On Tuesday evening, as results from Georgia’s special election began pointing to a win for Republican Karen Handel, it didn’t take long for pundits to focus their ire on loser Jon Ossoff and the party’s strategy that pumped record mountains of cash into the 30-year-old centrist’s campaign, helping make the race the most costly in history.
There are times these days when I rejoice at no longer being held to the newsroom convention that restricts journalists from acknowledging that they hold opinions on, basically, anything. For instance, as someone who believes almost all of our nation’s problems can be solved by providing our citizens with universal education and healthcare (particularly mental healthcare), I supported Bernie Sanders during the Democratic Primary last summer.
But I am also a pragmatist. I realize that for a universal healthcare plan or education plan to be enacted, there must first be waves of Democrats elected to the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House. That is to say, we are nowhere close to that happening.
All four of the House seats up for grabs were gerrymandered districts in deeply red states. Each special election was won by Republican candidates.
Which brings me back to Jon Ossoff, who lost points among progressives during his campaign for refusing to back single payer healthcare. His distance from the progressive left was a personification of the widening gap between the two wings of the Democratic Party. Who knows what he would have done had he been elected? Maybe he would have gotten on board to improve Obamacare, or even been part of bringing single payer on board. Maybe he would have bucked the party and entrenched himself in some kind of weird “anti-Medicaid” neoliberal position. I guess we’ll never know, because Ossoff lost, 52-48.
What I do know, however, is that if Ossoff had been a Bernie acolyte, campaigning loudly through Georgia’s 6th on a platform of progressive planks, single payer, social safety net and free college tuition, he would not have come anywhere near as close as he did.
That’s because there are not enough progressive voters in Georgia’s 6th to support a progressive candidate. It’s math. They simply don’t exist there. To imagine that Bernie, transformative a candidate as he was (and hopefully will be again in 3 years), could simply conjure voters supportive of a liberal agenda in the tony suburbs north of Atlanta, or in Alpharetta, or in Roswell, is to engage in magical thinking. This was Tom Price’s district—for God’s sake, this was New Gingrich’s district! How can you possibly think it’s going to go from Newt to Democratic Socialist in 17 years?
My fellow Bernie supporters like to invoke the broad, runaway out-of-nowhere populist wave that catapulted the longtime Vermont independent during the past year to the position of party leader. They point to his strong showing against the supposedly unbeatable Hillary Clinton, his spot-on messaging and its relative strength against Donald Trump’s craven, nationalist message, and the assertion that, yes, “Bernie would have won.”
And they are right, except in places like Georgia’s 6th, where Clinton wiped the floor with Sanders, earning three votes for every two he garnered.
Let’s not forget the most important aspect of Bernie’s message: populism. His message resonated in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (where have we heard about that trio of states before?) but fell on deaf ears across the Sunbelt, where Clinton held strong in the primary. Georgia’s 6th is an affluent collection of suburban and rural communities that is among the most educated in the country. The Georgia 6th voter is not concerned with the same issues as, say, the Michigan 5th Congressional District voter (where Sanders dismantled Clinton). So why would they back the same candidates?
It’s easy to Monday-morning-quarterback Tom Perez and the national party’s strategy as too exclusionary toward the progressive wing—and for sure, it is. It’s also easy to beat up on the party that has ceded thousands—thousands!—of state and local elected positions in the past 10 years. It’s easy to look at Jon Ossoff and see Hillary Clinton, and to rebuke his candidacy with demands for proxies who will push the progressive agenda in every national race.
But it’s also wrong to do that. Ossoff was the right candidate for Georgia’s 6th. He lost because he was a Democrat running against a Republican in a place where Republicans always win. Universal healthcare was never going to move the needle in a district held by Republicans since 1979.
So, to my fellow progressives who look at district candidates like Ossoff and see shades of Hillary Clinton: you’re only half right. The lesson from her epic loss shouldn’t be that there is no place for centrists. Different districts require different candidates. Alpharetta is not Grand Rapids.