Erick Erickson on Tuesday’s Georgia Congressional special election:

In 2016, Rodney Stooksbury got 38.3% of the vote in Georgia’s sixth congressional district after spending only around $1000.00. Less than a year later, Democrats spent $30million to get only ten percent more of the vote and still lose.

There are some real issues here that the cheering and moralizing will overlook. Democrats will say it should not have been so close, but Republicans can counter than outspending the GOP and still losing is a big deal. It is. The Democrats can note that the GOP was winning this district by twenty points regularly and now are barely winning. That is true too.

But there are some fundamental problems for Democrats that they are going to overlook as they declare moral victory.

First, the national netroots rallied to Jon Ossoff, who was completely unknown to the sixth congressional district. There was a state senator from within the district who had a built in constituency that crossed party lines. But that guy got rejected for this unknown who lived out of the district.

Second, Ossoff did live out of the district and that cost him a number of votes. Democrats want you to believe this race was about healthcare and a referendum on Trump. The reality is more voters talked about Ossoff being a carpetbagger than they talked about where either candidate stood on the issues.

Third, Democrats got cocky. In the last two weeks of the race they started knocking on Republican doors to try to turn out the vote. Yes, they needed to persuade persuadable Republicans to vote Ossoff, but they did not just target those voters. They blanketed the district, knocking on the doors of Trump voters. They saturated the district with robocalls. They overbought television advertisements. They overexposed their candidate.

Fourth, Ossoff never defined himself. He went negative on Handel, who had won this district in three elections and who was known by 90% of the district. He could not define a woman who everyone already knew and mostly liked. But no one knew Ossoff and he got defined as a Pelosi loving carpetbagger.

That leads me to the fifth point, Nancy Pelosi is as much an anchor on the Democrats as Trump is on the GOP, if not more so. If Democrats want to win GOP seats, Pelosi needs to stay in the shadows.

Sixth, Ossoff was way overexposed. People got tired of his ads. They were on constantly. They never changed. People tuned them out over time. He never shook up the advertisements or rolled out new attacks or positive messages. Democrats saying this was about healthcare want to focus on his literally last two days where he talked about healthcare. He otherwise did not go deep on policy on the campaign trail.

Seventh, this was a Republican district that was won by a well known and liked Republican who was able to offset poor fundraising with high name ID and likability. Trump voters turned out for her and got her across the finish line.

Eighth, and this is the most important point, Ossoff ran as a moderate Republican. He never attacked the President and opposed universal healthcare. But the national noise about this campaign filtered in. Local voters and local news coverage knew the national progressive activists viewed an Ossoff win as another step towards the impeachment of President Trump. By being so vocal about the implications of this race, the Democrats fired up the GOP voters to defend Trump. It is a poor strategy moving forward for them. This is a district they need and they lost it.

Ninth, despite the rhetoric, you should know that this was one of the most civil races I have witnessed. Yes, there were crazies and bad things happened to both sides, but largely the candidates and campaigns were very civil to each other and the attacks were relatively mild.

Tenth, expect Karen Handel to be her own person in Congress. She will stand up to both sides and she will not be a yes woman for anyone. Jon Ossoff too will come out of this with an enhanced reputation among Democrats. He is going to be a force to contend with in the future. His political career is just starting.

Ossoff’s political career may or may not be starting, but even though the Democratic Party isn’t going to go away, it’s not going to win anything anytime soon either based on Stephen Miller‘s observations:

The only thing Democrats won recently was the congressional baseball game, while the only way Democrat voters can seem to get Republicans out of Congress is by shooting them. And they can’t even do that right.

Jon Ossoff’s loss-off, and the three prior to it, has left the party messaging fractured and split along two primary lines of thinking; abandon the moderate center (which Ossoff attempted to cater to), by going further left (the Bernie/Warren activist wing), or moderate the message by attempting to peel away disenfranchised Trump voters, along with independents who have come to believe the White House reality show is a failure.

Two glaring examples of these fault lines have emerged on Twitter.

“Maybe instead of trying to convince hateful white people, Dems should convince our base—ppl of color, women to turn out. Cater to them,” Tweeted noted far-left feminist and author Jill Filipovic. Filipovic went on to rail against bigoted voters in proceeding tweets. “At what point is this not a failure of Democrats but toxic, vindictive voters willing to elected hateful bigots.”

Herein lies the Democrats’ problem, just as it was a problem when Hillary Clinton bellowed about a basket full of deplorables during the 2016 campaign. The Democrats and their base (Hollywood) think the key to winning elections is to insult voters. “They don’t vote for us because they are bigots” is not a strategy I would employ as a campaign manager but they are welcome to keep trying this, and they are welcome to keep losing.

