Wow, talk about desperate:
Ahead of the highly anticipated Tuesday special election in Georgia’s 6th District in which Democrat Jon Ossoff is hoping to end Republicans’ stranglehold on the House seat, a fringe conservative group is running an ad tying Ossoff to the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA).
No, really. This is not a joke.
Principled PAC is running an ad called ‘Stop the Violent Left.’ Backed by a small five-figure ad buy, the commercial will run on Fox News Sunday and Monday.
In the 30-second spot, video footage of Scalise being taken away on a stretcher while a narrator claims that the “unhinged left is endorsing and applauding shooting Republicans.”
“When will it stop?” the voiceover continues. “It won’t if Jon Ossoff wins on Tuesday, because the same unhinged leftists cheering last week’s shooting are all backing Jon Ossoff. And if he wins. They win.”
Of course, the ad doesn’t actually point to anyone actually “applauding” the shooting, but it does make use of Kathy Griffin’s infamous Trump photoshoot.
Yep, it’s absolutely a sign of desperation and it’s very telling how scared the GOP is of losing this race. I mean, they have to send these guys in to help Handel:
Former Georgia Rep. Tom Price will appear in his first public campaign rally of Georgia’s 6th District race to urge Republicans to get behind Karen Handel. And he’ll be joined at the Saturday event by fellow Cabinet member Sonny Perdue in what’s billed as a final get-out-the-vote push.
The event, set for Saturday at 9:30 a.m. at the Peachtree-DeKalb Airport, is the latest and perhaps last in a string of high-profile visits that have brought Donald Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Vice President Mike Pence to town to back Handel in the Tuesday runoff against Democrat Jon Ossoff.
But this one holds more local flair for voters of the suburban district. Price won the seat in 2004 and notched commanding victories every two years until Trump tapped him as his health secretary. Perdue, now the agriculture secretary, was elected in 2002 the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction.
With polls showing a tight race, Handel is seeking every advantage she can to consolidate Republican support and thwart Ossoff. Both parties have poured enormous resources into the Tuesday vote, which is seen as an early referendum on Trump and a dry run for the 2018 midterm elections.
It makes sense that the GOP would want to keep this as more of local race than a nationalized one because Handel’s trying to keep Trump at arm’s length:
You could count on one hand the red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps in the crowd here Saturday at a get-out-the-vote rally for Karen Handel, who is in danger of being the first Republican since the 1970s to lose in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District.
At least two of the hats sat atop the heads of voters from the nearby 14th District. And that summed up rather neatly the struggle Handel and her GOP allies face.
They need to keep Donald Trump close. Just not too close.
The president beat Hillary Clinton by only 1.5 points last fall in the suburban Atlanta district. Polls suggest Tuesday’s special election — to fill the House vacancy left by Tom Price, whom Trump picked to be Health and Human Services secretary — is a coin flip. Many Republicans fear the contest in its final days is trending toward Democrat Jon Ossoff, who has raised far more money in what’s already the most expensive congressional race in history. Results will be parsed as a barometer for both parties nationally as they realign in the Trump era.
Handel has offered Trump an awkward and politically cautious embrace. He headlined a private fundraiser for her in April, though he already had been scheduled to come to town for a National Rifle Association event. That “checked the box,” Chip Lake, a Republican consultant in Georgia, told BuzzFeed News. Handel accepted an assist from the White House, but she didn’t have to do it in front of TV cameras or the kind of raucous rally crowd that Trump draws. (More recently, Vice President Mike Pence came to the district for a low-key fundraiser with Handel.)
But Ossoff is getting help from a major local and national hero in getting out the vote:
Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) returned to the campaign trail on Saturday to stump with Democrat Jon Ossoff in the final stretch of the high stakes Georgia special election.
Ossoff and Lewis made an appearance at the NAACP's Juneteenth Celebration, meeting with eager supporters on a hot and humid Saturday afternoon. Both Georgia Democrats got a warm reception from attendees who repeatedly asked for pictures and selfies as they walked through the annual festival.
Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery and marks the day slaves in Texas were told about the Emancipation Proclamation. Festival goers said this year's event had more political booths than usual, with stands for both Ossoff and his GOP opponent, Karen Handel's campaigns.
“I'm here in support of Jon Ossoff,” Lewis said to big applause. Supporters crowded in front as the Georgia congressman took the stage and delivered brief remarks.
"[Voting] is the most powerful, nonviolent instrument or tool that we have and we must use it. So all of us, let's get out and vote on Tuesday like we've never voted before."
Lewis, a key civil rights leader in the 1960s, stumped with Ossoff earlier this month. Ossoff previously interned for Lewis in his Washington office and has also worked for Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.).
Lewis is absolutely right and Civil Rights Leaders are sick and tired of racist voter suppression tactics silencing their voices:
DEE HUNTER: To be very clear, Jon Ossoff would be the congressional member right now. He really would have won the previous special election but for a combination of systemic voter suppression tactics and techniques.
GREG PALAST: Dee Hunter is director of the Civil Rights Center of Washington, D.C.
DEE HUNTER: The district itself was gerrymandered. The Republican leadership have been very clear that they gerrymandered this district in order to ensure that it would be held by a Republican.
GREG PALAST: And the gerrymander was overtly racist. This is Laughlin McDonald, who was attorney for the ACLU.
LAUGHLIN McDONALD: The chair of the House Redistricting Commission, and he says, quote, "I am not for drawing [bleep] districts," end-quote. That was his quote. And that’s what the court of—the D.C. three-judge court cited to support its finding that he was a racist.
GREG PALAST: So how did it happen that a Democrat is favored to win the Georgia district racially gerrymandered to give us Newt Gingrich? The answer is here, in this newly built African-American church. In the past few years, there’s been a huge influx of African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos into these Atlanta suburbs. So how could Jon Ossoff lose, given the new racial map of this congressional district?
PASTOR LEE JENKINS: And we talked about voter suppression for a lot of minorities.
GREG PALAST: Pastor Lee Jenkins warns the congregation about the threat to their rights.
PASTOR LEE JENKINS: There’s a lot of things going on behind the scenes, where there are tactics to suppress votes.
GREG PALAST: Voting rights groups registered literally tens of thousands of minority voters, but, strangely, the voter forms simply vanished.
NSE UFOT: We registered over 86,419 voter registration forms.
GREG PALAST: How many again?
NSE UFOT: Eighty-six thousand four hundred nineteen. There are 46,000 of the folks that we’ve registered who have made it, and 40,000 of them are missing. And you know what they told us? "We don’t know what you’re talking about. What forms?"
GREG PALAST: You mean that 40,000 of the voters you had registered, mostly minorities, just disappeared?
NSE UFOT: They did not disappear.
GREG PALAST: Nse Ufot of the New Georgia Project.
NSE UFOT: With all four of my eyes, I—we walked into county boards of elections—county boards of registrars and seen boxes of voter registration forms waiting to be processed.
GREG PALAST: And if you complain about the missing voter registrations, you could face criminal felony charges, and your group could be destroyed. Three years ago, I visited the group registering 10,000 Korean voters. I met their director, Helen Ho.
HELEN HO: Asian Americans, nationally, are the fastest-growing electorate, and our, you know, political power is growing.
GREG PALAST: They called it "Voting Gangnam Style."
VOTING GANGNAM STYLE VIDEO: Vote Gangnam style! Vote Gangnam style!
GREG PALAST: This past week, I went by their office. But it was shuttered and empty. It was this one right here. Right. Gone.
Nse told me what happened to them.
NSE UFOT: And so there was a campaign to register them, and they started registering significant numbers of Korean Americans. Their registration forms weren’t getting processed. So they sent a letter to the secretary of state and said, "Hey, here are all these people that we registered to vote. They aren’t on the voter rolls. WTF?" And they never got a response from the secretary of state. And the next thing you know, there were folks from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation coming, seizing their files, requesting correspondence, basically kicking in the door and shutting down their operation.
