GA06 2017: The Twitter Rant
Guest post by Will Collier- originally posted at WillCollier.com
So it’s time for some post-runoff Gaming Theory, from an actual resident of GA06.
If you lived in the 6th, you were bombarded by fliers, signs, ads, door-knockers, and most of all, phone calls. At least once a day (and usually more than once), the phone would ring from an out-of-state area code.
First it was robocalls, then the last couple of weeks, call centers. They weren’t targeted. They were calling everybody, every day. And they wouldn’t take “Go to Hell” for an answer—trust me on this one.
Now, imagine for a moment that the roles in the ’16 election were reversed, and Hillary had nominated a Bay Area Democrat for her cabinet. California would have called a special election.
Imagine millions of dollars and tons of vicious social media rhetoric flowing out of Georgia to the Republican candidate for that race. How do you think Californians would have reacted to that?
Self-awareness not being a notable Leftie trait at the best of times, the Left coast is already declaring GA06 a mass Klan meeting.
That’ll go over just as well here in 18 months, dudes. You should definitely keep that up.
One big factor that was missed by the national press: the sheer annoyance of the race. Not only did this special and the runoff extend the godawful 2016 election for another 8 months in a district where neither major nominee was remotely popular, the ridiculous amount of money that poured into the Ossoff campaign from out of state resulted in wall-to-wall ads.
You could not turn on the radio or TV without hearing/seeing a campaign commercial, and Ossoff’s fans seemed determined to cover every square inch of Georgia with “Jon Ossoff” signs. The state will probably have to dig a new landfill to get rid of them.
That strategy made sense in the jungle primary: put this nice-looking kid out there, use the money to flood the zone and slip him through the crowded ballot on name recognition.
That was a smart strategy. It very nearly worked—in April.
Back then, Ossoff never uttered the word “Democrat,” nor did it appear in his ads. But yesterday, there were only two names and two parties on the ballot.
Karen Handel might as well have her name next to “Generic Republican” in the dictionary. Ossoff, thanks to the media blitz on both sides, might as well have had “Nancy Pelosi” on his ballot.
Trump is not popular here, and I doubt he ever will be. Dan MacLaughlin, aka @baseballcrank does an admirable job of tallying that reality
But “unpopular” is not the same as “toxic.” Leftie media types started griping yesterday about the GOP putting Pelosi in anti-Ossoff ads. There’s good reason for that: she’s toxic everywhere except hard-Left enclaves.
GA06 is a lot of things, but hard Left isn’t one. Pelosi, her caucus and its nutball fan club are about as disliked as Notre Dame football around here.
When Ossoff couldn’t hide in the crowd of the primary, the crowd he really was hanging with—Hollywood and Pelosi—was instantly toxic in Cobb and north Fulton; somewhat less so in more Democratic Dekalb, but the damage was done.
I’ll add another factor that the national media wants to ignore: the post- election temper tantrums on the Left. Once again, Trump isn’t popular in this district. But you know what’s a lot less popular?
Riots. Morons in black masks with clubs. Kids who’ve never thought about paying a mortgage telling you you’re a terrible person because you wouldn’t vote for a corrupt old liar in a pantsuit. Those things are really, really unpopular. And the Left’s bratty insistence that it deserves a do-over after it lost an eminently winnable election Isn’t getting any traction in middle America.
Today’s run of the usual suspects saying Ossoff lost because he didn’t go full Bolshevik are right up the same alley. And they’ll result in similar reactions in later elections, especially those that aren’t bolstered by $30 million in now-wasted activist money that simply filled coffers of Democratic consultants and advertisers and broadcasters.
But all they really succeeded in doing was pissing off the people they needed to get votes from. Bad strategy, bad politics.
And so, Jon Ossoff, we who actually live in GA06 say to you, your loopy fans, and most of all your phone centers:
About Author
Mike Hassinger
Add a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
To quote Sean Connery after interviewing Andy Garcia in the Untouchables, “I like him!”
The point of this post seems to be that Dems should assimilate by becoming GOP light.
To be clear, the following is in reference to some states and the nation as a whole, not GA or GA-6. A house divided against itself can’t stand. It’s worsened when the slight minority exercises the control normally accorded a significant majority. There will be excesses or lapses that are likely to not be good when that’s overturned. Locally we have the DeKalb and Clayton County examples. Hopefully Gwinnett County will avoid their experiences.
As to the Klan, there’s Benton. The guy wasn’t put in check until damage was imminent. The type of people that support his type are critical to the GOP retaining control.
“But all they really succeeded in doing was pissing off the people they needed to get votes from. Bad strategy, bad politics.”
Perhaps true, emulating the GOP’s example of promotion of fear and loathing isn’t the way forward either.
Andrew has a point. Are you guys gonna put Collier on the payroll?
Collier’s comments about self-awareness would be ironic if they weren’t pathetic. I wonder if he even knows a Democrat. His other complaints are just boilerplate that I can read in a hundred places.
Wait, we have a payroll? I think I am due some back wages.
Lawton, let’s revolt. I want money.
See where self-awareness gets you?
So blah blah blah. Dems are stupid. Dems are whiny brats. Dems “never thought about paying a mortgage” (hint: I own my house, thanks, and pay my mortgage every month).
This post is nothing but a whiny rant full of cliches and false talking points about Dems/Liberals.