Another problem with Filipovic’s theory: Trump won educated white women over the first major party female nominee in history. ”

The otherization and dehumanization of large swaths of the voting public is a primary reason operatives like Filipovic have been reduced to tweeting from the havens of their Upper West and East Coast cities. These urban islands are where the party is forced to mine for talent to send into strange flyover districts. As Heat Street reported, Ossoff had nine times as many donors in California, as his home state of Georgia.

The key to winning, according to Filipovic, is to act contemptibly toward voters and put up candidates in districts where they don’t live, while simultaneously marching through their streets and blocking highways. Bold strategy.

On the other end of the spectrum, is former Obama administration advisor Dan Pfieffer, who between CNN gigs basically wanders around acting like he had nothing to do with the past eight years or the rise of Donald Trump.

In a series of tweets, Pfieffer argued that the key to Democrats’ getting back on their feet is to go after swing voters, specifically those voters that flipped from Barack Obama to Trump in the 2016 election. Those voters handed Trump narrow victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Florida and that other weird state that starts with a W that Team Hillary seems to have completely wiped off the electoral map.

“To take back the House, we need lean GOP voters who disapprove of Trump to vote for a Dem. This is hard, but very doable over 18 months.” Pfeiffer believes that Democrats should highlight the unpopular Obamacare replacement and hammer nothing else until 2018.

Pfieffer’s peel away strategy has immediately met with resistance from Mike Casca, a former communications director for both Rep. Keith Ellison and Sen. Bernie Sanders. “What if we proposed things our voters like? that seems easier and more honest,” Casca tweeted in response to Pfeiffer, and then ended his night with “i think a simple thing democrats could do to help in the midterms is to be more openly hostile to capitalism.”

The far left wing of the party has a problem however because Pfeiffer is for the most part correct. If Democrats can’t win back the white working class vote that Clinton ignored in 2016, and to whom Filipovic is openly hostile, they aren’t going to win another election for the next 30 years, until that demographic dies off. Long time to wait.

The problem with Pfieffer’s direction are two-fold. While there are Republican voters disenchanted with Trump, they may not be disenchanted enough to close their eyes and pull the lever for Democrats. That’s an awfully big gamble for a party that just threw $30 million down the toilet.

The second, as evidenced by Casca, is the far-left base, still enamored with Obama’s cultural justice campaigns and falling head over heels for Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have no intention of modifying or moderating their message.

This is the rudderless, sinking ship the Democrats are faced with as they attempt to find their identity after Obama.

Democrats either want to be a party that offers a more sane and measured alternative to Trump’s chaotic, unpredictable craziness, or they want to keep putting together symbolic marches while attempting to explain why some of their more extreme supporters are staging campus riots, talking about blowing up the White House and stabbing people on trains or shooting up baseball fields. Maybe they’ll figure it out post 2018, or a couple of years into Trump’s second term.

Zero Hedge reports:

With just 10 days to go until Illinois enters its third year without a budget, resulting in the state’s imminent downgrade to junk status and potentially culminating in a default for the state whose unpaid bills now surpass $15 billion, Democratic Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza issued a warning to Illinois Gov. Rauner and other elected officials on Tuesday, saying in a letter that her office has “very serious concerns” it may no longer be able to guarantee “timely and predictable payments” for some core services.

In the letter posted on her website, Mendoza who over the weekend warned that Illinois is “in massive crisis mode” and that “this is not a false alarm” said the state is “effectively hemorrhaging money” due to various court orders and laws that have left government spending roughly $600 million more a month than it’s taking in. Mendoza said her office will continue to make debt payments as required, but indicated that services most likely to be affected include long-term care, hospice and supportive living centers for seniors. She added that managed care organizations that serve Medicaid recipients are owed more than $2.8 billion in overdue bills as of June 15.

“The state can no longer function without a responsible and complete budget without severely impacting our core obligations and decimating services to the state’s most in-need citizens,” Mendoza wrote. “We must put our fiscal house in order. It is already too late. Action is needed now.” …,

But the biggest insult and injury is to the near-insolvent state is that Illinois is facing a full-blown crisis just one day after chronic defaulter Argentina managed to pull off a 100 year bond offering, which was 3.5x oversubscribed.

Which makes the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass admit:

Illinois is like Venezuela now, a fiscally broken state that has lost its will to live, although for the moment, we still have enough toilet paper.

But before we run out of the essentials, let’s finally admit that after decade upon decade of taxing and spending and borrowing, Illinois has finally run out of other people’s money.

