Money is flooding into Democrat Jon Ossoff’s campaign. The national party has started running focus groups on his behalf. Thousands of volunteers have flocked to his team to help him win his April special election for a vacant Atlanta-area congressional seat.

The race for Georgia’s 6th District has suddenly become a focal point, viewed as a chance to send Donald Trump a message by channeling the party’s grass-roots rage, energy and frustration into a single contest. But party leaders are growing increasingly frustrated by the nationalization of this race and another in Montana — and worried about unrealistic expectations in Republican-friendly seats where the Democrats are at a decided disadvantage.


Just a few high-profile losses in races framed as referendums on the Trump agenda, Democrats fear, and the currently heightened level of engagement and hope might fall off the cliff.

“I would caution heavily against resting the entire future of a party on the outcome of a special election,” warned Rebecca DeHart, the Georgia Democratic Party’s executive director.

“You can make two mistakes with special elections. One is to over-read and assume that because you won or lost, that is a predictor of the midterms. The flip side is that you can under-read,” said strategist Jesse Ferguson, a former top official at the House Democrats’ campaign wing.

The polarizing nature of the presidential election and the early months of the Trump administration are already amplifying the noise surrounding not just the Georgia special election but a handful of congressional special elections slated in coming months. The national press, and activists and officials in both parties, are looking for clues to understand Trump’s newly refashioned political landscape — in places like Montana, where there’s a contest to replace Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke; in South Carolina, where Budget Director Mick Mulvaney’s former seat is vacant; in Kansas, where CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s seat is open; and in California, where there’s a crowded contest to succeed Xavier Becerra, now the state’s attorney general.

Nowhere is grass-roots Democratic optimism more acute than in Georgia, where Ossoff, a 30-year-old documentary filmmaker, is vying to capture the suburban Atlanta seat left vacant by Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. The state is trending toward battleground status, and Trump won the district in question by a single percentage point.

Ossoff has raised millions of dollars online from angry activists, and he spent Thursday night at a fundraiser hosted for him by party bigwigs like Reps. Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, James Clyburn and John Lewis at Democratic National Committee headquarters.

A Pelosi-signed fundraising email for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee claimed on Thursday that the energy surrounding the race has Republicans “terrified.”

But local and national Democrats alike see risk in raising expectations too high. Trump may have underperformed there in November, but Price typically won the seat by landslide margins. At best, Ossoff is a long shot — and local party officials fear even a narrow Ossoff loss could create the impression that Georgia is still too red to warrant attention from the national party.

“Special elections are indicators, not prognosticators. They are testing grounds, but not conclusive proof-points, [so] it can be a mistake to read into a special election as giving the party a perfect road map for where to invest in the future. But at the same time, ignoring the consequences of these testing grounds comes at your peril," said Ferguson.

The Georgia race will feature an April primary with candidates of all parties, and assuming none reaches 50 percent, there will be a June runoff that’s widely expected to pit Ossoff against a Republican who will likely be the favorite.

“If Jon Ossoff is the future of the Democratic Party, the future is very bright for Republicans. Jon Ossoff has a better chance of being cast as Han Solo in the next 'Star Wars' movie than becoming a member of Congress,” said Corry Bliss, executive director of the American Action Network and Congressional Leadership Fund, groups tied to GOP House leadership — which has run anti-Ossoff ads. He was alluding to clips that have circulated of Ossoff dressed as that character in college.

Not all of the special elections are viewed as Trump-era barometers. The South Carolina and Kansas seats are expected to remain in GOP hands, while the Los Angeles-area seat is almost certain to remain in Democratic control. But along with the Georgia contest, the May special election for Montana’s at-large House seat is being watched closely, and some Democrats see it as a promising — if slightly more difficult — pick-up opportunity.

In its endorsement of Rob Quist, the Democratic nominee, the popular liberal website Daily Kos described the race as "the perfect test, then, of a populist outsider versus an out-of-touch one-percenter.”

But the conventional wisdom in Montana is that in order to win statewide, a Democrat needs exceedingly high name recognition. That doesn’t describe Quist, a musician who is running against Greg Gianforte, a businessman who waged an unsuccessful challenge against Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock in 2016.

“There are some people on the national level who are saying this is the referendum of what’ll happen with Trump, because our state went for Trump. But the reality is it’s local. Our state is unique: We elected Steve Bullock and Trump by a wide margin,” said Jim Larson, chairman of the state Democratic Party.

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Bullock himself warned against attempts to nationalize the race.

“We haven’t really seen what this election is going to look like,” he said. “It’s hard to say it’s going to be one thing or another until it starts to be a little more defined.”

Montana GOP chairman Jeff Essmann, a local legislator and former state Senate president, said he’s skeptical about Democratic chances in a state where Trump won easily.

“If they want a laboratory for that, they need to do it in a state where Trump didn’t win by 20 percent, like Montana,” said Essmann. “He’s very popular, his policies are, and I think this race is going to simply come down to a race between one experienced candidate who will support the Trump agenda and one who will oppose it."

Even local Democrats are hesitant to use their race as a potential piece of evidence regarding Trump’s standing among voters.

“For Democrats and Republicans to [look at the results and] say, ‘Oh, America hates Trump,’ or ‘America loves Trump’? Well, both of that is true,” said Larson. “Can there be lessons learned on elections that we win? Well, what worked in Delaware isn’t necessarily going to work in Montana."

