Media Hyper-Spin, Post-Georgia: Claim Dem Loss Really a Win

In the wake of Democrat John Ossoff’s Tuesday loss to Republican Karen Handel in the Georgia special election, Democrats are falling over themselves to either excuse or spin the outcome.

The rules of the Democrats’ electoral outcome spin game are simple: If the Democrat wins, the Republicans lost — if the Republican wins, the Republicans really lost.

Americans were treated to a taste of this the day before the election, when Slate, which perhaps alone on the Left could see the Democrats’ impending loss coming, published an article on Monday that declared “Georgia’s 6th Is a Democratic Win: Even if Jon Ossoff ultimately loses.”

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The tune didn’t change when Ossoff did indeed ultimately lose. “Don’t believe anyone who says Jon Ossoff’s result in Georgia was a loss for Democrats,” wrote New Republic writer Graham Vyse. “The Democratic candidate fell just short of 50 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s special election for the House seat vacated by Health and Human Service Secretary Tom Price,” he noted. “Trump supporters are wrong to cast Tuesday as a huge loss for Democrats.”

Democrats have made much of how Handel’s margin of victory — she beat Ossoff with 52 percent of the vote to his 48 percent — was lower than the margins Price regularly notched in successive re-election bids. “It was a much closer margin than the 20-plus-point wins typically posted by former Rep. Tom Price,” wrote CNN’s Eric Bradner.

But Tom Price’s 2016 opponent raised a grand total of $0, according to Open Secrets. In 2014, his opponent pulled in a paltry $8,000, and in 2012 his opponent raised roughly $44,000. Ossoff’s campaign, on the other hand, raised a whopping $26 million dollars — and that’s to say nothing of the tens of millions of dollars outside PACs poured into his efforts.

Tuesday’s election grabbed the attention of the entire nation — and inspired the full mobilization of the Democrats’ resources and their roster of reliable celebrity spokesmen. Had Ossoff managed 48 percent in a normal election, and without a record-setting fortune in political spending in a House race, his 48 percent loss to Handel would indeed be impressive. But it wasn’t.

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In light of the liberal disappointment, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow grasped for another culprit to explain away the loss.

Maddow had an analyst on her show Tuesday evening to discuss whether or not “there was a turnout effect from the bad weather today in the district.”

She asked if the “bad weather” — what by all accounts was little more than a light drizzle, which lasted only part of the day — had “any partisan implications you could foresee in terms of what was expected for same-day, election-day voting.”

Journalist Mark Halperin explained to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough Wednesday morning the real takeaway from the outcome: that the election was “an unmitigated disaster” for the Democratic Party.