Cook Political Report has an excellent summary of yesterday’s election results. I’ve included the link despite the fact that much of Cook Political is behind a paywall.
Key points include:
It's a devastating psychological blow for a party to spend over $30 million on a House special election and still lose. For Democrats, Jon Ossoff's defeat to Karen Handel stings, and the blame game is already raging: "Why did Ossoff run such a bland campaign? Why didn't he take a sledgehammer to Trump and the AHCA? Don't Democrats need to recruit little league coaches with deeper ties to their communities?"
And we have indeed seen a whole bunch of this sort of hang-wringing on DKos since last night. But one point to consider is how little difference there actually was between the results in Georgia and South Carolina — which suggests that the Cook Political analysis is spot on, and that candidate quality didn’t ultimately drive the results.
For those who argue that the DCCC ignored the South Carolina race, the article notes that the DCCC did fund a low profile effort to get African-American voters to the polls in South Carolina. Perhaps this effort is part of the reason why the Democrat did better in South Carolina than polling had indicated.
Furthermore, the analysis notes that heavy spending in a race can actually hurt whichever side has more enthusiasm. Why? Because the resultant high profile of the race ended up providing motivation to the side that otherwise is on the wrong end of the enthusiasm gap:
The divergent results in GA-06 and SC-05 prove saturation-level campaigns can backfire on the party with a baseline enthusiasm advantage—in this case, Democrats. The GA-06 election drew over 259,000 voters—an all-time turnout record for a stand-alone special election and an amazing 49,000 more than participated in the 2014 midterm in GA-06. The crush of attention motivated GOP voters who might have otherwise stayed home, helping Handel to victory. [bolding is mine]
The bottom line is that the results do remain good news. We’ve overperformed the districts in these special elections by an average of 8 points so far (ranging from 6 to 12 points, depending on the race). If we were to achieve that next year:
If Democrats were to outperform their "generic" share by eight points across the board in November 2018, they would pick up 80 seats.
The analysis notes that is not likely to happen, since we’ll be dealing with incumbents, not open seats, next year. Still, it gives an idea of what is possible...