Congresswoman Karen Handel Kicks Off Campaign In Roswell
Congresswoman Karen Handel (R-GA-06) kicked off her general election campaign yesterday in Roswell. Speaking to a packed house, the Congresswoman highlighted some of the accomplishments that have come from the Republican Congress: largest military pay increase in a decade, tax cuts that are putting more dollars in the pockets of Americans, roaring economic growth with the comparison of last quarter’s 4.4% GDP growth to the 1.9% growth during the “best” times of the Obama administration, and the work to fight the opioid crisis.
Congresswoman Handel also spoke about her work to fight human trafficking. The first piece of legislation that she put her name on was to combat and shut down sites responsible for online sex advertising and recruiting. She also talked about her work with Congressman Rob Woodall (R-GA-07) to secure funding for the GA-400 corridor expansion which got a big amount of applause from the crowd.
She reminded supporters that elections are about the future, and that Republicans need to drive to get out the vote in order to continue the work. She invoked the unsavory image of Nancy Pelosi taking back the Speaker’s gavel and Maxine Waters chairing the House Financial Services committee. A “radicalized and extreme” Democratic majority would mean rolling back tax relief and an unaffordable “Medicare for All”. She emphasized all really means ALL meaning that people covered under an employer-sponsored healthcare plan would have to surrender those benefits and go into a government-ran system.
Last year, Democrats were motivated to “Flip the Sixth” by electing 6th district outsider (literally) Jon Ossoff. So motivated to avenge their loss of the White House in 2016, Democrats outside of Georgia helped contribute $40 million to his campaign. She referenced headlines that indicated that her campaign was a lost cause. That Republicans would lose a reliably Republican seat in Congress, but that was not the case. Karen Handel is now a Member of Congress and Jon Ossoff is giving interviews on how it feels to lose an election.
Congresswoman Handel reminded the crowd that she is battle-tested and ready. She’s ready to fight to win and keep GA-6 in the Republican column. Millions will pour in from Democrats to prop up their nominee Lucy McBath and try to nationalize the race. Handel reminded supporters that this isn’t a national referendum, it’s about neighbors. As she closed, she reminded supporters that together they will hold the sixth this year as they did during the 2017 special election: “what did we do together? We kicked some Ossoff.”
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nsmith
Father. IT Geek. Former 14th District GOP Chairman (2015-2017). Former Walker GOP Chairman (2009-2013). Resident of Chamblee. American. Georgian. Conservative.
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“…roaring economic growth with the comparison of last quarter’s 4.4% GDP growth to the 1.9% growth during the “best” times of the Obama administration…”
Q4 2011 – 4.7%.
Q2 2014 – 5.1%
Q3 2014 – 4.9%
Also, Q2 2018 was 4.1%, not 4.4%. But lets not let numbers get in the way of talking points.
Handel and Woodall are probably the two most at risk of losing their seats here in GA. When she ran against Osoff she did not have the pro Trump record. So she really can’t say that it’s the same after voting with Trump 100%.
The Ossoff race was was close only because of the fundraising and voter mobilization efforts and media attention, which will not be replicated in November. Alyssa Milano won’t be tweeting offers to personally drive people to the polls this time around for example.
Another factor: Ossoff was able to benefit from being a political unknown and a local and national press that was willing to pass him off as a moderate before he was finally forced to reveal his stances on specific issues in debates. Also Handel was personally unpopular with GOP primary voters who never forgave her for taking on the GOP boys club to run for governor and senator, or for her committing the even bigger crime of showing that it is possible to be a white Republican Atlanta politician without being a Dixiecrat race-baiter like many who came before her.
This time she is an incumbent running in a general election against a Democrat, so all the antipathy that the GOP primary voters had for her are under the bridge. And her opponent, Lucy McBath, is not nearly as well-connected as Ossoff, isn’t getting anywhere near the media attention or fundraising, and unlike Ossoff – who was able to get away with his “I’m a fiscally conservative moderate southerner willing to work with Republicans” – act until the last minute, McBath is singularly known for her gun control advocacy in a district where opposition to gun control is one of the few issues that unites the various factions of Republican voters. Lots of swing voters in that district are social liberals, lots of them are economic populists, but virtually none of them support gun control. So even if Handel were as weak as you believe, McBath is the worst possible candidate to exploit that weakness. A (well-funded) Democrat who is pro-NRA and has a “tough-on-crime” law enforcement stance like Zell Miller, Roy Barnes, Joe Frank Harris or Michael Barrow not only would have a real shot in November, but likely would have won the special election without a runoff.
And finally allow me to propose that having a pro-Trump voting record is not nearly the negative in a Republican district as you wish it to be. That district isn’t blue or even purple but red. So backing the national party only helps. That was why Handel was glad to receive Trump’s endorsement during the runoff and campaigned on the fact that she would work with him to implement his agenda. By contrast, she did not seek Paul Ryan’s endorsement or state that she would vote to keep him speaker of the House.
