Following the special election in the 4th Congressional District of Kansas last week to fill the seat vacated when Mike Pompeo joined the Trump Administration, I wrote a piece about how the narrow victory by Ron Estes to retain the seat for the GOP portended dark days ahead for the Republican Party. Other conservatives also share this opinion.
The primary reason for the difficulty in winning the seat that Pompeo easily won by 31 points—Estes only won by 7 points—boiled down to the historically low approval numbers held by Trump and the GOP. And while there are Trumplicans within the Republican party pointing the blame at conservatives for their struggles, recent data following another special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District would indicate otherwise.
In what is known as a “jungle primary” election, Jon Ossoff, a Democrat who doesn’t live in the district, came within a hair of getting 50% of the vote necessary to win the election in this traditionally Republican district. There will now be a runoff election against Karen Handel, the Republican career politician who garnered a meager 19.8% of the vote to take second place.
While it has been argued that the sheer number of candidates running for the seat in Georgia is the main reason for Handel’s low numbers—there were 18 other candidates—final voting data indicates that a candidate’s closeness to Trump is the real reason Republicans struggled. In a piece by Erick Erickson at The Resurgent, he documents that “the more closely aligned a candidate was with Donald Trump, the worse the candidate did in the special election in Georgia.”
This fact has already raised a question within the Handel campaign. Is she willing to be seen with Donald Trump when he goes to Georgia next week to address the NRA? Even though she never mentioned Trump in her so-called victory speech, she has since stated she’s willing to appear with the New York liberal.
The Democrats and the liberal media are spinning the Georgia election as a “victory for the ages,” and Trump is claiming a victory for the GOP. The truth is they’re both wrong. But in a solid Republican district where Trump only beat Hillary by 1.5 percentage points, it appears the Democrats are closer to being right than Trump is.
David Leach is the owner of The Strident Conservative, your source for opinion that’s politically incorrect and always “right.” His articles are also featured on RedState.com.
His daily radio commentary is nationally syndicated via Salem Radio Network and can be heard on stations across America.
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