Donald Trump Is the Savior Democrats Need

Over the past eight years, even as they fetishized the historic presidency of Barack Obama, Democrats lost power in Congress and fell into a deep hole in statehouses across America. And if Hillary Clinton’s disastrous presidential campaign proved anything, it’s that the party has a real, enduring problem actually winning. But Democrats’ strong, if not quite victorious, showing in the special election for Georgia’s sixth congressional district on Tuesday offers real hope—and fresh validation for their #Resistance strategy of making everything about opposition to Donald Trump.

The Atlanta suburbs comprising Georgia’s sixth have gone red since 1978, but after local congressman Tom Price resigned to serve as Trump’s health and human services secretary, anxiety on the left gave the party no choice but to go for it. In the special election, an open race that pitted 18 candidates against one another, Jon Ossoff, the 30-year-old Democratic frontrunner, pulled in 48.1 percent of the vote. He needed 50 percent to win outright and could well lose in the run-off this June. Still, it would be disingenuous to categorize Tuesday night’s election as a defeat for Democrats or some kind of validation for Trump, his tweets to the contrary notwithstanding. After all, despite his youth, good looks and generous national media coverage (along with his robust fundraising), Ossoff was not a particularly strong candidate: He was halting on the stump and didn’t even technically live in the district, as Olivia Nuzzi reported for New York.

Whatever the final outcome in Georgia’s sixth, the race has already clarified that the future of the Democratic Party and Donald Trump’s early and profound unpopularity can’t be untangled.

Earlier this month, Democrats came surprisingly close to winning a special election in Kansas’s fourth district. (Yes, God is cruel, and after 2016, we’ve been cursed with a continuous stream of anxiety-inducing elections that will last forever and always.) Sixty percent of the historically red district voted for Trump in 2016, which helps explain why the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and its House counterpart, the DCCC, basically ignored the contest. Yet even without much institutional support until the days leading up to the election, Democrat James Thompson lost by only about 9,000 votes.

Ossoff had a lot more help, raising over $8 million. But the emerging theme here is that running hard against Trump has brought Democrats to the cusp of victory in previously unfathomable pockets of America.

“This race is absolutely and entirely a referendum on President Trump,” a Republican consultant told CNN. “Every single vote Jon Ossoff receives is a rebuke of Trump from within GA-06.”

Not exactly immune to fits of vanity, Trump took to his favorite social media platform to remind the country who Georgia’s special election is really about: himself. He’s not wrong, actually, but repeatedly calling on his Twitter followers to send Democrats a message before voting closed Tuesday may have done his party more harm than good.

In the 2016 election, Clinton actually did well in the district—or at least much better than Barack Obama did. So even though the area has had for a Republican congressional representative for almost 40 years, Democrats seem to be gaining ground, a trend that continued with Ossoff’s strong showing.

Ossoff, for his part, resides with his girlfriend a mile and a half away from his district to “support” her as she finishes medical school—something Trump made sure to note in his barrage of panicked tweets. But a friend of mine who grew up in the district doesn’t think his residency was problematic for local voters. “The sixth covers a fairly wide swathe of north Atlanta and the suburbs, and he lives near the district, so it’s not like he reads as a stranger,” she told me, arguing that after Karen Handel’s involvement in a high-profile spat over Planned Parenthood funding at the Susan G. Komen foundation in 2012, Ossoff’s lone remaining opponent is not especially popular there, either. On Tuesday night, Handel told CNN’s Alyson Camerota that she hopes the president will help her campaign, which may or may not backfire horribly.

Ossoff’s nebulous campaign message is somehow clearer than the typical “moderate” one Democrats have historically embraced in traditionally red territory: As Nuzzi noted in her profile, one of Ossoff’s early fundraising emails that helped define him had a simple subject line: “Make Trump Furious,” a goal he seems to have already achieved.

The question for Democrats is if they can continue to find decent (or at least less than horrible) candidates who tap into the anxieties of reluctant Trump voters having second thoughts in districts across the country.

“There was not much enthusiasm for Trump here before the election—few signs or bumper stickers in an area that was overrun with vocal, visible Romney and McCain support,” my friend from Georgia’s sixth told me. “These are the kinds of Republicans more concerned with their taxes than immigration, so Trump-ism doesn’t play as well here.”

Luckily for the Democrats, Trump has neither the humility nor the self-awareness to grasp his growing unpopularity. Meanwhile, he’s presented the country with a platter of Orthodox Republican shit. So even as remnants of the Never Trump crowd might think the president is out of line with their party, he is the only real face of the GOP.

Follow Eve Peyser on Twitter.