GREG PALAST: Georgia GOP officials dropped all threat of criminal charges after two years. But by then, the group was put out of business. But even if you get your name on the rolls, GOP officials may simply erase your name through a purge called Crosscheck. Georgia has a secret list of an astonishing 660,000 suspected double voters. We got our hands on a copy of this list. According to the Crosscheck list, Maria Isabel Hernandez of Georgia is the same voter as Maria Cristina Hernandez of Virginia. The list of accused voters was created for Georgia by this man, Kris Kobach. Donald Trump just appointed this same Kobach to head Trump’s voter integrity commission.
But Ossoff and Democrats are working hard to turn out the African American vote:
The Democratic National Committee is bankrolling an effort by the state party to knock on the doors of minority voters who did not vote in April. It has 10 operatives hitting the pavement every day. “For many of these voters, this is the first time they have had a conversation with an organizer,” said Chrystian Wood, the director of organizing and outreach for the state party.
The Ossoff campaign hired more of its own organizers to reach out to black voters, including Donald Jumper, a political operative in Atlanta who says he can relate to frustrations with the party expressed by fellow African Americans.
“I understand some of how they are feeling,” Jumper said, while slogging through a hilly residential neighborhood in the intense heat, knocking on doors. He aims for 100 doors a day. “People need to be talked to by someone they can identify with. I try to communicate with them that nothing will happen if they are not voting at all.”
Often, he gets an earful.
“African Americans are passionate, but if you don’t engage us, you are going to lose us,” said Charmetria Johnson, 44, a salon owner from Marietta approached by Jumper on his canvassing rounds.
Several miles away in the community of Doraville, a separate group of canvassers with a nonprofit called the New Georgia Project was also working to drive up minority turnout in the district. The group is aiming to create “supervoters” — people who won’t just cast a ballot next week and be done with it, but who stay engaged. The group follows up with texts and emails on the issues and elections most likely to interest each individual. It holds boot camps on political engagement. This week, canvassers were giving out Uber coupons voters could use to get a free ride to the polls.
“A lot of people we talk to did not even know there was an election,” said Roderick Smith, one of the canvassers. When he approaches voters, they might talk about mistreatment by the police or other civil rights concerns, which are not a central focus of the congressional campaign. But they frequently will talk about healthcare, which is.
And Asian Americans:
Before the U.S. presidential election last November, software engineer Suresh Kolichala wasn’t too interested in politics.
He’d voted in previous elections and enjoyed listening to NPR, but he couldn’t name the member of Congress representing him and his city of Johns Creek, a northeastern suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, and he’d never donated to a political campaign, he told NBC News. The results of the election changed the way he thought about civic participation.
“I’ve been living in America for years and have always had a great deal of respect for the Constitution and this country’s system of checks and balances,” Kolichala, who emigrated to the U.S. from India in 1992, said. “But the fact that we elected a president who has this anti-immigrant rhetoric and hateful supporters made me ashamed to be American. I felt like I had to get up and do something.”
Kolichala wouldn’t have to wait long before getting involved. After then Republican Rep. Tom Price vacated his seat to join President Donald Trump’s administration as secretary of health and human services in February, Kolichala began volunteering with a campaign during the ensuing special election, phone banking and canvasing houses.
His efforts are leading up to the scheduled June 20 runoff election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District between Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff. The 6th District, which covers northern Atlanta neighborhoods and sections of Cobb, DeKalb, and Fulton counties, has been a steady Republican stronghold since 1979.
Based on the district’s demographic makeup, Asian-American residents like Kolichala could play a major role in determining the final winner. While there are approximately 420,000 Asian Americans living in Georgia — roughly 4.2 percent of the state’s total population, according to the U.S. Census bureau — Asian Americans make up more than 10 percent of the 6th District.
Certain subsections of the district are also known for their high concentration of Asian Americans, including Johns Creek, where approximately a quarter of the city’s population identifies as Asian.
“Generally what attracts a lot of first generation Asian Americans to the area are the good school districts,” Sam Park, a Georgia state legislator and current Asian outreach director for Ossoff’s campaign, told NBC News. The son of Korean immigrants, Park grew up in the 6th District.
