OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: Either it is, or ...

The special Georgia congressional election today in the suburban district immediately north of Atlanta turns out to be legitimately enormous.

Either Democrats can cash in on Donald Trump's outrageous ineptitude and the Republican meanness on health care, or they can't.

Either Georgia, driven by changing Atlanta suburban demographics, is moving from Alabama-style redness to swing-state status like North Carolina, or it isn't.


Polls suggest the race is razor-thin close. That alone would be a big story either way except that Democrats have invested so much in the race--and behold such a confluence of hopeful factors--that the conclusion if they lose will be that they remain hapless Southern losers.

Getting 49.9 percent will mean nothing for Democrats. Getting 50.1 percent will mean everything.

If 30-year-old documentary filmmaker and political aide Jon Ossoff wins for the Democrats, word will go forth that:

• Major suburban areas of the solidly red South are blue-ing.

• Trump is hurting Republicans everywhere.

• The health-care issue is a loser for Republicans even in the district formerly served by Tom Price.

You know Tom Price. He's the man Trump plucked from Congress to head the Health and Human Services Department and undo Obamacare. He tabbed Price partly because Republicans were confident they could spare him in Congress because the vacant seat was a certain hold for them in the special election.

If Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel wins today as a bland and mediocre Republican nominee, then word will go forth that Trump is survivable for the GOP, that Obamacare repeal and replacement is survivable too, and that the Democrats took their best shot and spent obscene amounts of money and yet remain unable to close a deal in the red sea of the solid South.

This district unfolds northward from Atlanta. It was one of the great original suburban white-flight districts, thus Republican, a little like what Saline County and Faulkner County have been on a smaller scale in the 2nd District of Arkansas.

But the nation's immediate and original suburbs are changing. The new flight is more distant--exurban, they call it.

The immediate suburb's inhabitants are becoming more diverse demographically. Women in these immediate suburbs tend to be offended by Trump and sensitive to health-care injustice and child-care needs.

These suburban women's first instinct remains Republican. But polling showed them moving in decisive numbers to Hillary Clinton because they took great offense at Trump. But then, in the last week, they came home unenthusiastically to Trump because of James Comey's unfair late-stage innuendo about Clinton that fertilized their general distrust of her.

Now, seven months later, these suburban women have gotten a full load of Trump as the madly tweeting clown-president and a full load of worry about what the Republicans may do to health care--and maybe to the climate, and maybe to immigrants, and maybe to poor people and for rich people.

Will they decide to cast a Democratic congressional vote just this once--in an isolated instance? Or will they settle at home again, this time for a fellow Republican woman who is not much offensive herself?

Polls suggest that a few thousand of them will make the difference.

Neither of the candidates is anything special. The race is big and portentous all out of proportion to their respective political strengths. It's all about the broader implications.

There is one other telling dynamic in the polling. People under 30 in this suburban Atlanta district favor the Democrat Ossoff by more than 80 percent.

They say an averaging of credible polls show Ossoff with a lead, but not one outside the margin for error. That sounds like Hillary's late polling lead.

They say early voting patterns indicate that Ossoff has banked an early lead. That sounds like Hillary's early voting advantage.

One other factor: A Republican group has entered the race late with a television commercial blaming Ossoff and his supposed "unhinged rhetoric" for the mad baseball-practice shooter in Alexandria, Va.

It's the height of cynicism, hypocrisy and breathtaking outrage for Republicans, whose personally destructive rhetoric has been at least as unhinged as that of Democrats in recent years, to try to cash in on such a tragedy.

Handel has denounced the ad, perhaps understanding it could backfire in a race in which the least new late-stage dynamic could be decisive.

Here's what it all comes down to: By late tonight, based on a few thousand Atlanta suburban votes, either Republicans will be chortling that Democrats can't even win when the pump seems primed for them, or Democrats will be buoyant that an anti-Trump, pro-Obamacare tide has turned for them even in the South.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 06/20/2017

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