Who Will Win Georgia's Election? What Polls Say About Jon Ossoff vs. Karen Handel

The most expensive House race in history comes to an end Tuesday when Democrat Jon Ossoff faces off against Republican Karen Handel to win Georgia’s sixth district. The special runoff election is for the seat left vacant by Tom Price, who became the Health and Human Services Secretary for President Donald Trump.

Ossoff is a first-time candidate and one-time congressional aide. Handel was formerly Georgia’s Secretary of State. The race is down to the wire and extremely close in the polls.

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FiveThirtyEight’s average of recent polls Monday gives Ossoff a 2.4 percent advantage. Those polls are from Trafalgar Group, Opinion Savvy, SurveyUSA, Landmark Communications and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The latest poll from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows Ossoff up just 1.7 percent with a margin of error of 3.5 percent.

RealClearPolitic’s survey of poll averages gives Ossoff a 1.5 percent advantage. Their average includes some of the polls that FiveThirtyEight does and in additional to others.

The district is traditionally very Republican. It voted for Mitt Romney in the 2012 election by a 23 percent margin, while the country as a whole went for former President Barack Obama by a margin of four points. In 2016 it chose President Donald Trump by a percentage of 1.5 while the country as a whole chose Hillary Clinton by two points in her popular vote win.

FiveThirtyEight also uses a predictor that blends the past two presidential elections in a three to one ratio favoring the most recent election. They add that to their generic candidate poll; this is an average of national polls asking in a congressional race whether respondents would choose a Democrat or Republican. Currently, the poll favors Democrats by seven points. After adding and averaging those figures, Handel comes out on top by a margin of 2.6 points.

While there is a national sentiment of increased Democrat activity, it doesn’t always translate in traditionally red districts. The sixth district has gone for GOP candidates for 40 years, including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

Two other special elections this year in traditionally GOP Kansas and Montana yielded Republican winners. There is also a special election Tuesday in South Carolina to replace the seat vacated by Mick Mulvaney when he was added Trump’s cabinet as the director of management and budget.

Ossoff almost won the race outright in the first round, garnering 48 percent, just shy of the 50 percent he needed. That near-miss triggered the Tuesday runoff. Ossoff was facing 17 other candidates then, but now he is just facing one.

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It is expected to be a very high turnout race. Politico reported Saturday that 140,000 early votes have come in which includes 36,000 people that didn’t vote in the first election. The election so far has seen $50 million come into the district for both candidates, most of that outside money.

Handel does, however, have one big supporter in her corner who was tweeting on Monday: the president himself.