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Opinion: Why Georgia vote spells trouble for Trump
Handel: We can't let Pelosi ally steal seat 01:09
Story highlights
- Tim Naftali: Outcome of Georgia special election pricks the bubble of Trump's magical invincibility
- He says it will likely spur resistance to White House from Republicans who are not Trump fans, embolden Dems to push to flip the House
The former director of the Richard Nixon library, Timothy Naftali is a CNN presidential historian who teaches intelligence history and national security policy at NYU. The views expressed in this commentary are solely his.
(CNN)Jon
Ossoff thrashed all of his opponents in the special election in
Georgia's 6th congressional district Tuesday night, and though he fell
short of the 50% plus one needed to avoid a June runoff, will go into
that runoff as the favorite.
This is big. But let's keep it in perspective: It's true that special elections can be nasty presidential bellwethers.
Republican
George H. W. Bush seemed to be on a glide path to re-election after the
Gulf War in 1991, but then his former attorney general Dick Thornburgh
lost to Democratic first-time political candidate (but civil rights
hero) Harris Wofford in a special election that was called following the
death of Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania. A year later George Bush
became a one-term President.
Ossoff: Defied the odds, shattered expectations 02:09
And
yet sometimes, though troublesome, special elections don't quite mean
disaster for the incumbent in the White House. In 2010, Republican Scott
Brown took from the Democrats not just a traditional seat in the Senate
but Ted Kennedy's seat, complicating the passage of Obamacare. But
Barack Obama was nevertheless reelected.
Spinners
will try to pinpoint a cause for Ossoff's strong showing. Was this a
protest vote against President Trump? A vote against the paralysis of
the "unified" GOP government that -- besides replacing Antonin Scalia
with a conservative jurist -- has not managed to pass any of its agenda
in its first 100 Days?
Or was it just about the appeal of the winsome candidate himself?
Actually,
given the importance of momentum in politics, the reason voters in this
safe Republican seat voted for a Democrat is less important than that they did.
This
vote, in the solid red south, pricks the bubble of Trump's magical
invincibility. It cannot be overstated how attractive the prospect of
being with a "winner" was to President Trump's base and how this begins
to cloud that image. Although it is too far from 2018 to make
predictions about what might be happening to that base, members of
Congress who are Republican but not Trumpist may now start to feel less
in awe of the President.
The House
Freedom Caucus' goal-line stand in the Obamacare "repeal and replace"
fiasco no doubt gave some confidence to Trump skeptics but there is
nothing more likely to spur real Republican resistance to the White
House than the fear of losing one's seat in 2018.
And Democrats are now likely to put a lot more money behind the dream of challenging the 47 seats that, according to the political analysis website 538,
are even more flippable than the Georgia 6th. But the bigger Ossoff
effect, whether he wins the runoff or not, may well be seen among
Republicans in Washington.
Tuesday's outcome may ultimately make Trump madder than any episode of Saturday Night Live.
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