Are the tantrums working?

On pa­per, this elec­tion should be a golden op­por­tun­ity for Demo­crats to make polit­ic­al in­roads. 

The dis­trict is filled with the type of col­lege-edu­cated voters who have grav­it­ated away from Trump—in­clud­ing in­de­pend­ents who don’t have strong par­tis­an loy­al­ties but tend to vote Re­pub­lic­an. 

 

El­ev­en Re­pub­lic­ans will be fight­ing against each oth­er on an all-party primary bal­lot, mak­ing it likely the even­tu­al GOP stand­ard-bear­er will be wounded head­ing in­to an ex­pec­ted run­off. Trump’s pres­id­ency has got­ten off to a rocky start, giv­ing any Demo­crat plenty of ma­ter­i­al to work with.

But the early Demo­crat­ic fa­vor­ite in the race is about as awk­ward a fit for this par­tic­u­lar dis­trict as Demo­crats could find. Jon Os­soff, a self-de­scribed in­vest­ig­at­ive film­maker, is a 29-year-old Bernie Sanders back­er and a former na­tion­al se­cur­ity staffer for lib­er­al Rep. Hank Johnson…

Os­soff fills the con­front­a­tion­al role to a tee. 

In case his cam­paign mes­sage wasn’t clear, his web­site is em­blazoned with the head­line: “Geor­gia: Stand Up To Trump.” 

Mak­ing the race about Trump is help­ing him raise his pro­file and bring­ing in loads of cam­paign cash. 

But money isn’t a sub­sti­tute for a mes­sage that can win over Re­pub­lic­ans who will find Os­soff’s down-the-line lib­er­al views as prob­lem­at­ic as Trump’s pop­u­lism. 

Demo­crat­ic act­iv­ists may be en­er­gized by Os­soff’s broad­sides against the pres­id­ent, but they will end up dis­ap­poin­ted if he doesn’t meld them with a cent­rist mes­sage de­signed to at­tract dis­af­fected Re­pub­lic­ans…

If Demo­crats can even run com­pet­it­ively in this dis­trict, it would be a sign that an unadul­ter­ated anti-Trump mes­sage can pay di­vidends. 

But if the next Re­pub­lic­an nom­in­ee per­forms like Price—who nev­er won less than 62 per­cent of the vote in his sev­en cam­paigns—it will send a sig­nal that simply be­ing the op­pos­i­tion isn’t enough to win back con­trol of Con­gress.

“If you have an old white guy who’s hard right-wing, pro-Trump, anti-Muslim, and anti-gay mar­riage run­ning against a wo­man who comes across like Michelle Nunn, that’s the dy­nam­ic that could be a prob­lem for us,” said one GOP strategist track­ing the race.

 “But you’re not go­ing to have that dy­nam­ic.”