Mr. Ossoff’s campaign had high hopes, but it lost, and may as well have pounded that $30 million down a gopher hole. Mr. Ossoff attracted more than nine times as much campaign money from San Francisco than he did from the state of Georgia. Well, those folks in ‘Frisco couldn’t vote for Mr. Ossoff, but he couldn’t vote for himself – he didn’t live within the district. That fact may well have been decisive. If we had a law that said “If you can’t vote for a candidate, you can’t donate money to him,” the campaign donors could have saved tons of moolah and perhaps spent most of it more productively than they did. There is a lesson in there somewhere, but we will bet that no one who needs to learn it, will learn it.
BY JOHN SHAFFER The Most Important Election of the Year is over, and so we can go back to using lower case letters to denote it, because it didn’t turn out the way the progressive, anti-Trump groups thought it would. Yes, the run-off election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District was supposed to be the election that marked the success of “the Resistance” to President Trump. (Ooops! We almost forgot that the term used to name the President is “Trump.” The “never Trumpers” almost never call him “President” Trump or use the honorific “Mr.”). Anyway, the candidate of the hour in the 6th, Democrat Jon Ossoff, was eager, capable, young, attractive, committed, and was a sure thing to take the House seat that had been in Republican hands since 1979. He almost did so a few weeks earlier when he nearly attained 50% of the vote in the first election. That is vital to the story, for had he exceeded the 50% threshold he would have won the seat and we wouldn't have needed the run-off. Maybe the Revolution would have started right then, but we will never know, because he came up a little short. Still, there was nothing to worry about. The experts said, given President Trump's unpopularity, Mr. Ossoff was the likely winner and those positive feelings helped him to rake in the dough attract substantial funding. The total for all the candidates in both the first election and the runoff could exceed $60 million. Over half of that was spent by the Ossoff campaign or on his behalf, but the eventual winner, Republican Karen Handel, was no slouch herself, taking in at least $21 million. Here is something to make us all pause: All that expense for a job that pays $174,000. Well, it WAS an important race – a “referendum on Trump” – that is, until the Republican won. Then it lost its significance and became just another “election in a safe Republican seat that the Democrats had no real chance to win and came much closer than anyone had a right to expect.” Eerily similar to earlier races in Montana and Kansas, both of which had been held by Republicans who took jobs in the Trump administration, and both of which were said to be landmarks on the road to removing Presi – pardon us, “Trump” - from office. That is, until both seats were held by Republicans in special elections
Mr. Ossoff’s campaign had high hopes, but it lost, and may as well have pounded that $30 million down a gopher hole. Mr. Ossoff attracted more than nine times as much campaign money from San Francisco than he did from the state of Georgia. Well, those folks in ‘Frisco couldn’t vote for Mr. Ossoff, but he couldn’t vote for himself – he didn’t live within the district. That fact may well have been decisive. If we had a law that said “If you can’t vote for a candidate, you can’t donate money to him,” the campaign donors could have saved tons of moolah and perhaps spent most of it more productively than they did. There is a lesson in there somewhere, but we will bet that no one who needs to learn it, will learn it. Comments are closed.
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