicts in every election that the results are going to be more GOP/DEM than other pollsters are showing, and the results in one election cycle do in fact end up being more GOP/DEM than most expected, then voila: "most accurate pollster"!

TL;DR: broken clock is right twice a day; Trafalgar is a sh**t pollster

[Adam Griffin]

Back to more important discussions, what kind of EV lead should Ossoff be having for a win here, 58-60%?

55 is my benchmark. The EV should be over half of the district's vote, and Handel probably cannibalized a lot of ED voters compared to Round 1

With 130k votes cast early and assuming another 90k will vote tomorrow, Ossoff needs 55% in EV and 43% in ED (for a total of 50.2%).

He got 41% on ED in April, so assuming the GOP has cannibalized some of their vote in EV compared to April/relative to Dems, the latter should be doable. The former is the real question.

[Adam Griffin]

I cant believe all this over a the crazy man with a gun

If ossoff looses the radical left will begin shouting "Bc he wasn't a progressive populist enough" without recognizing that populism is why this district swung left

You have to understand that suburbans in Georgia are just terrible people. These are the same ones who make Georgia close in polling and then damn near unilaterally swing to the GOP every single time. Their perspective is one of deluding themselves into believing they're "undecided" and "thoughtful" voters because they make good money and are well-educated. Their subconscious selves of course are constantly looking for the slightest reason to justify jumping ship from "undecided" to Republican at the last minute, and they always find their excuse.

* Assuming this shooting has had any real impact; this may be the excuse for them but not the reason

[Adam Griffin]

Jfern doesn't seem to understand that people give money to the candidates to whom they want to give, and that said money isn't automatically earmarked "for all candidates" or whichever ones he likes in lieu of that.

[Adam Griffin]

snip

Second one is definitely fake.

I'm actually pretty sure they're real (they were shared here some time ago, but maybe it was fake then). Nevertheless, campaigns do it because it works: people pour money into campaign coffers when they receive a higher frequency of emails. Of course, all campaigns engaging in this behavior create an inflationary-like effect where even more emails have to be sent over time in order to yield the same results. You can largely thank Barack Obama's campaign for this.

[Adam Griffin]

Jfern doesn't seem to understand that people give money to the candidates to whom they want to give, and that said money isn't automatically earmarked "for all candidates" or whichever ones he likes in lieu of that.

Even if I liked Ossoff, this would be a waste. Of course people like you got mad when Van Jones said that the Hillary campaign basically set a billion on fire, so I guess it makes since that you don't see the issue with over $23 million in a House race.

When did I get mad about that? Unlike you, I don't have to build strawmen to assail your character.

Whether it's a "waste" or not isn't up to us to decide. The guy has raised the money he has because he became the lightning rod for anti-Trump resentment in a way that the others never did (just like "MUH HILLARY" became the lightning rod for you and others). His district barely being won by Trump is the contributing factor, unlike the others that were won by Trump by 20-30 points. There are no other elections going on - the kind of money that's being raised wouldn't be raised if it were a mere appeal to "fund future campaigns now" or whatever.

Even if you could raise the $23 million (probably more like $30m by now) and spread it across multiple specials, it wouldn't have any meaningful effect. Money advantages and superior campaign infrastructure can only buy you 2-3 points over what you'd get organically: that means Quist would have still lost and so would Thompson. You also seem to forget that in most cases, the GOP easily matches in the end whatever Dems raise, so the advantage you think that money would buy would be completely wiped out in the end anyway.