On Tuesday night, Republican Kay Kirkpatrick, a retired orthopedic surgeon, easily defeated Democratic attorney Christine Triebsch by a 57-43 margin in a special election for Georgia's 32nd State Senate District, which happens to be located almost entirely within Georgia's 6th Congressional District. (Republican Judson Hill vacated the seat to run in the House special election, finishing a distant 5th in last month's primary.) While you might think Republicans, who have good reason to fret about the June 20 runoff in the 6th, are breathing a sigh of relief, a closer look at the numbers in the 32nd should only worry them.
For starters, in the primary, which took place on the same day as the congressional primary, the five Republican candidates on the ballot combined for 60 percent of the vote while the three Democrats took 40 percent. (As with the race for the 6th, all candidates ran together on a single ballot, with the top two vote-getters advancing.) This means that the GOP saw its overall margin slip from 20 points to just 14, a drop of 6 points. Needless to say, a similar shift in the 6th District would be lights out for Republican Karen Handel.
It's also worth noting that Triebsch took 43 percent despite raising just $5,000; Kirkpatrick, meanwhile, brought in a hefty $300,000. As it happens, Democrat Jon Ossoff won 42 percent within the confines of the 32nd District while spending millions of dollars, so Triebsch actually did a tinch better despite running a shoestring campaign. This suggests a GOP fade in the month since the primaries.
Kirkpatrick did manage to match the 14-point margin racked up by Donald Trump, who won here 54-40, but she fell far short of Mitt Romney's massive 67-31 victory. And that leads us to the final interesting observation about this race: Of all the legislative and congressional special elections held since Trump won last November that have pitted a Republican against a Democrat, this is the first to take place in a seat where Hillary Clinton performed better than Barack Obama—yet Kirkpatrick couldn't gain any headway on Trump.
That's a big deal because it had been reasonable to wonder whether voters in districts that had shifted to the right last year were just reverting to form.
At the same time, it made sense to ask whether voters in seats that had moved to the left would do the same thing, particularly once Trump was no longer at the top of the ticket. That, however, didn't happen.
While this is just one data point, it's a key one, because it shows that Democrats can hope to hang onto the gains they made in areas like Georgia's 32nd Senate District. If that same pattern holds true for Georgia's 6th Congressional District, which is similar—but less Republican—turf, then that'll be good news for Ossoff.