Another election night in America, another failure for the Democratic Party. Having spent a mind-boggling $23 million trying to win a congressional seat in Atlanta, Georgia, the Democrats lost to Republican candidate Karen Handel.
The Democrats had been desperate to paint the contest in Georgia as a ‘referendum’ on the Trump presidency, especially since the reasonably affluent area was thought to be a prefect example of the sort of place Trump’s support was collapsing, the sort of congressional seat the party would need to start winning back in the mid-term elections next year. A win here, it was thought, would show that Trumpism wasn’t working.
But it seems that the Republican Party’s election machinery — with or without Trump — is more solid than its critics think. The Republicans countered the Democrats strategy by presenting the vote as a referendum on Nancy Pelosi, the somewhat toxically liberal minority leader of the House.
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