Democrats 0-4 in Trump Era: Today's News for June 21st

Fox News:

Republican Handel wins Georgia special House election

Republican Karen Handel on Tuesday night defeated Democrat Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s record-spending, special-election House race, according to the Associated Press.

With all precincts reporting, Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state, led Ossoff 52 percent to 48 percent -- a margin of nearly 11,000 votes out of more than 250,000 ballots cast.

Seems pretty straightforward. Yet the CNN story veered into more news analysis than reporting:

CNN:

Democrats just went 0-4. When will they win?

Democrats tried an inoffensive moderate message in Georgia. They ran a banjo-strumming populist in Montana. They called in the cavalry in South Carolina and tried to catch their foe sleeping through a long-shot in Kansas.

None of it worked.

In the special elections for House seats vacated by Republicans who wound up in President Donald Trump's Cabinet, Democrats went 0-for-4.

Now, party officials, strategists and candidates are pondering what went wrong -- and how they can turn it around in time for the 2018 midterm elections.

Jon Ossoff's loss Tuesday night in a hyper-competitive Georgia race -- the most expensive in history -- "better be a wake up call for Democrats," tweeted Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, an emerging Democratic leader.

"We need a genuinely new message, a serious jobs plan that reaches all Americans, and a bigger tent," he wrote, "not an smaller one. Focus on the future."

#Ossof Race better be a wake up call for Democrats - business as usual isn't working. Time to stop rehashing 2016 and talk about the future.

— Seth Moulton (@sethmoulton) June 21, 2017

It is hard to disagree with the TRUTH of that analysis, but let's try? Note the races were all in districts which Republicans held previously. Strike one against the Democrats.

Strike two against the Democrats came in the following:

But before the 2018 midterms, Democrats must grapple with the party's need to drive its base to the polls while also convincing some independents and moderate Republicans to reject Trump.

This was why Mitt Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012 (and many of the Republican campaigns against FDR as well): You cannot run a campaign "against" somebody. If you don't represent something, if you don't believe in something, you can never win. In other words, you have to present an alternative. The Democrats are overly focused on "not Trump", but they have no ideas of their own, other than the tired ones of the last 8 years under Obama. Trump's election was a wake-up call against those policies, but the Democrats are still hitting the snooze button.

Finally, here is the Democrats' third strike:

CNBC:

GOP's Karen Handel wins most expensive House race ever, dashing Democrat upset hopes

The two campaigns and outside groups supporting and opposing the candidates shelled out at least $36 million as of May 31, including more than $22 million from Ossoff's campaign. The election easily set a record for spending in a House race, according to NBC News.

This presents one inherent flaw in political thinking in general, although Democratic Party thinking in this particular case: You can fix any problem if you throw enough money at it. This doesn't work when the government does it, and it doesn't work in the private sector either. Some problems require more than money. Some of them require thinking.

(hat tip to Political Vel Craft for the pic)