It’s been more than a year since Jon Ossoff lost the most expensive U.S. House race in history, the special election in Georgia’s Sixth District. Federal special elections—off-cycle contests to fill unexpected vacancies in Congress—have been treated with especial significance in the first two years of the Trump Administration, their outcomes sifted through and analyzed as harbingers of what might come in the midterms this November, of how the country is feeling about President Trump. Most of the special elections that have taken place since November, 2016, have occurred in Republican-leaning areas, yet the outcomes in most of these races have been close. Last June, Ossoff—a young, coalition-inclined Democrat—came within ten thousand votes of winning a congressional seat that had been held for more than a decade by Tom Price, a conservative Republican whom Trump had tapped to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services, and by Republicans since 1979.

On Tuesday, Danny O’Connor—a young, coalition-inclined Democrat—came within two thousand votes of winning a congressional seat in a special election in Ohio’s Twelfth District, an area that has been represented by Republicans since 1983. As of midday Wednesday, there were some thirty-four hundred provisional ballots yet to be counted, and the race had not been officially called, but O’Connor’s chances looked tough. Even so, as in the Georgia Sixth, the very fact that a Democrat had been so competitive in Republican territory—Trump won the Ohio Twelfth by eleven points in 2016—has been greeted by many as good news for Democrats: a victory even in defeat.

How should the public weigh the results of special elections? How should we talk about them? On Wednesday morning, I asked Ossoff these questions. He was cautious not to make too many inferences—both because the Ohio Twelfth contest, in which he’d supported O’Connor, had yet to be truly decided, and because he’s wary of narratives being retrofitted to outcomes rather than being derived from them. “It’s a false choice between these narratives,” Ossoff said. “Winning and losing elections matters. The distribution of seats in the House matters.” At the same time, he said, “This Presidency has put a huge number of districts in play. Democratic enthusiasm is sky-high. That’s made these races competitive. But in heavily gerrymandered districts, where Democratic candidates are still running uphill, that’s not always quite enough. In a way, it’s not that complicated.”

A year removed from his own special election, Ossoff argued that people underestimate the long-term effects of these races. “There’s real party-building that happens when competitive campaigns unfold in districts that haven’t recently been so,” he said. In the Georgia Sixth, he said, there is now “an army of battle hardened volunteers and activists.” Since his campaign, Ossoff has returned to work at his documentary production company, Insight TWI. He’s also lent a hand to some local candidates for office in Georgia. “I’m a recovering candidate who is staying politically active,” he said.