Those “other people” include taxpayers who’ve abandoned the state. And now Illinois faces doomsday.

So as the politicians meet in Springfield this week for another round of posturing and gesturing and blaming, we need a plan.

And here it is:

Dissolve Illinois. Decommission the state, tear up the charter, whatever the legal mumbo-jumbo, just end the whole dang thing.

We just disappear. With no pain. That’s right. You heard me.

The best thing to do is to break Illinois into pieces right now. Just wipe us off the map. Cut us out of America’s heartland and let neighboring states carve us up and take the best chunks for themselves.

The group that will scream the loudest is the state’s political class, who did this to us, and the big bond creditors, who are whispering talk of bankruptcy and asset forfeiture to save their own skins.

But our beloved Illinois has proved that it just doesn’t deserve to survive.

So why not let our friendly neighbors like Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri and Kentucky just take the parts they want?

As you can see by the excellent “Kevorkian Illinois” map that accompanies this column, this plan is visionary.

The alternative is hell. Illinois hasn’t had a state budget for years. The state continues to spend money it doesn’t have, and the state’s credit ratings have dropped, increasing the cost of borrowing more money we don’t have to keep the rotten shebang going.

Bills pile up; Moody’s Investor Service says taxpayers are on the hook for $251 billion in unfunded public union pension liabilities.

Boss Mike Madigan, king of the Democrats who control things, wants tax increases but no real structural reform to bring stability to The Venezuela of the Midwest.

And the whispers of bankruptcy won’t help the average (remaining) taxpaying chumbolones like you and me who don’t want to leave our homes but who’ll get stuck with the bills.

Since our neighboring states are doing better, taking Illinois jobs and businesses and Illinois workers and taxpaying families, they might as well just take the rest of Illinois, too, dammit.

Wisconsin can have Chicago and begin calling it “South Milwaukee.”

Naturally, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel will fight this. He needs a job. And he’ll most likely beg his friends at The New York Times and the Washington Post to write angry editorials to save him. And these will be full of concern for the republic and those dispossessed Midwestern salt-of-the-earth taxpaying Americans, as if.

Sadly, Wisconsin probably won’t want Rahm, either. So to spare hurt feelings, I propose carving out 40 acres around the mayor’s home so Rahm might be prince of his own country:

Rahmonia.

And Cook County Board President Toni “Taxwinkle” Preckwinkle will fight it, too, so she needs something to soothe her ambitions:

A grant of land as large as a case of the soda pop she taxes, so that she might stand on it and proclaim herself Queen of Taxwinkletopia.

If there are portions of Illinois that the other states don’t want, they may be left as federal territory, a wilderness where only the strong survive and peasants and friendly propagandists kneel and beg for crumbs. You already know the name of this wasteland:

Madiganistan.

And in return for taking care of our politicians, Wisconsin will probably demand assets. Like the Milwaukee Cubs. The Beloit Blackhawks. The Sheboygan Bulls and the Fond du Lac Bears.

Indiana may want a large curvy slice of the former Illinois, so the state will be shaped more like a basketball. This will please Hoosiers to no end.

And Indiana also gets the Indianapolis White Sox and the hottest soccer team in America, the Indianapolis Fire.

Why not? Indiana is a great state, with friendly people and Mitch Daniels and Kilroy’s in Bloomington.

Iowa can have part of the west. Missouri may also get a small piece. Kentucky can take southern Illinois, considering many on both sides of the border share Kentucky DNA, as did Abraham Lincoln.

A colleague told me he had reservations about sharing Illinois with the Bluegrass State.

“I wouldn’t give Kentucky anything because A) it’s the South and the former Illinois needs to stay in the Midwest, and B) their state government is a mess, too, with a governor who refuses to talk to certain reporters.”

But beggars can’t be choosers. If Illinois is dissolved as planned, we won’t have a say in anything.

And though some in Kentucky might not respect “the media,” the state does have excellent bourbon. I would allow Kentucky to send me countless barrels of its fine sipping spirit so that I might hold it in escrow, to make sure everything goes as planned.

Northwestern Illinois is attractive, with vestiges of the Driftless Area and the Mississippi River. Northeastern Illinois is not necessarily attractive, but there’s money there, which often gets spent on our side of the state line anyway on weekends and in the summer. Flatlanders — I mean, our new friends from the former Illinois — might be interested in experiencing what winning football looks like too.

On the other hand, is there some way we can give Chicago — I mean, Rahmonia and Taxwinkletopia — Milwaukee? It is, after all, the source of most of the state’s social dysfunction, and at least as many Wisconsinites view Milwaukee as unfavorably as they view Madison, for good but different reasons.