By John Whitesides — After the crushing electoral losses that swept Donald Trump into the White House and sealed Republican control of the US Congress, the Democrats’ road to recovery winds through the leafy, well-heeled suburbs of north Atlanta. Here, Democrats are threatening a stunning special election upset that could signal how well the party can turn Trump’s low approval ratings into political gains. And they appear to have an ally in the April 18 vote: Trump himself. In the first congressional election of the Trump era, a wave of grassroots anti-Trump fervour has positioned Democrat Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old political newcomer, to possibly capture a House of Representatives seat held by Republicans for decades, one of 24 seats Democrats need nationwide to reclaim the House.
“The grassroots intensity here is electric, and it’s because folks are concerned that what is happening in Washington doesn’t represent our values,” Ossoff said in an interview. “This is a chance for this community to stand up and make a statement about what we believe.”
With Democrats desperate for signs of hope after Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump, Ossoff’s underdog “Make Trump Furious” campaign has endeared him to national anti-Trump activists and pushed him well ahead of 17 rivals in polls.
The documentary filmmaker and former congressional aide raised a jaw-dropping $8.3 million in the first quarter, his campaign said. “I’ve never seen the Democrats around here so engaged, and it’s Donald Trump who got us so engaged,” said Carolyn Hadaway, 77, a veteran party activist and retired software engineer from Marietta, a city of about 60,000 people in Georgia’s central Cobb County.
Georgia would seem an unlikely venue for a Democratic revival.
Trump won it by about 5 percentage points in November.
And its voters backed Republican nominees in eight of the last nine presidential contests, including the last six in a row. But demographic changes are brewing.
Growing minority communities and transplants from other regions have made Atlanta’s suburbs increasingly competitive for Democrats.
Georgia’s sixth congressional district, the location for April’s special election, exemplifies changes common in booming southern cities like Atlanta, Charlotte and Nashville.
The district is white collar, educated and doing well economically, with median household incomes of $80,000 versus $50,000 statewide, and nearly 60 per cent of adults holding a college or professional degree, more than twice the
statewide average.
It is also increasingly diverse, and in recent years became a magnet for well-educated immigrants from India and other parts of Asia.
The district was about 80 per cent white at the turn of the century.
But since then, the black share of the population has grown from 10 per cent to 13 per cent, the Hispanic share has doubled to 12.5 per cent and Asian representation doubled to more than 10 per cent.
About a fifth of the district is now foreign born — twice the statewide average, according to census data.
Though newer immigrants may not be eligible to vote, census data indicate more than 40 per cent are naturalised citizens, potentially bringing a different set of views on issues like immigration to the table than the voters in this district who sent
Trump adviser and former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to Congress for 10 straight terms.
April’s special election fills the seat vacated by Tom Price, the new secretary of health and human services.
It gives both parties a chance to test their messages for election battles next year in suburban districts where Democrats need to make inroads and where Trump’s populist economic message did not sell well in November.
While Price sailed to re-election with 62 per cent of the vote, Trump barely beat Clinton in Georgia’s sixth district by one percentage point. — Reuters
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