
Watching the returns on the Drudge Report via the New York Times was hilarious. With less than one percent of the vote in, the headline was about the huge advantage that Ossoff had with over sixty percent of the vote in his camp. But they failed to admit the obvious, the fact that the early votes in the district always come in from the liberal precincts closest to Atlanta proper and the rural vote is usually recorded later. Shades of the Trump-Hillary election, don't you think?
As the night went on, Ossoff's percentages dropped back to just above fifty percent before falling below that magic level in the last hours of counting. And Karen Handel, the leading Republican vote getter at just about twenty percent will have nearly two months to consolidate the rest of her party and likely win the runoff. She is a seasoned name in Georgia politics and Ossoff, well, he's not likely to meet even the same level as in this first round. Democrats were highly motivated with outside resources, while Republicans just took shots at each other in a round table firing squad. Expect Handel to win the June runoff with fifty-four percent or more of the vote.
And this showing just adds to the gloom of the Democrats following the early defeat of their special election effort in Kansas just a short time ago. In the attempt to defeat the replacement for Mike Pompeo, the new CIA Director and former Congressman from Kansas' Fourth District, they lost that one to now Representative Ron Estes by eight percent. Even now they are calling that a photo finish, although that percentage is even greater than the percentage difference between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012. But, then again, the hype is driven by both the Times and the Washington Post, two newspapers that just can't help but doctor the truth.
So the great Democratic upswell that the Left is talking about for the 2018 elections is clearly not materializing, at least not at this point. But Republicans better get serious and do a better job of consolidating their efforts. If they get complacent and Congress continues to thumb their noses at the Conservative voters in their party, who knows what the future can bring. But if the Democrats keep pushing farther to the Left while they try and call themselves the mainstream, they will find that the true American mainstream will continue to shun them at the polls.