LOSING AGAIN, FOR THE SAME REASON. Jon Ossoff’s loss in Georgia shows that the Democrats have failed to broaden their appeal, Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center writes at City Journal:
Ossoff’s loss ultimately stemmed from his failure at the third task: persuading independents and never-Trumpers that he was the better choice. Third-party voters cast 4.9 percent of the vote in 2016, but Ossoff outperformed Clinton by only 1.3 percent. Since partisan turnout seems to have been about equal, this implies that Ossoff won by only about a quarter of the third-party supporters’ votes. Democrats hoped that he would do better, based on polls showing Trump’s low approval rating (less than 40 percent) among voters in the district. But Trump’s approval ratings were no better last November, and he still won because people who did not like either Trump or Clinton voted for him by a large margin. Apparently these mostly Republican voters remain willing to choose the Trump-backing GOP devil they know over the Democratic devil they don’t, even if they don’t like Trump himself.
This is the Democrats’ national problem in a nutshell. The Democratic mantra this year has been “resist,” a call to the barricades that energizes their base but apparently does nothing to attract more people to the cause. When Democrats are trying to win districts or states where Trump triumphed, they’re simply re-running the same failed strategy that sent Clinton down to defeat.
Rather than resist, the Democrats should desist—from overreacting to every tweet from the Oval Office and from trying to push their unmodified agenda. Whatever Democratic activists think, a majority of Americans do not want what they are selling. They may not like much of what the Republicans and Trump are offering, either, but when forced to choose, they will, however reluctantly, back the Trump-GOP synthesis over the united Democratic alternative.
One special election 18 months before the national midterms is just a data point, of course; extrapolating national trends from such a unique race as Georgia’s is unsound. But placed in the context of polls and other special elections that show the same thing—Democrats mobilizing their voters but not winning over Republicans or GOP-leaning independents in appreciable numbers—it is a warning. Unless Republican voters start to see Democrats as acceptable alternatives to their own Trump-backing party members, Democrats who hope to regain power quickly are just whistling Dixie.
Good luck getting the left to see that, however. QED:
