
Republican Karen Handel said Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA) only won in 2018 because of the 'emotion' after her son's murder.

It doesn't get any more cynical than this.

Former Rep. Karen Handel (R-GA), who lost her suburban Atlanta House seat in 2018 to now Rep. Lucy McBath (D-GA) during a suburban revolt against Trump, is waging a comeback bid in 2020.

And she was caught on camera at a town hall on March 28 claiming that the only reason McBath won in 2018 was thanks to the "emotion" that came after her teenage son, Jordan Davis, was senselessly shot to death at a gas station.


"Now she won't be able to run on emotion," Handel is heard saying on a video recording obtained by Shareblue from the town hall event in East Cobb, Georgia. "She will have to own her record."

Of course, McBath did run a campaign on the issues in 2018, when she defeated Handel in Georgia's traditionally Republican 6th District by 1 point.

Specifically, McBath focused on gun control and health care in the ads she ran against Handel.

Republicans, on the other hand, ran scare tactic ads trying to tie McBath to now-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — the GOP's favorite bogey-woman. The attacks fell flat, however, and McBath won despite the fact that Republicans had long held this seat and that Trump himself carried it by a 2-point margin in 2016.

National Republicans are working hard to try to oust McBath in 2020, and have even waged silly stunts against McBath that have thus far backfired.

The NRA — which opposes McBath's attempts to pass commonsense gun reforms — even went a step further than Handel and said that McBath only won in 2018 because she's black.

"It is wrong to say like McBath said, that the reason she won was because of her anti-gun stance," NRA president Carolyn Meadows told the Marietta Daily Journal back in May. "That didn't have anything to do with it — it had to do with being a minority female. And the Democrats really turned out, and that's the problem we have with conservatives — we don't turn out as well."

McBath's campaign declined to comment on Handel's assertion that she only won based "on emotion."

But McBath will likely be happy to run on her record of working to strengthen background checks for gun buyers.

After all, the public broadly supports gun control measures, with 61% of Americans saying they want gun laws to be more strict, according to Gallup.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.