BATTING 0.000 Democrats continue their losing streak in special elections. The latest defeat was in Georgia where 30-year-old Democrat Jon Ossoff (above) lost an election to fill the seat vacated by Republican Tim Price

D emocrats are 0-for-5 in special elections since Donald Trump was elected president a losing streak that has party leaders searching for answers.

The Republican’s biggest victory came last week in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District where 30-year-old Democrat Jon Ossoff lost an election to fill the seat vacated by Republican Tim Price whom Trump tabbed to be his secretary of health and human services.

The two parties spent almost $57 million in the Georgia contest with the Democrats spending more than $30 million of that sum making it the most expensive House race in history. But all that money apparently didn’t move voters. Republican Karen Handel beat Ossoff by 3.8 percentage points greater than the 1.5 percent margin that Trump enjoyed over Hillary Clinton in the presidential race.

In the days that followed Ossoff’s defeat Democratic party leaders and activists engaged in panicky postmortems trying to understand how a president tarnished by scandal could still push his party along at the polls. Early indications are that the Democrats the party that once championed the working class is failing to attract white middle class voters the kind that supported Trump in Michigan Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and propelled him to victory. Though historically the opposition party gains in midterm elections the Democrats now have reason for concern: they will need to flip more than 20 seats to wrest control of the House of Representatives from the GOP.

“It was just an extraordinary waste of time and money and what this says is that the Democratic Party doesn’t have a message it needs new leadership and it has become the very elite structure that they accuse the Republican Party of being ” Democratic campaign strategist Hank Sheinkopf opined in a conversation with Mishpacha.

It was clear from the results Sheinkopf said that voters did not see the election as a referendum on Donald Trump. “Donald Trump does whatever he wants. He’s not impacting the policy debate ” he said. “If the Democrats have any hope it’ll be that the Republicans’ policy not Donald Trump’s mouth infuriate enough people.”

Jim Arkedis president of 4DPAC a progressive foreign-policy-focused action committee thinks the glass is half full when assessing the party’s future chances of winning in vulnerable Republican districts.

“When you look at the larger context of the [Georgia] race I think that there’s a lot of hope in there for the Democratic Party ” Arkedis told Mishpacha.