Well before running for Senate, the Democrat tried and failed to win a House seat — powered by out-of-state money.
Well before running for the Senate, the Democrat tried and failed to win a House seat in Georgia’s sixth district.
D emocratic consultant Jon Ossoff burst onto the political scene in 2017, running for a House seat in a Georgia congressional district where he wasn’t even a resident. On the morning of the election, a CNN anchor shared an inconvenient fact with the candidate: He couldn’t vote for himself.
“I grew up in this district,” Ossoff replied. “I grew up in this community. It is my home. My family is still there.” Yet he didn’t deny reality; when voters headed to the polls that morning, Ossoff would be campaigning on the sidelines, barred from the ballot box.
Ossoff had moved “down the street,” as he put it, to support his girlfriend while she was in medical school. When voters expressed concerns during the campaign that he didn’t live in the district he wished to represent, Ossoff’s staffers repeatedly assured residents that the candidate lived a mere “three blocks away.”
But as one intrepid reporter discovered, “down the street” actually meant down hundreds of streets, and “three blocks” actually meant about three miles. It took the Washington Free Beacon’s Brent Scher two hours to walk from Ossoff’s residence to the closest landmark inside the sixth district.
It was the perfect encapsulation of Ossoff’s overly ambitious campaign. In the April open primary that year, Ossoff failed to reach the 50 percent needed to win outright, even though several competitive Republican opponents split the GOP vote among themselves. The June runoff against local GOP lawmaker Karen Handel quickly became the most expensive House race in U.S. history, with Ossoff outraising his opponent nearly five to one.
On Election Day, Ossoff lost by nearly four points.
To understand why he fared so poorly, consider the breakdown of his fundraising numbers. Though Ossoff amassed nearly $30 million during the election cycle, the overwhelming majority of that funding came not from Georgians but from Democrats across the country, determined to elect the progressive candidate as a repudiation of the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump.
“Most of the itemized contributions to Mr. Ossoff were from large Democratic states like California and New York,” a New York Times report noted. “Just 14 percent came from Georgia, compared with 56 percent of Ms. Handel’s contributions.” In his financial records for that spring, Ossoff reported 7,218 donations from California and only 808 donations from Georgians.
Money, it turns out, can buy you neither love nor a seat in Congress.
It’s a lesson Democrats refused to learn from Ossoff’s 2017 failure. In the 2018 midterms, Ossoff wannabe Beto O’Rourke raised $38 million to challenge Texas senator Ted Cruz, a number that was “30 percent more from July to October of [2018] than Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown has raised in all six years of his re-election campaign, and more than Jeb Bush raised for the entirety of his 2016 presidential run.”
Though the race did end up closer than one might expect in Texas, Cruz defeated O’Rourke by more than 200,000 votes.
Still disinclined to take a hint, Democrats poured millions into red-state Senate races this past election cycle. Democratic candidate Amy McGrath, who challenged Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, raised almost $37 million to McConnell’s $15.7 million. She lost the race by 20 points.
In South Carolina, Democrat Jaime Harrison raised $86 million in a bid to unseat Republican senator Lindsey Graham. During the final full quarter of the campaign, Harrison raised $57 million, the largest single-quarter total by any candidate in U.S. Senate history — a title he wrested from the disgraced O’Rourke. Graham defeated Harrison by ten points.
And now, of course, there is Ossoff, who returned to the political scene this year to challenge Republican senator David Perdue for his seat. When neither candidate reached a majority in the November 3 election, the two headed to runoff. Since then, Ossoff has been following a familiar pattern.
As Tim Carney reported in the Washington Examiner, the Democrat has once again raised more money from non-Georgia residents than he has from those who live in his state and who can actually pull the lever for him in today’s runoff race.
“Ossoff, according to my analysis of the latest campaign filing with the Federal Election Commission, raised $4.79 million from individual California donors, compared to only $2.83 million from individual Georgia donors,” Carney writes.
Perdue reports that his biggest contributions have come from two major private employers in Georgia: Delta and Home Depot. Ossoff’s largest sources of funding during the runoff campaign, meanwhile, have been employees at major, California-based tech companies: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.
“Ossoff is dominating Perdue in terms of campaign cash, having outspent the incumbent $121 million to $73 million according to numbers released in mid-December,” Carney notes. “Ossoff’s single biggest source of funds, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, is Google’s parent company, Alphabet.”
He goes on to point out that Alphabet employees had donated nearly $1 million to Ossoff by mid December, while employees at Apple and Microsoft donated close to $300,000, respectively.
As Carney notes, Perdue’s combined funding from those two companies ($239,000) is less than Ossoff raised from Amazon alone.
Campaign funding from outside the state is always useful, of course, and it’s enabled Ossoff to outspend his Republican opponent during the closely watched runoff. But the lack of comparable support from within Georgia is a warning sign that Democrats are once again hoping to push a blue candidate over the finish line in a big Senate battle by flooding it with resources from across the country, perhaps discounting the importance of convincing residents who can actually vote for him.