“If you look at the northern end, we have some of the best schools, from Walton High School in Marietta to Chattahoochee High School in Johns Creek, where I attended,” he said. “We’ve seen a trend of Asians moving out of the city of Atlanta and into the northern suburbs to send their kids to the best educational institutions."
And it’s clear the GOP is worried about the Latino vote costing them this election, hence this:
Republican Party political consultants are so determined to tie Democrat Jon Ossoff to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, that they are sending that message in two languages.
The Congressional Leadership Fund is betting that there are enough conservative Latinos in Georgia's sixth district to warrant a Spanish-language spot accusing Ossoff of backing big government liberalism.
The narrator doesn't appear to tailor the ad's message to Latinos. It simply assumes suburban Atlanta Spanish-speakers join white conservatives in disliking Pelosi. The narrator says, "Nancy Pelosi and liberals put us $20 billion in debt. Jon Ossoff would be worse. He would vote for more taxes, more bad spending and regulations that would crush jobs. Ossoff and Pelosi: A bigger government that we cannot allow."
The ad then misleadingly suggests Republican Karen Handel is the incumbent: "The only woman from Georgia in Congress, Karen Handel will fight for working families. Supporting a balanced budget. Putting Georgia taxpayers first."
The Washington Post reports that Latinos make up a "small but growing" constituency in the district. Ossoff sees Latino voters as critical to piece together a winning coalition. Perhaps Handel won't win most of them, but if the CLF attack helps persuade just a few to back Handel, that could derail Ossoff.
As for the idea of the GOP trying to keep the Suburban vote in their favor, then they have a really big problem on their hands:
If Jon Ossoff is able to win Tuesday’s congressional election he’ll owe the victory in large part to an army of women in the wealthy Atlanta suburbs, many of whom — driven by guilt over not helping Hillary Clinton enough in 2016 — have spent dozens of hours a week volunteering for the 30-year old Democrat.
Arlene Meyer, 47, a homemaker, said she has knocked on more than 1,500 doors for Ossoff. On Thursday afternoon, Meyer and her friend Cathy Karell, a 56-year-old retail manager, were going around a neighborhood in 89-degree weather to talk to people about Ossoff and make sure they voted.
The week before the election, supporters of both Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel’s believed the race — which polls show as a toss-up — is all about voter turnout.
“Hello is this Fannie? Hi Fannie, my name is Arlene, I’m with the Jon Ossoff campaign and I’m just calling today to see if you were able to get your absentee ballot in?” a peppy Meyer said to a woman through her closed door. “You did? Excellent thank you … Thank you so much for being a voter!”
It’s the most expensive congressional race in history, with the two campaigns spending a total of more than $40 million.
A year ago, people in the sixth district would have laughed had you told them the seat could flip to Democrats. This is the seat former House Speaker Newt Gingrich held in Congress for 20 years. In November, Rep. Tom Price won re-election to the seat by more than 20 percentage points. But when he was selected by President Trump as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Democrats saw their opening.
The race pits 30-year-old Ossoff, a former documentary filmmaker and national security aide for progressive Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., against Handel, the former Georgia secretary of state.
Karell and Meyer had been acquainted before, but they reconnected at a gathering that started with 11 people in a suburban Atlanta living room after the 2016 election, and has been steadily growing since.
“I looked around the room and there were a lot of familiar faces,” Karrell said about the first meeting she attended. “I think we all politely didn’t talk about politics (in the past.) It’s the elephant in the room. Most of us in this area assume that everybody you meet is really a Republican or a conservative and so, you know, who wants to bring that up at a PTA meeting?”
Now, that initial group of 11 has grown into the John’s Creek-Milton Progressive Network, with more than 500 members on Facebook. One hundred and thirty people showed up at their last meeting where Ossoff spoke, according to Meyer.
When USA TODAY asked the candidate about his thoughts on the newfound Democrat community, he said, “I think that what has emerged here is a coalition of people who are interested in leadership that’s committed to them rather than to self or to party.”'
