It is a truism in politics that special elections usually don’t mean
very much. But Tuesday’s runoff election in the Georgia Six, as it came
to be known, could be one of the exceptions to the rule. If, on Tuesday,
the Democrats had captured this deep-red congressional seat in an
affluent suburb of Atlanta, it would have been a major blow to President
Trump and his Republican allies. Conceivably, it could have affected the
progress of the controversial G.O.P. health-care bill and other matters
pending in Congress. Undoubtedly, it would have been received as a
harbinger of the Democrats’ chances in next year’s midterms. But, by ten
o’clock on Tuesday night, the Republicans gathered at the headquarters of
Karen Handel, their party’s candidate, were already celebrating a
victory over Jon Ossoff, the young Democratic upstart.

The result was a huge relief for Republicans and a reality check for
Democrats. This was a seat that has been held by Republicans for
decades. In November, the district’s previous congressman, Tom Price,
who is now Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, won by more than twenty-three percentage points. But Georgia’s
Sixth is also a district where almost sixty per cent of the electorate
have college degrees, and where, according to a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll,
Trump’s approval rating is just thirty-five per cent. Ossoff led the
field, with forty-nine per cent of the vote, in April’s so-called
jungle primary, and Democrats began to hope that he could pull off a
historic victory and demonstrate that Trump is poison to the Republican
Party, at least in certain areas.

Yet, soon after the votes started coming in, it was evident that
Ossoff’s challenge, which attracted strong financial and logistical
support from Democrats and Trump-loathers all across the country, had
come up a bit short. His lead among early voters wasn’t as big as had
been expected, and, when the returns started coming in from the heavily
Republican Cobb County, it turned out that Handel, a fifty-five-year-old
businesswoman and veteran Georgia politician, had succeeded in rallying
enough Republicans behind her.

Despite the result, Ossoff, a thirty-year-old documentary filmmaker and
a former congressional aide, shouldn’t have his achievement dismissed.
By peeling off a significant number of Republican moderates,
particularly Republican women, he held the G.O.P.’s margin of victory to
about 3.8 percentage points. If such a big swing were repeated
nationwide in the midterms, it would produce a hefty Democratic
majority. Still, as David Axelrod pointed out on CNN, shortly after the
network called the race, in politics you don’t get prizes for coming in
second. And the ultimate message of the evening was that, in this
heavily contested Republican district, traditional party lines held up,
despite deep local misgivings about Trump.

This was partly because Handel, with a big helping hand from the
national Republican Party, ran an effective campaign. To offset the
roughly twenty-five million dollars that Ossoff raised, the
Congressional Leadership Fund—a super PAC associated with House Speaker
Paul Ryan—and the National Republican Campaign Committee poured in more
than thirteen million dollars. America First Policies, a super PAC formed by former Trump-campaign officials, kicked in another $2.5
million.

While many Democrats wanted the race to be a referendum on Trump,
Republican ads framed it in a more traditional way: as a race between a
conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat. The G.O.P. high command
depicted Ossoff as a puppet of Hollywood celebrities and Nancy Pelosi,
who, according to the Journal-Constitution poll, has a ninety-one-per-cent disapproval rating among local Republicans. Although Ossoff did his
best to portray himself as a non-ideological moderate—he refused to
endorse higher taxes on the rich and said that he would work with the
Trump Administration on issues that benefitted the district—the
Republican barrage proved effective, something Handel acknowledged in
her victory speech.

Handel thanked Ryan and other Republican leaders who “united to help us
hold the Sixth.” She also offered “a special thanks to the President of
the United States.” The crowd responded with chants of “Trump, Trump,
Trump.” Then, perhaps displaying her true feelings, she added, “And
let’s not forget our equally great Vice-President, Mike Pence.” (A
couple of weeks ago, Pence flew to Georgia and attended a fund-raiser for
Handel.)

Ossoff, in his concession speech, didn’t mention Trump directly. But he
did say to his supporters, “As darkness has crept across the planet,
you’ve been a beacon of hope.” Democrats, however, had been hoping for
more than a beacon. They wanted a victory to cheer, and its failure to
materialize is sure to generate debates about the future direction of
the Party, and whether Ossoff would have done better if he had adopted a
more populist and overtly anti-Trump approach.

In a district as red as Georgia’s Sixth, the disheartening truth is that
Ossoff probably wouldn’t have done better had he run to the left. While
many Republicans have some misgivings about Trump, they have even more
serious misgivings about voting for a Democrat. According to that same
opinion poll in the Journal-Constitution, just one in three Republican
voters said that they were supporting Handel to express support for
Trump. What motivated them, they said, were traditional Republican
issues: taxes, government spending, and illegal immigration.

It bears repeating that this was a special election—it is dangerous to
make projections based on these results. In another special House
election on Tuesday, in South Carolina, the Democrats did better than
expected. If the White House and the Republicans go ahead and pass
unpopular measures, such as tax cuts for the rich and a health-care bill
that raises premiums and causes tens of millions of people to lose their
insurance coverage, they could well suffer the consequences in 2018.

For now, though, it is Trump and congressional Republicans who are
smiling. Their Faustian pact remains intact.