How so? No one is suggesting no leftist pays a mortgage. But certainly you realize several of their constituencies such as young millennials and the urban poor in large measure do not. You don’t see much GOP voting in section 8.
And certainly you are aware the left has been in constant whine mode since November.
And if you don’t believe a meme on the left now is that CD 6 is a nest of klansmen well then you have not perused liberal twitter/ websites.
As to OP’s larger point: we really don’t like Trump. But we like the left even less. And yes, the national left went all in on a relative empty suit.
And given that the execrable Planned Parenthood went so far in for Ossoff, I would love for Paul Ryan to let Karen become the principal sponsor of a bill to defund them.
As if the GOP wouldn’t demonize someone else if there wasn’t a Pelosi to kick around.
Can anyone even say what it is they don’t like about Pelosi?
This….
Do you wish to ignore that Sanders supporters dislike Pelosi as much as the GOP does?
“Can anyone even say what it is they don’t like about Pelosi?”
Yes. They dislike her ideology. What are you saying? That conservatives and moderates shouldn’t have the same disdain for people on the far left that liberals and moderates have for the far right?
She’s a yugggeeee liability. The Repubs effectively ran against her in the past race and all of the Repubs will do the same thing in ’18. Watch for the return of the infamous morphing ads of any Dem candidate morphing into her botoxed mug…ala the Clinton midterm 1994. If Dems are smart, they’ll dump her forthwith.
I appreciate your full throated defense of her. I do. But she’s been the face of Lib politics for north of a decade. Eiger’s clip/post of her is legendary. Fair or not, she brings more baggage than a Trailways Bus. There is visceral disgust of her by The Right. IMO, and you know where I stand on everything, any new face in the Minority Leader slot, would bring fresh blood to your side.
Yes, but why was she considered “toxic”? Ideological disdain doesn’t mean disgust. I think the toxicity is one dash super-progressive and one dash misogyny.
my liberal 16 year old son had this to say about pelosi…she’s in her 70’s. all the house leadership for the democrats are, they are 25 years older than the gop leaders…we need fresh blood and new ideas…he went on to describe tulsi gabbard as an example of who he would look to for this…
Some more data from Tuesday’s runoff:
—As many of you might suspect, turnout rate in apartment-heavy, Democratic precincts in CD 6 lagged behind the overall districtwide rate. I mentioned yesterday the Pleasantdale Road precinct in north DeKalb (the only DeKalb precinct in CD 6 which is majority black in voter registration), where turnout was just 34%. Lets look at some in Fulton County…Fulton reported a turnout of about 57% of active registered voters in the runoff, but the turnout rate lagged far behind in some Democratic precincts. In Roswell 7A for instance (47% black in voter registration last fall), turnout was just 31% (only 402 of the district’s 1,306 active registered voters). Just below the Chattahoochee River along Roswell Road in Sandy Springs, the Sandy Springs 15A precinct (45% black) had a turnout of just 30% (690 of 2,330 registered). And not far below there, the Sandy Springs 26 precinct in the Morgan Falls area (44 percent black), just 35% turnout. Maybe in just those precincts, a higher turnout could have cut Handel’s 9700-vote win to maybe 7500 or so.
—Nearly 30% of the total turnout Tuesday (about 76,000 of the 259,000 votes cast) came from just Senate District 32, the East Cobb-Sandy Springs district under newly-elected Senator Kay Kirkpatrick. Handel won that Senate district by a 58-42% margin over Ossoff, nearly a 13,000-vote margin—exceeding her districtwide margin of about 9,700 votes. Though 42% is a pretty good showing for a Democrat in that district, Ossoff needed closer to 45% to have a chance of prevailing Tuesday. (Most of SD 32 lies within CD 6, with a small part of SD 32 overlapping CD 11.)
—Because Ossoff’s 48% showing was above the Democratic norm in CD 6 (Obama never exceeded 40% there), the Democrat obviously had to win some GOP-held state legislative districts in CD 6 in the runoff (Scott Holcomb may be the only Democratic state legislator who lives in CD 6). And Ossoff did—as some examples, carrying the Johns Creek HD 50 of Brad Raffensperger (by a mere 26 votes), the Dunwoody-based HD 79 of Rep. Tom Taylor (52-48%) and the north DeKalb-Sandy Springs panhandle SD 40 (Sen. Fran Millar) with 55% (the Gwinnett portion of SD 40 is in CD 7). And Ossoff came close in others—losing for instance the Roswell-Sandy Springs HD 51 of Rep. Wendell Willard by only a point and a half.
—The overall turnout in CD 6 was so high on Tuesday—about 260,000—that it actually exceeded the turnout in some of Georgia’s congressional districts in last year’s presidential election (based on data from daily kos website), more than the 248,000 presidential votes cast in Sanford Bishop’s CD 2 in southwest Georgia and the 256,000 cast in Tom Graves’s CD 14 in the northwest corner of the state—and not much below the 268,000 who voted in the Augusta-based 12th CD of Rock Allen.
“At least once a day (and usually more than once), the phone would ring from an out-of-state area code.” And you can bet those were “spoofed” caller ID calls. I’m sure our good political consultant posters here use that nasty tactic to avoid getting unwanted call backs. Spoofing caller ID is illegal when making calls for commercial gain or fraud.
“FCC rules prohibit any person or entity from transmitting misleading or inaccurate caller ID information with the intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongly obtain anything of value.”
I think political calls fall in this category.