"Nate Silver failed to take account for the gender gap which was the big divide in this race. The educated female vote was anti-Trump but not anti-Republican. Trump was not on the ballot, This was much more of a local race than the national media recognize. Ossoff did incredible well in this solidly red district. Emphasizing Trump I believe would have backfired. Handel ran branding Ossoff as a liberal. Ossoff ran as an inclusive pragmatic, centrist politician. It was really the best strategy for the district. No Democratic has come as close to winning in 37 years.
John Armwood
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Nate Silver & Crew
"Question No. 2: Blame Ossoff! How much was the Georgia 6 result about Ossoff as a candidate and his being too blah or too centrist?
harry: Who knows? is my answer.
natesilver: I’m kind of ambivalent about Ossoff. On the one hand, the basic metric that we usually look at is whether a candidate has been elected in the past, especially to another office in that state or district. Ossoff hadn’t been. On the other hand, I think of his performance as basically having been “fine” in Georgia 6, and he entered the race when few other Democrats were willing to do so.
Put another way, I think he was an average candidate in a race where Democrats could maybe have won with a great candidate, but could also have lost by 12 points with a candidate who wasn’t taking the race seriously.
harry: Yeah, there was nothing that Ossoff did that screamed “awful candidate.” He was milquetoast.
perry: I didn’t meet Ossoff. I wasn’t in Georgia. And I’m always loath to criticize candidates I have not seen in person. I read some more populist Democrats last night claiming the party needed a more populist candidate. Handel emphasized that he did not live in the district. He was obviously young and had little electoral experience. But he didn’t make any major gaffes, seemed to know the issues, got an endorsement from Bernie Sanders and received strong support from John Lewis.
Let’s Play The Democratic Blame Game! | FiveThirtyEight
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