David Nir has a front page post Democrat Jon Ossoff loses to Republican Karen Handel in closely watched Special Election. The short version is, we came really close, but we were never going to win in a red state like Georgia. Ditto for the much closer race in South Carolina.
Hear that people? Get used to losing.
I think David Atkins has a much better take on what happened yesterday.
The Ossoff-Parnell Lesson: Stop Chasing Romney Voters
In July of 2016, Senator Chuck Schumer made a statement that will go down as one of the greatest political miscalculations in modern history: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”
This strategy undergirded every decision of the doomed Clinton campaign, from ignoring the white working class in her Rust Belt firewall, to chasing suburban Republican women in Missouri and the South. It is a strategy that establishment Democratic operatives continue to pursue to this day.
That same strategy may well have cost Democrats a House seat in last night’s special elections, where Democrat Jon Ossoff underperformed expectations in a loss in Georgia’s 6th district, while the more ideologically aggressive Democrat Archie Parnell dramatically overperformed expectations in a loss in South Carolina’s 5th.
I listened to Ossoff in an interview on NPR yesterday. His message was so mild as to be practically generic. I had a sinking feeling listening to it. At that point I began to have serious doubts Ossoff could pull it off. More from Atkins:
The lesson of the special elections around the country is clear: Democratic House candidates can dramatically outperform Clinton in deep red rural areas by running ideological, populist campaigns rooted in progressive areas. Poorer working class voters who pulled the lever for Trump can be swayed back to the left in surprisingly large numbers—perhaps not enough to win in places like Kansas, Montana and South Carolina, but certainly in other more welcoming climes. Nor is there a need to subvert Democratic principles of social justice in order to accomplish this: none of the Democrats who overperformed Clinton’s numbers in these districts curried favor with bigots in order to accomplish it.
emphasis added
Read The Whole Thing — it’s not that long.
Digby has remarked that conservatives keep running on hardcore conservative beliefs, even though they fail to deliver every time. Their rationale is that they didn’t do it hard enough — next time it will work. DIgby puts it something like this: conservatism can never fail; it can only be failed.
For Democrats, the corresponding principle is something like: progressivism can never succeed, because we’re too scared to actually try it.
What do you think?