Oddly timed elections, such as last week’s Virginia gubernatorial primaries, and Tuesday’s congressional special election in Georgia are like wormholes in science fiction.
Anything can happen. And, as is so often the case in science fiction, a new reality emerges. To explain just what that new reality is – or is supposed to be – requires us all to suspend our disbelief. In cases like these, logic is less important than a good storyline.
A classic example was Republican Scott Brown's January, 2010 shocker. That Massachusetts special election for U.S. Senate, following Ted Kennedy’s death, was the result of a freakish combination of factors—including the indictment of the state’s Democratic House Speaker, and the perceived iciness of Brown’s opponent, Democratic state attorney general Martha Coakley.
But nationally, it was read as a simple tale of a populist/conservative Tea Party tsunami. That led to a surge of Tea Party candidates (or Republicans pretending to suddenly be Tea Partiers) running for Congress later that year, which changed the GOP and the country in ways we are still grappling with. In classic sci-fi fashion it produced a paradox: Brown’s win helped bring about the Tea Party ascendance that supposedly triggered that win.
Something similar might emerge from a special election this week in Georgia, for the Congressional seat vacated by Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price. In this case, a win by obscure young Democrat Jon Ossoff over serial Republican candidate Karen Handel will be read as a sign of a huge national electoral rebuttal of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party—and could help create such a wave.
Were it happening at the normal time along with 434 other congressional elections, the Ossoff-Handel campaign election might barely stand out—as was true with the Brown-Coakley race. It certainly will mean nothing to the balance of power in the House of Representatives during the 2017-’18 session. But with polls running close, the Washington political intelligentsia have decided that the Georgia race represents the national direction of the electorate.
That’s why millions and millions of dollars—tens of millions—have flooded in, setting a record for most spent on a single U.S. House election.
Those tens of millions, and the massive national attention, has completely change the nature of the race—just as Brown’s campaign, driven by breathless national coverage on FOX News and other conservative media, was literally raising money faster than he could spend it; he outspent Martha Coakley and still ended the race with $5 million left in the bank.
In the case of this Georgia election, a recent Atlanta Journal Constitution poll suggested that the district’s voters are paying intense interest in the Ossoff-Handel campaign, and are viewing it as exceptionally important. Although special elections are often low-turnout affairs, with only the intensely political participating, whopping 140,000 people have already voted via early balloting, pointing to a total turnout vastly higher than the district usually delivers for a normal mid-term election.
In other words, the decision to treat this election as a national political test case has actually turned the election into an anomalous outlier.
And yet, you can hardly expect those who poured all that money and attention into the race, to then treat the results as unimportant.
So, a few thousand votes in one direction or the other will likely prompt significant changes in behavior, as the political pros rush to react.
That’s just what happened last week. Because of an odd blip in last week’s Virginia gubernatorial primaries, Republicans in Congress have become even more reticent to criticize Donald Trump.
Virginia is one of just two states electing a governor this year, along with New Jersey, so its primaries were closely watched in a way they wouldn’t have been in a busier campaign year.
The Republican primary was supposed to be a breeze for well-known and strongly-backed Virginia Republican Ed Gillespie.
Instead, according to The Atlantic, it was “a wake-up call to the GOP establishment” that “there’s still a substantial appetite in the party’s base for the populist impulses Trump represents.”
“The big lesson from Virginia’s election,” blared a headline at online publication Vox, is that “we’re still underestimating Trumpism.”
Those conclusions come despite Gillespie’s nomination-claiming victory on Tuesday. They are a reaction to the strong second-place showing of Corey Stewart, an attention-seeker too troublesome even for Trump, who removed Stewart as its Virginia state campaign chair last October. Running for Governor, Stewart campaigned primarily on stoking rural Virginians’ resentments, and on a pledge to protect the state’s Confederacy monuments.
Stewart’s rhetorical, and literal, waving of the Confederacy flag brought a late rush of harsh coverage from the national political media—which played extremely well for him among media-hating rural conservatives.
By very nearly beating the establishment favorite, Stewart put a jolt of fear down the already weak spines of congressional Republicans. Any nutty anti-establishment Trumpian might do the same against me in next year’s primary, they all think. Best to toe the Trump line, and avoid criticizing the President.
In fact, that spinelessness might have been what hurt Gillespie in that primary. “Squishy Gillespie,” as I call him, tried to coast through the primary without offending either the conservative base, or the moderates and independents he needs in the general election. He essentially cocooned for the primary: he skipped the debates, sat on his funds, and avoided taking positions on everything from the Republican health care bill to Trump’s firing of FBI director Jim Comey.
All of that probably dampened turnout for Gillespie, at least as much as Trumpism raised it for Stewart. No matter; the storyline has already altered the timeline going forward.
It happened on the Democrats’ side, too.
Going into last Tuesday’s primary, much of the national media framed the Virginia Democratic primary as a grand clash between the progressive Bernie Sanders and establishment Hillary Clinton wings of the party. The polling gains of Sanders-endorsed former Congressman Tom Perriello supposedly demonstrated that the party’s energy now resides with outsider populist lefties.
That story line never really matched what the campaign seemed to be on the ground, which was a regional split between two popular, solidly liberally candidates—with Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam holding the solid advantage in name-recognition and monetary backing.
Northam ended up winning by a wide 12-point margin, mostly for reasons having little to do with Bernie Sanders, and the notion of a progressive takeover of the party seemed to dissolve overnight.
That could very well discourage outsider progressive candidates from running elsewhere, or make it harder for them to raise money. Not because Perriello’s loss really disproved the viability of such candidates, but because people believe that it did.
After all, as any science fiction fan will tell you, we all want to believe.
