All eyes are on Georgia ahead of significant special election

Voters in Georgia's 6th congressional district head to the polls Tuesday to vote in a special election between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel. On Monday, President Trump weighed in with an endorsement of Handel:

Ossoff will enter election day with surprisingly strong numbers for the heavily Republican suburbs of Atlanta: "If Democrats are to keep pace with their special election results so far, then Ossoff probably should be winning the race, not just coming close — and Georgia 6 should be the election where Democrats go from 'moral victories' to actual wins," FiveThirtyEight writes in its analysis. That being said, "Ossoff [is] ahead by a not-very-safe margin of about 2 percentage points." In other words: It's still anybody's race.

But as small as the victory might ultimately be, the implications will likely be read as massive by the defeated party. "This is a laboratory. In order to win the House back we have to win in districts that are gerrymandered for Republicans, so [special elections like this one are] laboratories for us to figure out what's the best way to mobilize this vote," Democratic National Committee Associate Chair Jaime Harrison told Politico.

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What's more, "a loss in Georgia's special election here could leave the [Democratic Party] demoralized, with little to show for all the furious organizing, fundraising, and spending in a handful of congressional special elections in the early months of the Trump administration," Politico writes.

"This is a harbinger of national politics. The world is looking, the nation is looking — and all the money has flowed in here," former Republican Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.