Jon Ossoff’s narrow loss means Democrats are on track to take House and Senate in 2018 midterms

| 10:26 pm EDT June 20, 2017
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The special election in Georgia’s 6th District has been called in favor of Republican candidate Karen Handel over Democrat Jon Ossoff, according to CNN. This was not the outcome that the Democratic Party and the anti-Trump resistance were looking for. But the numbers coming out of GA-06 confirm that the Democrats are on track to take the House and Senate in the 2018 midterm elections.

The final votes are still being tallied, but it looks like Handel’s margin of victory will be somewhere around four points, perhaps five. This tells us that a district as firmly red as the GA-06 may not be winnable for the Democrats even with Donald Trump imploding and spilling his own toxic unpopularity onto the Republican Party. But it also tells us that every district less red than the GA-06 is definitely winnable for the Democrats in the midterms – and that’s the majority of districts around the nation.

For reference, Republican candidate Tom Price just won the GA-06 by a twenty-one point margin back in November (source). One of the reasons Donald Trump plucked Price for his cabinet was that the Republican Party was absolutely certain the Democrats couldn’t compete for his seat in a special election. And it turns out Trump’s toxicity has already sucked seventeen points of life out that overwhelmingly red district since November.

In fact all of these recent special elections have been the result of vacancies that the Trump administration created in red districts and red states because it thought they were all completely safe for the Republicans – and yet we keep seeing that the GOP can barely retain even the seats it thought were the safest in the nation. By design, all of these special elections were supposed to be double digit blowouts for the Republican Party. Yet not one of them has come close to going according to the GOP’s plan.

So while this was certainly not the outcome that the Democratic Party and its supporters were hoping for in Georgia, tonight was further evidence that the Republicans are completely screwed in the midterms. The Republican Party will struggle to retain seats in even the solid-red districts, while the Democrats are in position to make major gains in the moderate districts, while retaining all of their existing blue district seats. Any Republican who thinks tonight was good news, and any Democrat who thinks tonight was bad news, is misunderstanding the math.