Story highlights Tim Naftali: Outcome of Georgia special election pricks the bubble of Trump's magical invincibility

He says it will likely spur resistance to White House from Republicans who are not Trump fans, embolden Dems to push to flip the House

The former director of the Richard Nixon library, Timothy Naftali is a CNN presidential historian who teaches intelligence history and national security policy at NYU. The views expressed in this commentary are solely his.

(CNN) Jon Ossoff thrashed all of his opponents in the special election in Georgia's 6th congressional district Tuesday night, and though he fell short of the 50% plus one needed to avoid a June runoff, will go into that runoff as the favorite.

This is big. But let's keep it in perspective: It's true that special elections can be nasty presidential bellwethers.

Republican George H. W. Bush seemed to be on a glide path to re-election after the Gulf War in 1991, but then his former attorney general Dick Thornburgh lost to Democratic first-time political candidate (but civil rights hero) Harris Wofford in a special election that was called following the death of Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania. A year later George Bush became a one-term President.

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And yet sometimes, though troublesome, special elections don't quite mean disaster for the incumbent in the White House. In 2010, Republican Scott Brown took from the Democrats not just a traditional seat in the Senate but Ted Kennedy's seat, complicating the passage of Obamacare. But Barack Obama was nevertheless reelected.

Spinners will try to pinpoint a cause for Ossoff's strong showing. Was this a protest vote against President Trump? A vote against the paralysis of the "unified" GOP government that -- besides replacing Antonin Scalia with a conservative jurist -- has not managed to pass any of its agenda in its first 100 Days?

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