Special election losses leave Democrats divided, searching

The latest GOP victor is Karen Handel, who won about 52 percent of the vote in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District to quell the upstart phenomenon of Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old Democrat who raised more than $23 million and became a symbol of opposition to President Donald Trump.

Handel supporter John Salvesen attributed her more comfortable margin of victory over Ossoff to Republicans determined to defeat a candidate they considered representative of national Democrats – with some encouragement from Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Paul Ryan.

Handel’s tough race, combined with closer-than-usual GOP House victories in Kansas, Montana and SC, suggests Trump will dominate the coming election cycle, forcing Republicans to make peace with him, for better or worse.

Lawmakers are also bemoaning a weak Democratic bench of candidates nationally, and demanding a better strategy for success and a new and stronger economic message that differentiates them more clearly from the Republicans. “It’s clear, that I think, across the board in the Democratic Party, we need new leadership”.

She acknowledged the attacks but added: “I think I’m worth the trouble”.

“In other words, the state Democratic Party is severely divided, as Ellis underscored after the party failed to win the seat in Georgia this week, taking to Twitter to declare, “#dem establishment hacks worst in biz.

So while Republicans held a seat that Tom Price and Newt Gingrich have previously won, by denying Democrats a win of national significance, they gained far more than just one congressional seat.

She said she has told Democrats to stop focusing on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.

When the astonishingly bad health plan is finally made public and people watch their parents, children, siblings and friends be denied health care, and when they experience the full horror of President Trump’s foreign policy, Democrats will win in district after district, if they do the groundwork that is always necessary to win elections.

Leadership elections occur every two years.

CNBC reports that the election between Ossoff and Handel was the most expensive House race ever, with both opponents spending a combination of $36 million as of May 31.

“We as Democrats have to come to terms with the fact that we lost again”, he said.

Tim Ryan criticized his party’s brand, their outreach to voters and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Democrats need to pick up 24 House seats to retake the majority.

And that same thing begins with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. But it should be a wake-up call to Democrats that a heavily Republican district in SC made up of mostly working-class whites living in rural areas nearly flipped on Tuesday.

But the now-familiar refrain of “close but no cigar” has worn on rank-and-file House Democrats who want to see concrete results.

But with Republicans re-energized after the Georgia win, they’re praying she doesn’t go anywhere anytime soon. Democrats saw similar double-digit improvements over Hillary Clinton’s showing in the year’s other special elections: in Montana, Kansas and California, where the GOP got less than 4 percent of the primary vote, trailing six Democrats and a Green. But Pelosi said she’d rather spend the money on individual members.