Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

Georgia's Special Election Was Expensive but Irrelevant

The voters in Georgia's 6th Congressional District got to vote for a new member of Congress yesterday. The election came about because the man they had elected in November, Tom Price, accepted a job in President Trump's cabinet. The Republican seat stayed Republican after the Democrats spent $25 million trying to win it. With that kind of strategic brilliance, the Democratic National Committee would be better off if it were composed of baboons with attention disorders.

The seat in question used to be held by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, and later, Mr. Price had it for 12 years. The last Democrat elected there won in 1976, when Jimmy Carter was top of the ticket. Mr. Price won by more than 20%. What deluded the Democrats into thinking they could win the seat was Donald Trump's poor performance there, carrying the district by just over 1%. They took the view that flipping the district would only require a shift of a small number of voters and an expanded electorate. If not easy, it was possible. Money flowed into the district in the million.

Yet, a decent strategist would ask whether the fight was worth more than the usual budget for the race in a general election. Winning would have all sorts of immeasurable benefits many argued, putting the Republicans on notice that no seat was safe, that their healthcare bill was a disaster, that Donald Trump is doomed. However, rational examination would lead one to believe that the race merited token resistance at best.

There were 238 Republican members of the House of Representatives as of the end of April, 193 Democrats, and four vacancies. In other words, winning the race would not alter what is a comfortable Republican majority. The mid-term elections are in 2018, about just under a year and a half from now. A lot of boosted morale can erode in that time.

Instead, the party should have taken $20 million or so of the money that turned up, and tried to build local machinery in Georgia (or elsewhere). The state has 14 members of the House, 10 Republicans. Boundaries are to be redrawn after the 2020 census. The Georgia General Assembly, the state's bicameral legislature which will redraw the boundaries, has a Republican advantage of almost 2-to-1 in the lower house and slightly more than 2-to-1 in the state senate. However, the voters didn't vote for the GOP 2-to-1, evidence of gerrymandering.

The simple lesson is that controlling the House in Washington is a function of controlling the state legislatures to ensure a reasonable apportionment of seats. Rather than blow $25 million in the hopes of winning one seat in 2017, the party should have spent $20 million to redraw all the boundaries and perhaps pick up five or six seats in 2022.

As things worked out, the DNC has come up with the perfect defeat. The Republicans kept the seat. The $25 million is gone. No real statewide apparatus has been constructed. Party activists and loyalists are feeling the disappointment of a loss. It is hard to find a silver lining here.

Political campaigning is about strategy, about taking limited resources and maximizing what one can do with them. Chess teaches that pawns and other pieces are easily sacrificed for the greater strategic good. History teaches that some battles are not worth fighting; the US never lost a ground engagement in Vietnam. It did, however, lose the war.

The Democratic Party's leadership needs to hire a few people who can think beyond the next month, people who can look at the country in 2030 and see how the party flourishes on the way there. Or the future can belong to the Republicans.

© Copyright 2017 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.



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