The Georgia 06 Special Election: All the Numbers You Need to Know

(above… my segment on OAN discussing GA06 special election on Tuesday)

The special election held on June 20th in the 6th Congressional district in Georgia was the most expensive house race ever. Here are all of the crazy, eye-opening, dirty, nasty numbers and details you should know.

• Glass Ceiling Shattered — You won’t hear a lot about this in the news media because Kaden Handel doesn’t fit their mold of a “woman” but the GOP just elected their first female representative from Georgia.
• Turnout was… meh — About 260K voters turned out to vote in this special runoff which is above the amount of people who turned out for 2012 but well below the 326K who turned out for the Presidential election last November. Handel won by a 3.7% margin.
• Referendum on what? — Many news outlets, Democrats and pundits saw this as a referendum on the unpopularity of Donald Trump but frankly this is the 5th special election in a row that Democrats have lost since Trump took office.
• Most Expensive Race Ever — I’ve spent part of my career in politics serving as the digital director of the Mitt Romney campaign so I know a bit about finance and this race was explosive! The finance numbers will be revised and updated before the end of the month but the big number you need to know is that Ossoff (the Democrat) raised 7x the amount of money of Handel (the Republican).
• Total Receipts — Receipts (or contributions) across ALL 18 candidates for this special run-off election to replace the seat vacated by Tom Price (Trump’s appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services) was $32 MM.
• Ossoff v. Handel- The Democrats with Ossoff raised over $23MM whilre Handel raised about $4.5MM.
• Itemized vs. Un-itemized Contributions — When you make a contribution you must provide your name, address, occupation, and employer. If you make a donation of $200 or less the campaign is not required to disclose your information but if you have given more than $200 to any federal candidates in total during a political season that has to be dislosed. The chart below shows the tiers of donation amounts to the two candidates:

Contribution unitemized and itemized for each candidate.

• Small donor donations — This is really the only bright spot for Democrats. They were pretty successful in raising A LOT of money with small donor donations to Ossoff. Much of that was from outside the state of Georgia. Ossoff saw about 47,000 small donor donations. About 46,000 of those were from contributors out of state. By comparison, Handel saw about 2000 un-itemized donations and about 1500 of those were from out of state. These type of donations will typically come from activists.
• Out of state vs in-state donations. We’ll go right to the charts here:

• Comparing these results to part results the GOP hasn’t really lost much foothold. Here are the results of elections in this district since 2008:

Note that the 2017 (sp) election was between 17 different candidates. Ossoff and Handel had the most votes and went of to the runoff.

In short, millions of dollars were spent to unseat a Republican and the Democrats failed in a big way.