Newly elected Congresswoman Karen Handel handily handed a humiliating defeat to her opponent Jon Ossoff Tuesday night. Handel won the blockbuster race by almost four percent, a stunning victory in a race many thought she would lose. The liberal media desperately made the race into a referendum on President Trump. But according to the numbers, Handel beat Ossoff by a larger margin than Trump beat Hillary Clinton. As liberals frantically tried to change the meaning of the election, CNN’s David Chalian appeared on CNN Tonight and declared that “I don't think there are moral victories here.”

At the top of the 10 o’clock hour, CNN Tonight host Don Lemon came on the air and announced that “CNN projects, right now, Karen Handel is the winner in the Georgia congressional race down in the 6th district in Georgia.”

Chalian talking about how the victory was huge for Republican even though it was a seat they have controlled for a number of years. “This was the best shot Democrats in these special elections to really try to make a victory in the Trump era,” he explained to Lemon. “And they came up short, which now, of course, is going to create a whole series of questions about how the Democratic Party should run in the era of Donald Trump because they came up short here.”

Then, Lemon tried to dismiss Handel’s victory:

What's interesting is that breaking news, a Republican wins in Georgia it shouldn't be breaking news. This is the way it should happen. But the fact, David, that it was so close at least it appeared in the polling and in the results, as well. The results are really close.

By harping on the claim that the election was “close” Lemon was trying to make it seem as though Handel didn’t really do that well. But her margin of victory was predicted to be much closer than it actually was, with many predicting that she would lose. She actually beat Ossoff by a larger percentage than Trump beat Clinton, which actually says a lot about the ineffectiveness of just running on an anti-Trump platform.

“Are Democrats looking at there as necessarily a loss or they got close and maybe there's hope for them in the midterms,” Lemon asked his guest. And Chalian hit his host with the cold hard truth.

“I don't think there are moral victories here. I mean, I think, the Democrats lost this race. That is a loss,” he told Lemon. “They went all-in on it, and with all the energized base through, had the small dollar donations, yes, they were running in a district whose DNA is a Republican district.” And in a quip that seemed directed at Lemon, Chalian noted that “it was an uphill battle all along but they lost, so I don't think we should gloss over that.”

The liberal media claimed that the election for Georgia’s 6th District was a referendum on Trump and would foretell the doom of the Republican Party in the 2018 mid-term elections. But that has been the narrative of nearly every special election so far under the Trump presidency, and yet the GOP is sporting a 5-0 record. The media will soon shift attention away from the humiliating defeat and claim something else is the referendum on Trump.

Transcript below: