How much money did Democratic congressional candidate Jon Ossoff spend per vote in Georgia Congressional District 6?
It’s been reported that Ossoff raised a whopping $8.3 million and spent $5.3 million of it. The final vote tallies show Ossoff reaching slightly over 48 percent of the vote at 92,390 votes. That works out to around $57.37 per vote.
What that means is that Ossoff funneled gobs of money toward reaching that 50 percent threshold to avoid a runoff election; he still missed it.
That doesn’t mean that a Republican victory is guaranteed, however.
Sean Trende gives Ossoff “a reasonable chance of winning in June” in his analysis of the election in RealClearPolitics, noting that Ossoff is still sitting on a heap of cash and that Democrats received 49 percent of the total vote.
However, Ossoff had the advantage of a massively split Republican field for Tuesday’s election and a far more energized Democratic base due to all the national attention drummed up because of Democrats’ portrayal of the race as a referendum on Trump. He won’t have nearly the advantage now that it’s a one-on-one race between him and former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel and the initial fervor failed to secure him the win.
Erick Erickson noted in The Resurgent that “Handel is the perfect candidate for this district”:
She is a Republican who focused on fiscal conservatism over social conservatism during her elected career on the Fulton County Commission and in the Secretary of State’s office, but she is a social conservative nonetheless. She has been skeptical of President Trump, but willing to assist him in a conservative agenda. In Georgia, she ran against the establishment and the good old boys fighting corruption and crony capitalist deals.
Erickson also pointed out that Handel “is so well known in the 6th, she could play the first stage of this race conservatively and did.”
All in all, it means that June’s election will be a competitive one and will be an interesting one to watch. But Ossoff may have to spend more than $57.37 per vote in order to win the election outright.
