Outside the Westin hotel in Sandy Springs, Georgia, it rained hard all
day on Tuesday. By nightfall, dozens of satellite dishes sprouted up
around the hotel like giant mushrooms in the suburban mist. Inside, the
final rally for Jon Ossoff was getting under way. It was noted, early
on, by a few of the more than a hundred credentialled members of the
media in attendance—CNN, National Review, Georgia News Network, a film
crew from Japan—that there wasn’t an open bar. Beer was six bucks; wine
was nine; premium drinks were twelve. This struck some as stingy,
considering that Ossoff had raised more than twenty-three million
dollars in his campaign for Congress, which he lost by nearly four
points, last night, to Karen Handel, who also spent millions of dollars
in the most expensive House race of all time. More than twelve thousand
Ossoff volunteers had certainly spent freely of their time and energy.
Next to a pond outside the hotel, Jennifer McFadden, of Liberal Moms of
Roswell and Cobb, described the
volunteering that she’d done on Ossoff’s behalf, and the Ossoff sign
that she’d proudly put up in her very Republican neighborhood. “My
husband told me, ‘I don't want anything happening to our vehicles or our
house.’ And I said to him, ‘I’m pulling the wife card. This is important
to me, even if you don’t understand it.’ ” “We wrote postcards,” her
fellow Liberal Mom Amanda Suarez added. “We put up signs. We canvassed.
We chased down kids stealing signs.” She told me that she
“glitter-bombed” the signs to punish any would-be thieves: “The glitter
would get all over them, like herpes,” she explained.
For these and many other Ossoff supporters, it was a proxy war, a local
fight against Donald Trump, even if the candidate shied away from
making his race about the
President.
A beaming middle-aged woman from Baltimore, whose shoes were still wet
from the final day of door knocking, stood on a chair trying to see the
room around her: balloons, projector screens, cameras, and the rest.
“This was where you could really make a difference,” Jill Jonnes said.
“So I came here.” The reward seemed nigh. Ossoff’s communications staff
was ready for it. Before polls closed, one team member, a veteran of the
Hillary Clinton campaign, told me that I should pitch a story on Ossoff
to a certain men’s magazine, because “Jon is so fucking GQ.”
In the lobby, Bob Picariello, a seventy-two-year-old wearing a “Veterans
for Ossoff” shirt under his dinner jacket, sat alone. He recalled the
strength of Ossoff’s eye contact and handshake, and the candidate’s
“remarkable refusal,” when the two spoke, to overstate the peril he’d
risked while working in conflict zones as a documentary producer. David
Reed, a seventeen-year-old who’d been canvassing for Ossoff because of
the “spineless complacency and vitriolic rhetoric” in Washington, walked
by. He mentioned Sinclair Lewis’s political novel “It Can’t Happen
Here,” from 1935. “Well, it is happening here,” Reed said. Why did he
support Ossoff? “I’m a centrist,” he said. “I think we need the American
equivalent of Britain’s hung Parliament. We’ve got to come to the
middle, bring both sides together.” The teen-ager lives with his
parents, in the neighboring Eleventh District, he said, “where I read a
lot.”
The hotel’s main ballroom was in the awkward early stages of a dance
party presided over by DJ Nutty—a wedding and corporate-event specialist
living in the Seventh District—who eyeballed the room as it filled to
capacity and beyond. “Seems like a Top Forty, Billboard 100 crowd,” he
said, queuing up Maroon 5. Minutes later, he gave a shout-out on his
microphone: “To all the Latinos for Ossoff in the building!” The mostly
white crowd cheered.
At 8:18 P.M., CNN flashed preliminary numbers: Ossoff led, 50.7 to 49.3
per cent, with forty-two per cent of polls reporting. The crowd erupted.
