THE TRUMP EFFECT
JON OSSOFF DOESN’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT DONALD TRUMP, THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY OR THE NATIONAL TURMOIL THAT HAS LIFTED THE 30-YEAR-OLD CANDIDATE TO THE TOP OF THE POLLS IN THE UPCOMING SPECIAL ELECTION IN GEORGIA’S Sixth Congressional District. But as he crisscrossed the affluent north Atlanta suburbs one afternoon in early April, the lanky Democrat paused to ponder how a sleepy off-year race to replace Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price had turned into a national referendum on the President’s tenure. “I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse,” Ossoff said with a shrug, sitting on a white leather couch in the back of an office-park studio after taping an interview with a local Vietnamese-American television program. “National political strategy is not something I have time to think about.”
Yet there is little question why the rookie candidate suddenly has a shot to turn this patch of the South blue for the first time in nearly four decades. Since January, the anti-Trump resistance movement has pumped a staggering $8.3 million into Ossoff’s campaign, more than five times the average sum collected by winning House candidates in recent two-year election cycles, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Some 95% of that haul came from out of state, as did Ossoff’s field director, an alumna of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and some of his battalions of eager volunteers. Polls suggest he’s lapping a field of 11 Republicans and five Democrats, inching toward the majority he needs to win the April 18 election outright and sidestep a June runoff. Ossoff, says former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who represented this district for 20 years, “is today the national left’s great hope.”
He may also be
