Tonight's Special Election In Georgia Is A Big Deal For Democrats

Democratic candidate and political neophyte Jon Ossoff has been the beneficiary of much of the country's largesse, raising more than $8 million in just three months.

The race for the seat vacated by United States Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price in Georgia's 6th Congressional District was close, but will ultimately be decided in a runoff in June.

In Tuesday's results, Democrats saw more evidence of a playing field for the 2018 midterm elections that has drastically expanded - and given the party's 10 senators up for re-election in states that Trump won some breathing room.

In a runoff, Ossoff could find it hard to sustain the momentum he witnessed this past week in a traditionally Republican district that has been in GOP hands since 1979.

Republicans escaped a potentially brutal loss on Tuesday night - for now - by forcing a runoff in a closely watched Georgia special congressional election.

An upstart Democrat leads a special election in a conservative Georgia congressional district, but incomplete returns show he's barely clinging to the majority required to pull off a shocking upset in the Atlanta suburbs. "But as one of the wealthiest, most urban, and best-educated districts that voted Republican last fall, it's also an outlier and rather unrepresentative of the larger House playing field".

With his plush campaign coffers, Ossoff was able to blanket the local airwaves, running ads that both called out Trump and promised to stand up to the president. Still, that wasn't enough, and Republicans will now be expected to coalesce their support around Handel. Ossoff appeared to have built up a big lead early on in the night, but as totals trickled in, his share of the vote kept dropping.

Polls close at 7 p.m.

Really, though, it's all about Ossoff - the only candidate who is expected to be in the ballpark of 50%. It was just shy of the 50 per cent he needed to win the Georgia 6th congressional district seat outright.

A 30-year-old former congressional staffer, Ossoff acknowledges he resides in Atlanta, south of the 6th District that encompasses numerous city's northern suburbs.

President Donald Trump is rallying voters in Georgia's 6th Congressional District to "get out and vote" Republican in a special election. Moral victories are lame, but for a party that's aiming to expand its map in 2018 and make Georgia competitive statewide sooner rather than later, there are greater tragedies than having to spend another month organizing the sixth district.

"Your voices are going to ring out across this state and across this country". Trump himself recorded a radio commercial, and on Tuesday sent a series of tweets urging Republicans to get out and vote.

Elsewhere in the district, a polling place inside a Fulton County high school opened late and voters at a Roswell polling place received incorrect instructions from a poll worker about how to cast ballots. "Dem Ossoff will raise your taxes - very bad on crime and 2nd A".

Ossoff has tried to walk a line between liberals looking for a chance to oppose Trump and Republicans who couldn't support him in November. New York Time, he had 48.3 percent of the vote, with nearly 70 percent of the ballots counted. The crowded primary featured 11 Republican candidates splitting the conservative vote.

There are few parallels to draw because the race is a special election with unique dynamics, and because of the unusual primary in which the top two finishers would advance, regardless of party. "A weaker performance wouldn't rule out a June victory, but it would be considered underwhelming given Mr. Ossoff's many advantages in the race so far". Republican groups are running a blitz of ads trying to tie Ossoff to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; a political action committee backed by House Speaker Paul Ryan has spent more than $2 million.