Pelosi tries to reassure Dems after Georgia loss

Republican Karen Handel defeated her Democrat challenger Jon Ossoff with 52 percent of suburban Atlanta voters Tuesday night. While Handel defeated Ossoff by about 10,000 votes and almost 4 percentage points, Republican outside groups had to spend $18 million defending a district where the party's candidates won easily for decades.

While any cross-aisle dealings appear unlikely, Trump's positions some of his key agenda items appear to be strengthened by victories in the Georgia and SC special elections Tuesday night.

"Laughing my #Ossoff", she added later, making a play on a popular pre-election catchphrase among Democrats that instructed voters to "Vote your Ossoff".

Her party shed 63 House seats when she was majority leader in 2010 and lost more than 900 races at the state level. "The Ossoff district wasn't one of them". She noted last week's shooting of Republican House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and said politics has become too embittered.

The California Democrat has always been a bogeywoman Republicans have used to motivate their base and to woo independents as the personification of liberal values and a reminder of why even if they may like their individual member or candidate, a vote for that Democrat would be a step toward putting Pelosi back in the speaker's chair. Second, exactly what, given the above, would Tanden consider 'going low?' Handel campaign volunteers were spit on, her neighbors and herself were mailed threatening letters with a suspicious white powder inside, her campaign signs were routinely stolen and the campaign on the streets devolved into lots of F-bombs and middle fingers delivered by Ossoff supporters to the opposition.

Republicans immediately crowed over winning a seat that Democrats spent 30 million dollars (£23 million) trying to flip.

The Democrat in the Georgia race, Jon Ossoff, was unsuccessful in flipping a traditionally Republican district in the Atlanta suburbs previously represented by Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.

The loss raised questions for Democrats about whether their current platform and message will help them regain congressional seats in the 2018 midterm elections.

But in recent weeks, both candidates had in many ways shied away from talking about the controversial president, with Ossoff trying to present himself as nearly nonpartisan and refusing to support higher taxes for wealthy people or a single-payer health care plan.

Clinton fell short of Trump by less than two percentage points in the presidential election, four years after Republican Mitt Romney triumphed over President Barack Obama by a 61-38 percent margin in 2012. In a later tweet, he urged Democrats to "get together" with Republicans on healthcare, tax cuts and security.

As expected, Republicans also won a special election in the fifth congressional district of SC held to fill the seat vacated by budget director Mick Mulvaney. The House of Representatives voted and passed their proposal last month.

Ms Handel, 55, will become the first Republican woman to represent Georgia in the US House, according to state party officials. Handel emphasized that pedigree often during her campaign and again during her victory speech. She rarely mentioned the administration, despite holding a closed-door fundraiser with the president earlier this spring.

But that's also part of the problem for Democrats: Pelosi is hard to dislodge as long as she wants to stay on as leader. The DCCC spent about $5 million in independent expenditures in support of Ossoff, while Planned Parenthood spent about $820,000. The attention on the race may have hurt Democrats by encouraging more Republicans to go to the polls, Clegg said.

For GOP consultants, the tie-every-Democrat-to-Pelosi is a tried-and-true strategy that's been working for more than six years.

She touts supply side economics, going so far as to say during one debate that she does "not support a living wage" - her way of explaining her opposition to a minimum-wage increase.