It’s official: Georgia’s special election will be the most expensive House race in U.S. history.

Candidates and outside groups have aired or reserved more than $29.7 million worth of TV ads in the race to replace Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price in Congress, which will break a five-year-old record for House spending — highlighting the outsize importance a sliver of the Atlanta suburbs has taken on in national politics.


It is plainly more money than one House race out of 435 needs. Cash is flowing in at such saturation levels that Democrat Jon Ossoff’s campaign had the money for everything from Korean radio ads to free Lyft rides for voters on primary day. The Atlanta NBC station has even bumped reruns of “The Andy Griffith Show” from their regular slot in order to extend its local newscasts and make more room for political ads.

“Everybody has shoved their chips into the middle of the table, and neither side can afford to lose,” said former GOP Rep. Tom Davis, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee from 1998 to 2002 and said the record-breaking spending has elevated the race into a “real test of narrative” for both parties.

“Republicans can’t afford to lose this because it changes the narrative and it makes it easier for Democrats to recruit candidates and fundraise,” Davis said. “If Democrats lose, then it punctures their narrative of a coming anti-Trump wave.”

The cost of the race between Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel is going to shatter the previous recorded high of $29.6 million — set in Palm Beach County, Florida, in 2012 by former GOP Rep. Allen West, former Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy and outside groups, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The $29.7 million total in Georgia, compiled by a source tracking media spending in the district, includes only money spent on TV ads.

But the campaigns and outside groups are also pumping millions of dollars into get-out-the-vote activities, mailers, radio and more. And the runoff Election Day is still six weeks away, on June 20.

“It’s entirely possible that by the time the books are closed on this race, there will be over $40 million spent in the special and in the runoff,” said Chip Lake, a Republican strategist who works in Georgia. “I’m at a loss for words.”

That staggering total reflects the special election’s unprecedented national profile. It exploded onto the scene this spring as a potential referendum on President Donald Trump’s popularity, elevating Ossoff — a little-known first-time candidate — into an online fundraising dynamo who raised more than $8.3 million, largely from small donors scattered around the country, in just three months at the start of the year.

As one of the first special elections of Trump’s presidency, it became an outlet for “the grass roots excitement, which is propelling the outrageous spending on both sides,” said Taryn Rosenkranz, a Democratic digital fundraising consultant.

Ossoff’s flush campaign forced Republican outside groups to spend millions to keep him from winning a majority in the April all-party primary, which would have won him the seat. Ossoff ended up getting just more than 48 percent in April — a near-miss that improved on Hillary Clinton’s 46-percent showing in the district last November, the first hint that the ancestrally Republican seat, where Price and others typically carried 60-plus percent of the vote, could ever be competitive.

However, the result also gave Republicans the chance to regroup and unify behind a single candidate.

Since qualifying for the runoff against Ossoff, Handel has benefited from the intensity, too. Her campaign said it raised more than $1 million in the week after the primary, and hundreds of thousands more came in when Trump held a fundraiser for her in Atlanta. House Speaker Paul Ryan has also held a lucrative fundraiser for Handel.

Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC with ties to House Republican leadership, has announced its intent to spend $6.5 million by the end of the runoff — a record for an outside group in a House race. Its ads have cast Ossoff as a rubber stamp for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and its staff have spent the spring knocking on Republicans’ doors, urging them to turn out to vote.

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It is money that won’t be available for other House races in the 2018 midterms, which are expected to be highly competitive. But Ian Russell, a former deputy executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, called the small-dollar donations powering Ossoff a “renewable resource” for 2018 races.

“This, to me, is a great sign of the environment heading into 2018 when there will be so many more races to see this energy,” Russell said. “Even if Ossoff comes up short, it doesn’t change the fact that Republicans are hemorrhaging segments of the electorate that they need to win in 2018.”

It’s also a warning for Republican incumbents that they could face historic spending against them in a year and a half.

“If Democrats are able to raise small dollars from donors in a big way like they’ve done so far, then this is probably going to be the most expensive midterm we’ve seen thus far,” said one national Republican strategist. “It’s the clearest signal yet for every single Republican member of the House running for reelection that if you are not raising money and if you are not running a professional campaign, you are vulnerable to defeat.”

Republican candidate for Georgia's Sixth Congressional seat Karen Handel is hoping to defeat Democrat Jon Ossoff in the runoff election. | AP Photo

So far, the money has given Ossoff the flexibility to run an expansive two-pronged campaign — a pavement-pounding endeavor to harness Democratic energy and boost turnout to maximum levels, and an all-out ad blitz aimed at persuading conservative-leaning swing voters to support a Democrat.

Ossoff’s public profile is more moderate than those of other Democratic fundraising juggernauts, like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, a necessity for this district. In a TV ad released this week, Ossoff called for reducing the deficit: “Both parties in Congress waste a lot of your money — it’s just on different things. And the deficits are holding back our economy.”

It’s unclear whether the contributors giving this money online will keep up the intensity that powered Ossoff so far. But there’s little sign that the Democratic base will stop getting provoked into action by Trump. (Democratic groups raised millions of dollars Thursday after House Republicans passed their Obamacare repeal bill.) And many Republicans are just as motivated to defend him.

“It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which 2018 will not be the election that shatters midterm spending record as well because we still have Donald Trump as president,” said Lake, the Georgia Republican consultant. “And he’s proven to be an activating force for both Democrats and Republicans.”