What Jon Ossoff’s Performance in the Georgia Special Election Means for Donald Trump and the Democrats

For those of you wondering whether the millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump are happy with what they've seen so far, last night provided your first hint of an answer. The good people of Georgia's sixth congressional district voted in a special election to replace outgoing Congressman Tom Price, whom Trump appointed to head the Department of Health and Human Services and/or get righteously owned by Elizabeth Warren in public. Democrat Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old former Capitol Hill staffer whose nascent political career should immediately make you reevaluate what you're doing with your life, overcame a more-than-passing resemblance to Paul Ryan to take home just over 48 percent of the vote. He'll advance to a runoff in June alongside the runner-up, Republican Karen Handel, who came in at just under 20 percent.

If you do not live in Georgia's sixth congressional district, which is located just north of Atlanta, it's entirely fair to ask why you should care about a special congressional election in Georgia's sixth congressional district. The answer has to do with what that election result signals. After each presidential contest, pundits generally view the state contests that immediately follow as mini-referenda on the newly elected president's performance. If the president's party loses an election, the logic goes, it's seen as a bellwether of dissatisfied voters to come.

Already, there have been a few elections since Trump was voted into the White House: Republican John Kennedy won a runoff election for a Louisiana Senate seat in December, and just last week, the GOP narrowly won a special election in Kansas's fourth district after the seat was vacated by Mike Pompeo, President Trump's nominee for CIA director. But these weren't particularly fair fights. Louisiana hasn't elected a Democratic senator since 2008, and hasn't gone for a Democratic candidate for president since Bill Clinton in 1996. Meanwhile, Pompeo's district is deep-red territory that Trump carried by nearly 30 points in November. Donald Trump could pop out of a giant matryoshka doll at his next press conference and still not hurt the Republican brand in those elections.

In Georgia, though, Trump won the sixth district by a mere 1.5 points. While it's been in Republican hands since 1979—it was Newt Gingrich's district during his tenure as Speaker of the House—it's a little bit more of a swing district, the type of place that might be a reasonable microcosm that indicates how a nation that narrowly elected Trump is feeling about that decision five months later. As financial backers lined up and nationwide buzz around Ossoff began to build, the Republican Party started getting very nervous and President Trump himself took to (where else?) Twitter to try and keep the seat under GOP control.

In Georgia's "jungle primary" system, a candidate wins the election outright if he or she gets more than 50 percent of the vote, but if no one clears that number, the contest goes to a runoff between the top two vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation. Since there were a whopping eleven Republicans on the ballot who were probably splintering the party vote, Ossoff obviously hoped to do the damn thing on Tuesday, and falling just short of the winner-take-all threshold has to be frustrating. The smart people have the runoff as "tight," and in even more grim news for Ossoff, upstart Democrats have been burned by this process before—in 2006, a Democratic candidate in a right-leaning California district took home nearly 44 percent of votes in a special-election jungle primary, besting the Republican runner-up by nearly 30 points, but then lost the runoff when the mostly Republican electorate united behind a single candidate. There's no guarantee that the same thing won't happen to Ossoff in June.

Nonetheless, if Tuesday's results aren't a haymaker to the chin of the Trump administration, they're at least, say, a solid body blow. Ossoff could very well keep up his momentum and finish what he started in a few months. More broadly, though, his performance signals to Democratic lawmakers in centrist or even Republican-leaning states and districts—even those that went red just five months ago—that constituents will turn out to support politicians who oppose Donald Trump. It's not the win Democrats hoped for, but it might be a sign of better things to come.