Jon Ossoff is a name you’re hearing concerning the special election in Georgia to fill former Rep. Tom Price’s sixth congressional seat. Price, a Republican, is now President Trumps’ Health and Human Services secretary. He’s doing strong in early voting totals, and he’s getting help from the Hollywood Left as well. Actress Alyssa Milano is campaigning for him. Brace yourselves for the question that the liberal media loves to ask: is Georgia going blue? Well, as Nate Cohn of The New York Times noted, special elections are hard to predict, and they’re usually a stand-alone event, not in keeping with being harbingers for national trends. The GOP field is also massive, with eleven folks vying to replace Price. Still, it’s possible that Ossoff could pull this off, as the GOP field fails to find a consensus candidate:
Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old Democrat and first-time candidate, has fared well in recent polls and has raised an astonishing $3 million in only a few months. Mr. Trump struggled to victory in this district, a well-educated suburban area north of Atlanta. He won by just 1.5 percentage points, down from Mitt Romney’s 23-point win in 2012.It would be a mistake to read too much into the result of this one election. Special elections tend to stand on their own, and there are reasons to think that Democrats have a better chance than the district’s voting in congressional races suggests.
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Instead, it’s the Republicans who are struggling to coalesce. They have 11 candidates on the ballot, with none emerging as the obvious favorite, although former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel, the businessman Bob Gray and state senator Judson Hill are considered among the strongest contenders. Whoever advances to a runoff (assuming anyone does) will have only two months to coalesce support and raise funds with the benefit of party unity.
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So far, 55 percent of early voters in the special election — either in-person or absentee — have most recently participated in a Democratic primary, while just 31 percent have most recently participated in a Republican primary.
For comparison, just 23 percent of voters in the district in the 2016 general election had most recently participated in a Democratic primary, compared with 46 percent in a Republican primary.
The huge Republican field probably helps the early Democratic turnout edge: Republican voters are less likely to know at this stage whom they’re going to vote for. But the Democrats also enjoy a similar 45-to-21-point edge among the larger group of voters who have requested but not yet returned absentee ballots.
Ossoff was a former congressional staffer and is currently a documentary filmmaker, who has done projects for Al-Jazeera. Yet, it seems, like Clinton, that he’s prone to stretching the truth, especially about his national security experience. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, Ossoff claimed to have had a top-secret clearance for years, while he only had it…for five months:
After claiming for months he had five years of experience as a congressional national security staffer with top-secret clearance, Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff has now admitted that he had clearance for just five months.Since Ossoff announced his campaign to fill the seat vacated by Tom Price earlier this year, he has leaned on his supposed five years as a "national security aide with top-secret clearance." The claim has been made in campaign ads, during campaign events, and even in his campaign announcement.
That seems like a lie, doesn’t it? The special election will be held on April 18.
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