Fueled by a swelling fervor against President Donald Trump, Democrats are putting up tougher-than-expected fights against special election opponents in Republican strongholds - something that's happened fairly regularly in recent history.
But Thomas Hauser, 67, of Belle Plaine, a Republican who works in the information technology industry, said he crossed party lines in Tuesday's election to vote for Thompson. "A win is a win but this should have been relatively simple and it wasn't". And Democrats were hoping to serve up the first election rebuke of Trump.
Ossoff, a 30-year-old former aide to Atlanta-area U.S. Rep. Hank Jones, has benefitted from a surge of Democratic and liberal sentiment since Donald Trump was elected president in November.
Nearly 100 days into Trump's presidency, voters in Georgia's historically Republican 6th Congressional district will choose a lawmaker to fill the seat opened by the departure of Tom Price, who is now Trump's Health and Human Services secretary. In 2018, Republicans will be defending 23 seats that Clinton won. After all, if a Democrat could win a district that Trump won big, why couldn't a Democrat win a district Republicans only carried by single digits?
But that was hardly the case.
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Trump won 60 percent of votes in November's election in the 17-county district in south-central Kansas that includes the state's largest city of Wichita. Wichita is home to Koch Industries, the company led by conservative billionaire political donors Charles and David Koch.
Thompson has tapped into voter frustration with Brownback throughout the campaign, tying the state treasurer to the unpopular Republican governor. "It probably took all three to get Thompson this close". Races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey next fall could also provide a window into Trump's popularity.
Much of the money that would have normally gone into the Kansas race has been diverted to the special election in Georgia's sixth district, where Democrat Jon Ossoff is now favored in a historically Republican-safe suburb of Atlanta. And after crunching Dave Wasserman's numbers, The Washington Examiner similarly concluded that "if turnout across all 435 districts followed this same pattern of partisan participation, then Democrats would win a 314-seat majority in the 435-seat House of Representatives next year".
Though it's far too early to know whether those Democratic gains will hold through the 2018 midterm elections, Kansas was an ominous sign for the GOP ahead of a much closer Georgia 6th District special election next week in Atlanta's northern suburbs - as well as other upcoming special elections in Montana and SC. Both parties treated it as such and that's how the voters perceived it.
Bernie Sanders" former presidential campaign team, now running a group called Our Revolution, piled on: "The Democratic Party can no longer ignore districts that they consider "safe' for Republicans". "That's why he's raising expectations on himself". He is running on a positive local message that is the opposite of the political climate that has been fostered by Trump. A ton of seats would come into play that no one ever dreamed of contesting-more than enough to flip the House. And national Democrats' refusal to spend money helping Thompson meant the race flew under the radar - which some Democrats argued could have left Republican voters feeling no sense of urgency to turn out to vote.
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