I’m going more on the Cook PVI. I have no doubt there are hardcore Trumper in the 6th District. There also a lot of Asians that loathe Trump. The PVI is +8 and so it’s a possibility. Also college educated white women of which there are many in this disctrict are abandoning the GOP in droves. It’s not as safe a district as it once was.
https://politics.myajc.com/news/state–regional-govt–politics/why-georgia-democrats-are-zeroing-atlanta-suburbs/NNTf3MoFEc6xgMu3qyqUQI/
Even Handel is not going to run on her record.
It is not a safe district, but it is a solid Republican majority district. This means that to have a chance at actually winning – as opposed to losing 52%-48% and declaring a moral victory – you will need:
A) a popular, well-funded and organized ideologically compatible Democrat
B) a Republican who is compromised by scandal and/or is in trouble with the base
Neither is the case here. McBath is a political novice with no machinery of her own and no state or national backing to speak of and either reads as “generic Democrat” or “single issue candidate whose position on that issue is the opposite of mine” to most swing voters in that race. And Handel is nowhere near as unpopular to Republicans and swing voters for beating Ossoff in what was supposed to be the race to set up the “Donald Trump is in trouble!” storyline as she is among partisan Democrats and progressives.
And Handel isn’t Roy Moore, and that is pretty much what she would have to be in order to lose that seat to McBath in a November election.
Uh, why do Asian loathe Trump? If everybody hates Trump how in the hell did he win?
People got complacent. Trump has 40% of the country that approves of him. The other 60% does not. The landscape in 2018 is similar to 2006.
Well she retweeted this the other day. https://twitter.com/LucyWins2018/status/1027931473410699265 . But I think she is to worried about the Supreme Court nomination.
@Andrew Pope:
Issues are often a lot more popular than the candidates who propose them. Republicans found that out in the 1990s on affirmative action. When opinion polls showed opposition to affirmative action was 65%-70% and especially after Proposition 209 overwhelmingly passed in very blue California, the GOP took up the issue. Result? They got massacred, including in the 1998 Georgia governor’s race (Roy Barnes against Guy Millner). George W. Bush demanded that the GOP dump the issue, got elected twice and it hasn’t been a campaign issue for the GOP since even though polls still show that 2/3rds of voters still oppose it (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/08/poll-finds-public-opposition-considering-race-and-ethnicity-college-admissions). The reason may be that being a white conservative Republican politician who makes opposition to affirmative action a major campaign issue gets you considered a possible racist by most swing voters, which was George W. Bush’s theory. Note: not even Donald Trump explicitly campaigned on ending affirmative action, and the infamous incident where Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields was assaulted by Trump’s then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski occurred because Fields was trying to force Trump to either affirm or disavow his past support of affirmative action and Trump wanted to avoid the issue (which 100% worked as a distraction). Before unconditionally backing Fields in this incident, one should note that she was a Ted Cruz supporter who never once publicly challenged her own preferred candidate about his views on affirmative action.
So the same is true of gun control. While a majority of voters support gun control, a lot of voters feel that candidates who make support for gun control an emphasis for their campaign support banning ownership of handguns and most other firearms, and are simply using incrementalist policies to achieve it. Until gun control advocates combine their gun control proposals with explicit classes and types of firearms that they are willing to legislate protection for – rather than simply banning one group of firearms today while leaving others to press for banning tomorrow – that isn’t going to change.
GA-6 is not an outlier. I don’t think she’ll to get more than 53%.
Here’s a couple of other things growing at a fast rate:
The deficit
Consumer prices
.
It’s one thing to stimulate the economy to dig out of a recession, but to do it (via tax cuts) when the economy is already chugging along pretty good? Is there any historical precedent for the economy to grow so fast that it could pay this debt back?
It’s a Laugher curve for a reason.
Can anyone remember the one thing that grew fast under Obama?
I believe that is was rational people’s hope that the world could do better.
Now that we have a president who tweets,
“Disgraced and discredited Bob Mueller and his whole group of Angry Democrat Thugs spent over 30 hours with the White House Councel, only with my approval, for purposes of transparency. Anybody needing that much time when they know there is no Russian Collusion is just someone….
looking for trouble. They are enjoying ruining people’s lives and REFUSE to look at the real corruption on the Democrat side – the lies, the firings, the deleted Emails and soooo much more! Mueller’s Angry Dems are looking to impact the election. They are a National Disgrace!
Where’s the Collusion? They made up a phony crime called Collusion, and when there was no Collusion they say there was Obstruction (of a phony crime that never existed). If you FIGHT BACK or say anything bad about the Rigged Witch Hunt, they scream Obstruction! ”
(Trump tweet this morning)
I am reminded that a President who tweets like this is either fearful or crazy.
