The new number that could haunt Republicans in the June 20 runoff for the Sixth District: An estimated one in five Republicans voted for Democrat Jon Ossoff last week.
That's what Nate Cohn of The New York Times deduced after crunching a new set of numbers in the 6th District race. Past GOP primary voters outnumbered Democrats by 52-29, he wrote in The Upshot, meaning that Ossoff had to have won 15 to 20 percent of Republican-leaning voters - and about two in three voters who had never cast ballots in a partisan primary.
Cohn also found that a larger portion of Democratic-leaning primary voters turned out than Republican primary voters - a rare feat for Democrats in Georgia or, really, across the nation.
The news wasn't all bad for Republican Karen Handel, though. Writes Cohn:
The electorate was not as favorable for Mr. Ossoff as the electorate was for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
The electorate was almost exactly as old and white as would be expected in a normal midterm electorate. This is not surprising — there is no recent precedent for a strong turnout among young and nonwhite voters in midterm elections. But this sort of pattern would hamper Democrats in relatively diverse districts where they depend more on nonwhite voters, like those in Southern and Central California, south Florida and Texas.
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The Georgia Chamber and its national parent group, the U.S. Chamber, is endorsing Republican Karen Handel later Tuesday morning. Some of her critics have a friendly reminder that, during her 2014 run for U.S. Senate, Handel supported a "religious liberty" measure abhorred by Georgia business groups.:
Said Handel in the clip:
"Wherever the battlefront comes, we have got to stand strong to protect that, so we can ensure that this does remain a country of great freedoms -- including religious freedom."
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On that same topic, a handful of Georgia's Republican congressmen are pushing President Donald Trump to sign an executive order to protect those who do not recognize the right of gays and lesbians to marry.
Rick Allen, Doug Collins, Barry Loudermilk and Jody Hice all signed onto a letter urging Trump to, among many other things, reverse an Obama-era rule protecting gay and lesbians against discrimination in the federal workforce. Trump had reportedly been considering one in February, but never took action on it. Per USA Today:
But on Monday, a senior White House official [said] that some sort of policy to protect religious liberty is still in the works, but that the president is trying to find middle ground. The official did not want to publicly discuss a policy that is still under development.
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Former President Jimmy Carter's presidential library is trolling Donald Trump as he nears his 100-day mark:
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Stepping into international crises on purely humanitarian grounds may soon no longer be U.S. policy, according to this piece in Foreign Policy magazine:
The administration's March budget proposal vowed to slash aid to developing countries by over one-third, but contained few details. According to a detailed 15-page State Department budget document obtained by Foreign Policy, the overhaul also includes rechanneling funding from development assistance into a program that is tied closely to national security objectives.
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