(Secretary Tom Price vacated this district when he was appointed to head the Department of Health and Human Services.)
Whatever happens in the first round of voting in the special election in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District on Tuesday, it seems like a safe bet that the result will get a fair amount of national attention because of what it may tell us about the 2018 midterm. But before getting into what those lessons may be, let’s remember that this is a special election — and thus it features special circumstances.
Here are a few:
- The format for this election is different than most other races: It is an all-party primary where there will be a runoff unless one candidate gets more than 50% of the vote. That means all of the candidates regardless of party run together in the same election. This is not how almost all House elections will be decided next year: With the exceptions of California, Louisiana, and Washington, all of which use some form of “jungle primaries” in their elections, other states will use a traditional primary and general election format next year. That includes all of the House races in Georgia — the jungle primary being used for this race is just used for special elections. And even in California and Washington, there still is a general election between the top two finishers even if one candidate exceeds 50% in the primary. So this electoral format won’t be replicated anywhere outside of Louisiana in November 2018.
- There are a whopping 18 candidates in this election, and 11 of them are Republicans. That includes several strong GOP contenders, such as former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel, former Johns Creek City Councilman Bob Gray, and former state Sens. Judson Hill and Dan Moody, among others. Meanwhile, there is only one viable Democrat, former congressional staffer Jon Ossoff. Polling indicates that Ossoff is effectively guaranteed at least a spot in the runoff, and he has an outside chance to win outright — a possibility that this unusual election format allows him. The Republican field, meanwhile, is bunched with a number of contenders in high single or low double digits. So Ossoff can stay above the fray while the Republicans fight among themselves. Republican outside groups seeking to prevent Ossoff from winning before the runoff have spent millions on attack ads against Ossoff, some of which ask voters to only blandly “vote Republican” on Tuesday because, for the most part, these groups are not endorsing a specific candidate.
- While there have been a handful of state legislative special elections this year, and one House special (in Kansas’ very Republican Fourth District, where the Democratic candidate strongly overperformed the district’s partisan lean on Tuesday but did not win — more on that below), Democrats have circled this race for months as perhaps their first real opportunity to strike back at President Donald Trump and Republicans after their surprise victories last fall. Ossoff has emerged as a dynamite fundraiser, raising an unprecedented $8.3 million so far, which is a historic number for any House candidate. Other Democratic candidates will benefit from the small donors who have fueled Ossoff next year, but they won’t be raising such amazing sums of money because there will be much more competition for donor dollars when all 435 House districts will have elections.
- The suburban Atlanta seat is historically Republican. Its former occupant, now-Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price (R), never failed to win less than 60% in his seven general election victories. Mitt Romney carried the seat by 23 points in 2012. But Trump only won it by a point and a half, and it is the kind of district — suburban, well-educated, affluent, and somewhat diverse — that Democrats have increasingly targeted in recent years and where Trump came up well short of usual Republican showings. Of all the Republican-held districts in the country, in only one other district did Hillary Clinton run further ahead of Barack Obama’s 2012 showing — TX-7, a suburban Houston seat held by Rep. John Culberson (R). That GA-6 swung so hard in 2016 at the presidential level makes it something of an outlier too, even though nearly half of all congressional districts experienced at least some significant degree of change in 2016.
- This district is open, which won’t be the case in the lion’s share of House elections next year. In the post-World War II era, an average of about nine out of 10 House incumbents sought reelection in any given cycle. So we’d expect most House elections, and most competitive House elections, to feature incumbents next year. Generally speaking, incumbents have at least a little bit of a built-in advantage against challengers, an advantage the Republicans do not have in GA-6.
- Oh, and this election is taking place a year and a half before the midterm. President Trump is probably a drag on Republicans now — his disapproval rating is roughly 10 points higher than his approval rating, which is a bad sign for his party’s midterm performance historically — but it’s impossible to say what his standing will be in a year and a half.
This is all a way of saying that those who project the GA-6 outcome, whatever it is, onto the still-distant 2018 midterms do so at their own peril. History tells us that these special elections can be a harbinger of the future, although there are plenty of examples illustrating when special elections provide misleading or mixed signals of what is to come . . . . . . . . . . .