The slow, steady and very real economic improvement under Obama was arguably preferable to the “boom and bust” economies of Clinton and Bush. It is very appropriate to argue precisely how much credit Obama deserved for the economic growth that began in the spring of 2012 and continued until, well it is still going on, as much of his economic program never got through Congress. But it did happen, and it is unreal that he never got a lick of the credit that Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush got for their economic recoveries. Especially since the bottom fell out on the Reagan and Clinton economies soon ofter they left office, and the Bush economy while he was still in office.
I can at least understand why partisan GOPers are pretending that A) the Bush recession was never that bad in the first place and/or B) the economy magically went from terrible to good immediately after Trump was elected. But as for why Democrats rarely mention, let alone claimed credit for, a 6 year long economic expansion that was accomplished despite enacting a major new entitlement program in ACA and without the tax cuts that since Reagan the GOP insists that economic growth cannot possibly happen without? I suppose that Democrats feel that it would be inconvenient to their growing push for social democracy?
“But as for why Democrats rarely mention, let alone claimed credit for, …” How can one even argue against something as vague and probably specious as that?
Democrats talked much more about inequality in 2016 (and prior) than the Obama boom. They talked about Piketty during the recession and inequality during the recovery. And when Clinton wanted to talk about the accomplishments of the Obama administration, she got hammered by the Sanders and Warren supporters on the left. At first she pushed back with her “the Soviet Union proved that socialism doesn’t work” line but then she caved and became Sanders/Warren lite. So her campaign never truly did run on how the Obama administration that she was a part of saved the country and possibly the global economy from the Bush meltdown.
The answer to the question was food stamps. It grew at an alarming rate… If things are such a great under Obama why did food stamp usage skyrocket? Why was new business formation at record lows even after eight years of Obama? Obama‘s policies of tax increases and increased regulation were harmful to the economy not helpful. The Federal Reserve deserves credit for all of the economic improvement. Washington was a net negative over that time period.
Ok, bottom line in all of this anti-Karen bloviating. What will be the percentage results in this race the day after the election? Repub_____%, Dem_______%
I responded Handel by not more than 53% before encountering your comment. Larry Sabato has GA-6 leans R. I don’t think Handel will gain much if any on her 52% in the special election, which became an on all hands on deck after Ossoff came within less than 2% of winning outright.
.
Trump won GA-6 by 1.5% I think it likely that GOP GA-6 voters on the whole are less supportive of Trump than a year ago. Handel’s primary advantage is incumbency.
Handel 56.5
McBath 43.5
Right. All of this talk of Karen losing, barring an unforeseen incident, is a waste of y’alls time. Better put your side’s effort into helping Tom Graves’ opponent stage an upset.
I’m happy for democrats to spend money on Karen’s race. That’s money they aren’t spending in other places where they can actually win. It also helps Karen raise more money.
Dems aren’t putting too much into it, at least not yet:
.
Handel:
Raised: $7,651,245
Spent: $6,647,774
Cash on Hand: $1,003,471
.
McBath:
Raised: $313,109
Spent: $161,930
Cash on Hand: $151,180
.
https://www.opensecrets.org/races/candidates?cycle=2018&id=GA06&spec=N
Lordy, Karen Handel has spent what? Around 6 million to keep her seat already?
The operative phrase being “her seat!” Ouch!!
Yeah, that looks weird. I thought I selected for 2018 only but let me check that.
I think they must have her money from last year too, but I can’t figure out how to separate it.
It says so far election cycle 2018 which I would imagine is from the day she was sworn into office until whatever the closing date on that is she has spent 6 million. If it’s such a safe seat she’s a virtual money pit.
If we’re playing by the rules of the Price is Right, someone has to go with McBath 0%, or Handel 0%.
Does anyone remember how much Hillary Clinton spent losing her presidential election? Just the last one is fine…I believe it was well over a billion dollars!
How much did Trump spend? Maybe 1/5 of that? And Hillary had all of the networks save one and most print media in her back pocket. And the FBI, IRS and Justice Department as well. And half of the republican swamp… How in the world did she lose?
Considering the fact that Handel has spent 6 million already and McBath around 150K you probably don’t realize it but you are actually making a case against Handel. You also should price in the Russian intelligence propaganda machine working on behalf of Trump.
Everyone was so concerned about her spending $6 million and winning but some could care less about blowing a billion in a rigged election for Hillary. Oh, and getting HAMMERED! That’s the connection. She has more in in common with Jeb Bush spending 100 million and getting 2 delegates…looks like she is having fund raisers again. Who is going to give her the bad news? Bernie?
“What does this have to do with Karen Handel? Take your threadjacking diatribes elsewhere.” Eye Roll…
You playin’ “Posting Cop” this am, Sniv?
Those I think are 538 numbers Andrew. Always a good bet.