Speaking of moms, watch how Handel treats this one mother:
Karen Handel — the Republican candidate in next week’s special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional district — told a constituent with a lesbian daughter that her “faith calls her” to prevent the woman’s daughter from ever adopting a child.
The New Civil Rights Movement reported Friday that Handel was clearly caught off guard by the woman’s question, which took place during a constituent meet-and-greet at a sandwich shop in the district.
In video taken from the event, the unnamed constituent explained to Handel that she is a conservative, but has a lesbian daughter.
“What protections do I have for her having a family in the future, wanting to adopt a kid?” the woman asked.
“(N)ote how quick Handel is to cut the woman off when the conversation moves to civil rights and equality for LGBTQ people,” wrote NCRM’s David Badash.
“I have to be honest,” Handel told the woman while placing her hand on her heart. “My faith calls me to a different place on the issue.”
She went on to say that her faith calls on her to be “compassionate,” but that she is “not aware of anything in the law, right now, that I’m aware of, that’s going to be impactful, from a discriminatory standpoint, against your daughter.”
She then stood, giving an arms-wide, “What am I supposed to do?” gesture and ended the conversation.
Seriously, how fucking smug was that? By the way, if there’s any funny business going on with the voting machines, we have Karen Handel to blame:
Eleven years ago, after Karen Handel had been elected as Georgia’s first Republican secretary of state since Reconstruction, Richard DeMillo, head of the Office of Policy Analysis and Research at Georgia Tech, got a call about an important project. The state’s election system, updated with new machines, needed a hard look.
“They said: Take a look at our processes, take a look at our technology, and give us your opinion,” DeMillo said. “I assigned some people from our Information Security Center to work on it.”
In May 2008, the Georgia Tech Information Security Center and Office of Policy Analysis and Research released its report, “A Security Study of the Processes and Procedures Surrounding Electronic Voting in Georgia.” A number of potential problems came up, from the transportation of election machines by prison laborers to password protection of machines and poll-watcher training.
“A malicious party with minimal knowledge of the voting machines could gain the confidence of the poll workers and thus access to the voting units,” the authors wrote. And the state’s Center for Election Systems, at Kennesaw State University, also was at risk. “The election center at Kennesaw State University fills a key role in Georgia’s statewide election procedures, which makes it a potential target of a systemic attack.”
In 2017, the threat became real; there was a data breach at Kennesaw State. While the Georgia secretary of state’s office said that key equipment was not touched, a lawsuit was filed in which worried parties demanded paper ballots in the June 20 special election for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District. The plaintiffs lost, but concerns about the state’s 15-year old election system have bubbled up as Democrat Jon Ossoff campaigns against his Republican opponent — Karen Handel.
According to DeMillo, she didn’t follow up on the report.
“She seemed very interested in getting this, at the time,” he said. “Once she was in office for a few months, we heard nothing.”
Polls have been all over the place showing Ossoff with a decent to narrow lead:
Five polls have been released in June, and four show Ossoff with a lead that’s somewhere between 7 points and 1 point, according to RealClearPolitics’ polling average. However, one of those polls showed the race in a dead heat, and a poll at the beginning of May showed Handel leading by 2 points.
Moreover, Ossoff’s lead appears to have diminished slightly. Though a poll released June 8 had Ossoff up by 7 points, the most recent one we have — from Fox 5 Atlanta — shows the Democrat’s lead being cut to a single point.
Ossoff came in first in the first round of voting this April in Georgia’s unusual “jungle primary” system, which featured more than a dozen other candidates. But he didn’t clear 50 percent of the vote in that race, setting up Tuesday’s runoff election, in which Republicans will have consolidated behind Handel.
Signs points to massive turnout in the race. More than half of the district’s voters have been contacted in person by Ossoff’s campaign, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The New York Times’s Nate Cohn says that 40,000 people who didn’t vote in the runoff this March have already cast a ballot this time around.
“It will all come down to turnout,” Ossoff told his supporters at his rally. “Let’s make sure we get out there and vote.”
Emphasis Mine.
Couldn’t agree more. Let’s seal the deal and win this damn thing on Tuesday. Click here to donate and get involved with Ossoff’s campaign.