There are several things to love about special elections. One of them is that many of them take place in the spring, which means that, in Atlanta, anyway, you can have house parties outdoors, with a little fire-pit at the end of the driveway for when the sun goes down and the air chills back down to February again. Another is the fact that they generally are ad hoc operations.

They occur when an incumbent dies, gets elected to higher office, joins the Carthusians or, as is the case with the Sixth Congressional District in Georgia, the incumbent gets selected to be the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, in which capacity, he can tell monumentally hilarious untruths about what's coming down the tracks as regards health insurance. The race to replace Tom Price in the district has the added attraction of being a "jungle primary," which means that everybody gets into the race and, unless somebody gets 50 percent-plus-one, the two top finishers run against each other. The primary is on April 18 and the run-off, if necessary, is on June 20.

One of the contenders, and the guy who I met in February at a lovely home in the Atlanta suburbs, is Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old Democrat, and a former congressional aide who has made a subsequent career producing documentary films. And Ossoff, a mild, softspoken fellow who is the furthest thing from a bombthrower, has become the first real test case of The Resistance at the ballot box. Hillary Clinton ran much closer in the Sixth than she did in Georgia at large. Also, Ossoff banked an important endorsement from Congressman John Lewis early in the process, and he headlined his first serious email fundraising pitch, "Make Trump Furious," which, experience teaches us, is a very attainable goal. That caught the attention of the progressive blogosphere, and Ossoff's campaign soon had $3 million in the bank.

"It's still really about focusing on your own campaign and putting together the best team possible, the best grassroots organization possible, just as it would be in any other context," he said. "There's no way to approach it except to try to win it outright."

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Ossoff is running a careful, cautious campaign, shrewdly surfing the unexpected wave that has nationalized his campaign without throwing himself headlong into the chop. He paid only a brief visit to the Democratic National Committee's winter meeting in Atlanta, which allowed him to stay apart from the intramural club-fest between the supporters of Keith Ellison and Tom Perez. "I was only there to see a few friends," he said. "I really haven't had time to engage in all of that. I didn't follow it all that closely. All I can tell you is that, here in the Sixth District, there's unprecedented Democratic unity. The fights of last year are not on the agenda. Everyone's focused on winning this election.

"I was surprised by the result [of the narrow win by Trump in the district]. Just because the district has been considered for so long to be a Republican stronghold. But I think what it demonstrated was that voters here judge individual candidates rather than parties, and with a pretty discerning approach."

Indeed, the Georgia 6th hasn't elected a Democratic congresscritter since 1979. Johnny Isakson, now a U.S. Senator, represented it. In addition, it's Newt Gingrich's original launching pad. He represented it for 20 years, during which time he advocated strongly for term limits. (Bad blogger, baaaad blogger!) But there is in Newt's career a single shaft of historical daylight with which Ossoff could find his way. It took Gingrich three tries to get elected in the Georgia 6th. He finally won in 1978. Twelve years later, in 1990, Gingrich beat a Democratic candidate named David Worley by a mere 978 votes.

(As Alec MacGillis' story reveals, Worley employed a strategy of goading Gingrich into looking like a dick in public, which is not dissimilar to Ossoff's take on the president*, although Worley's job may have been even easier than Ossoff's.)

"There's no way to approach it except to try to win it outright."

The state legislature, of course, threw up some barricades in the next redistricting process, and Newt was saved from a lifetime of having to work for a living. Jon Ossoff could be a David Worley who wins, and there's no colossal ego blob standing in his way. In all of its many manifestations, the Georgia 6th has been a very unruly place.

(The 1990 campaign provided me with my favorite Pathetic Democrats story. That autumn, I was in Atlanta working on a story about Evander Holyfield. One night, my hotel hosted a fundraising party for the local African-American Democrats. Being a gifted freeloader, I crashed the party and, all night, people were telling me, 'Hey, we got Newt beat, but nobody in Washington will take our calls.' In detail, they lamented that they couldn't get the DNC to pry open its wallet to help Worley. Imagine how the political history of the 1990s would have changed had Newt Gingrich merely been a failed congressional lifer, instead of the Definer of civilization's rules and Leader—perhaps—of the civilizing forces.)

Ossoff is taking no chance, however. As we've seen, he's developed his own fundraising base of small donors, and he's got a highly evolved notion of how to translate the several hot springs of activism that have sprung up since November into something like controlled campaign energy. "The basic job of any campaign is to translate grassroots energy into turnout," he said. "That's what my people in the community are doing here, working with the people here who are fired up and helping channel all their good will and energy into the result we all want to see. I've never seen more grassroots enthusiasm than I've seen here, and it's not me. It's just the times we're living in. It speaks to the intensity of people's engagement in the political process.

"Anger is just not who I am, and I don't think it's what voters in the 6th district want. They want respectful, decent representation that contrasts so starkly with what we have in Washington. The criticism is implicit. The criticism of what's happening in the White House and what's happening in Congress. I made it clear that I can run a positive campaign and do it better.

"It has to do with gerrymandering, I think. At the structural level, when the primary is all that matters, the incentives change for politicians. And, when you can earn media coverage with bombast and vitriol, that creates another incentive for politicians to light things on fire."

"At the structural level, when the primary is all that matters, the incentives change for politicians."

But they are coming for him. There's little doubt of that. A Republican "tracker" planted at the house party asked him a tricky question about guns, which Ossoff handled with relative ease. A Republican Super PAC targeted him with an ad mocking his youth and what he did in college. And, perhaps strangest of all, there seems to have been some cyber-mischief aimed generally at the electorate in the 6th.

As The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, the FBI is investigating a breach at the Center For Election Systems at Kennesaw State College that could have compromised the data for over seven million Georgia voters. Ossoff jumped on the story, asking Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp to release details of the nature of the attack and also details of what may have been lifted from the facility. The investigation is ongoing, but there's no question that the stakes in this election were jacked into the ionosphere even before all this happened.

"You ordinarily wouldn't have the kind of energy among Democrats and among people in the center as well who are concerned that we're losing touch with traditional American values," Ossoff said, "that we're departing from our own story in a way that is foreign to our national character. I think that's a deeply unsettling sensation, not just for activists, but people across the country who have a shared sense of who we are."

And the ghost of David Worley's campaign begins to stir again.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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