Nutty played “Staying Alive.” People wearing “Pave It Blue” and “Vote
Your Ossoff” shirts were Periscoping, filming, Facebooking, tweeting,
and endlessly refreshing the Times coverage of the race on their
phones. Congressman John Lewis, who had urged Ossoff into the
fray in the first place, sat in a small room adjacent to the party with an
inscrutable look on his face. Soon, he came out and told the crowd how
glad he was to have answered the letter that Ossoff wrote him in high
school, asking for an internship. “We need Jon in Congress,” he said.
“We need all of you.”
In another nearby room, a half-dozen of Ossoff's old classmates from the
Paideia School, along with a few of their parents, sat around a table.
Allen Jarvis, who works at Google, was struggling to make sense of
precinct data he’d pulled from the Secretary of State’s Web site, so
that he could compare it with the results of April’s single-ballot
election. “But there’s a bug in my code,” he said. Lynda Herrig, a
Paideia mom, told me that she’d invited Ossoff to see “Hamilton” with
her sons in New York, last August. “Instead of going to Brooklyn after
it was over to hang out with friends, Jon wanted to go to a bar and
dissect the birth of democracy,” she said. So they did. Ossoff bought
Herrig a copy of the Federalist Papers later, as thanks. A few months
afterward, Herrig received a call from Ossoff. He wanted to know whether
she’d help with his campaign, if he ran. Herrig promised a few hundred
dollars.
By 9:45 P.M., the numbers had turned. Reluctant Trump voters had become
reluctant Handel voters: she led Ossoff by five points, with
three-quarters of the precincts reporting. DJ Nutty did what he could,
but neither Paula Abdul nor Zapp could save the energy from leaving the
room. CNN showed an image of the last three people to represent the
Sixth—all old white men, dating back to Newt Gingrich—as Handel was
declared the winner. “I wish I felt excited that at least she’s female,”
a woman said.
When I had first met Ossoff, at a rally in mid-February, female
volunteers dominated his campaign office. One, a lawyer in her fifties,
had worn a cape. If Trump was the spark that lit the “Flip the Sixth”
fuse, middle-aged suburban women were the match. Ossoff spoke to them,
perhaps, more than anyone else. “Folks are concerned about a woman’s
right to choose,” he told me, “losing access to women’s health care. I’m
a defender of Planned Parenthood.” I spoke to women canvassing for
Ossoff who hadn’t voted in any election prior to last November’s and
who, before Trump won, had never volunteered for a campaign at any
level.
In the privacy of his war room, upstairs above the dying rally, Ossoff
told his staff that it was a “near perfectly run” campaign. His campaign
manager, Keenan Pontoni, shed tears backstage, before Ossoff gave his
four-minute concession
speech.
“We showed the world that in places where no one thought it was even
possible to fight, we could fight,” he told those gathered. In the
distance, Trump began
gloating,
as Ossoff concluded, “This is the beginning of something much bigger
than us. . . . The fight goes on. Hope is still alive.”
The rain had stopped. A few huddled staffers were beginning to place
blame. One spoke of too many volunteers knocking on doors too often.
Maybe too many commercials and phone calls, too. There was a spreadsheet
mentality, it seemed, among the campaign's strategic leaders. This was
not, a staffer argued, a fault of Ossoff the candidate. It was, instead,
a fault of the Democratic Party for relying too much on data, and
treating voters like points on a graph.
Lynda Herrig and her sons had a smoke outside as the crowd dispersed.
They’d invited Ossoff to spend some time with them at a lake house in
north Georgia this weekend. “Win or lose,” she said, “he’ll need the
rest.” She paused, turning to those around her. “Everyone needs to call
your senator about health care tomorrow,” she said. “Health care!"
I found Jennifer McFadden back outside by the pond, drinking a Bud Light
with three other Liberal Moms. “This has gotten us even more pissed
off,” she said. “On to 2018!” Ossoff hasn’t publicly said whether he’ll
try again next year, in the midterm elections, but his supporters don’t
seem to have much doubt. Many, as they filed out, picked up signs,
stickers, and buttons. “We’ll be using these again,” one said.