Voters on Tuesday picked state Treasurer Ron Estes to fill the vacancy created when Trump chose former U.S. Rep. Mike Pompeo as Central Intelligence Agency director. Unofficial final vote tallies show Estes scored a 7 percent victory over Thompson. Any investment from Democrats would have been met with an equal or greater response from Republicans, while donors might have been misled into thinking that a victory was imminent.
President Trump, who carried the 4th district with about 57 percent of the general election vote in 2016, also pushed for Estes, with a message on social media network Twitter expressing support for his fellow Republican earlier in the day.
After Tuesday night's special election, a Republican will continue to represent the people in Kansas's Fourth Congressional District. "People are prepared, they're fired up they're ready to go they're ready to organize and to turn out and vote like we've never voted before".
The 60-year-old state treasurer defeated Democrat James Thompson, a civil rights attorney. He says he wants to see if the GOP "can get something done" with Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate.
If Democrats won, it would have been a boost for the party ahead of more special elections in Montana and Georgia - as well as a recruitment tool in more competitive districts for next year's mid-term Congressional elections. If he can gain more than 50 percent of the vote on April 18, Ossoff could win the race outright, without having to face a runoff pitting him against a single Republican candidate and unified GOP opposition. Democrats still haven't won an election there since the early 1980s. On Monday, Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of SC, who shouted "You Lie!" at President Barack Obama during a 2009 health care speech, heard chants of the same phrase at a town hall from constituents angry about health care and his voting record on violence against women. "It probably took all three to get Thompson this close".
With the Kansas race over, attention will shift to next week's free-for-all in Georgia's 6th Congressional District, left vacant when Tom Price became health and human services secretary. If Democrats can seriously compete in this Kansas district, they can seriously compete nearly anywhere.
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"This should be a wakeup call to the administration and the Republican Congress", the lawmaker said.
But there's a difference between running television advertisements from national Democrats and using the race as an opportunity to build the Kansas Democratic Party.
Because of the deathly pallor that Brownback casts on the Republican party in Kansas, the results of this special election are not terribly instructive as to the current state of public sentiment toward the Republican party as a whole.
"The key question is whether the weakness of Estes tonight was due to his shortcomings as a candidate, the weakness of the state party under Brownback, or a sign of Trump's national unpopularity", he said.
The importance of the election was demonstrated by the national GOP figures who campaigned for Estes.
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