Jon Ossoff: Nobody Buying Pathetic Democratic Hokum

BostonGlobe |  Probably the most humiliating thing about the Georgia loss is that tactically there wasn’t much else they could have done. Yes, it would have been nice if their candidate, Jon Ossoff, wasn’t a baby-faced 30-year-old who didn’t technically live in the district. Yes, it would have been helpful if he had a positive message of his own, and not just an anti-Trump one.

But Ossoff raised more money than any other candidate running for Congress in the history of the United States. He ran endless numbers of television ads. He had thousands of volunteers that came in to campaign for him from across the country. Even more of them were making phone calls for him from wherever they lived. On the campaign trail he didn’t make any real damaging verbal mistakes.

And yet in contest that Democrats called a referendum on Trump, Handel’s 4-point win over Ossoff was 1.5 percentage points higher than Trump’s victory there last November.

They fought the wrong race

Adding to Democratic frustrations Tuesday night was the logic that they may have focused too heavily on the wrong race. The real surprise of the night was just how competitive another special election held Tuesday — that one in South Carolina — had become. The South Carolina race, in a district to replace Trump’s budget chief, could have used more attention.

Yes, in South Carolina the Republican ultimately won, but he did so by just 3 percentage points. This contest wasn’t even supposed to be close, and yet the loss there was less extreme than the one in Georgia.

There are many Democrats saying that spending in Georgia had reached its saturation point weeks if not months ago. Had the party instead sent more of its dollars to South Carolina, it just might have snuck in an upset.

The wounds of the 2016 primary are back

When there’s a win, everyone takes the credit. When there’s a loss, everyone starts pointing fingers.

So it was with Tuesday night that the blame game started immediately after it was clear they had lost both seats, particularly the one in Georgia. The Democratic Party still hasn’t found a way to come together after the divisions created in the 2016 presidential primary between Clinton and Bernie Sanders. These new loses only re-opened these wounds.

Liberal groups like Vermont-based Democracy for America repeated lines so familiar, they could have come after Clinton’s loss in the general election.

“The same, tired centrist Democratic playbook that has come up short cycle after cycle will not suffice,” DFA chairman Jim Dean said in a statement.

Meanwhile those from the Clinton wing only reaffirmed their commitment that these elections are hard to win. Now is not the time, they said, to move even further left in picking Democratic nominees from the so-called Sanders wing of the party.

It is not a matter of who is correct. The real point is that after Tuesday night, Democrats are right back to where they were in November.