DAVE ROSS

Latest referendum is the equivalent of shoving a thermometer into a cooling turkey

Jun 20, 2017, 5:50 AM

Candidates in Georgia's 6th Congressional District race Republican Karen Handel, left, and Democrat...

Candidates in Georgia's 6th Congressional District race Republican Karen Handel, left, and Democrat Jon Ossoff. (Branden Camp/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

(Branden Camp/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP)

Today, we’re having another referendum on you-know-who!

The special Congressional election in Georgia is billed as the latest attempt to take America’s temperature after the shock of 2016.

Seems to me it’s more like plunging a meat thermometer into the turkey after you’ve turned the oven off; it’s only accurate for a small area. In this case it’s Georgia’s 6th Congressional district, which is suddenly headline news.

Personally, I was hoping that at this point we’d have headlines about a giant new border wall, a new health care plan, new highways, millennials flocking to their new coal mine jobs, but we have none of that yet.

All we have is this little fortune cookie election that is supposed to tell us whether the nation is leaning Democrat or Republican, which is important for reasons I can’t understand. Anybody know?

If the Republican wins in Georgia, will this have a different effect on your insurance premium, tax bill, jobs, than if the Democrat wins?

I know this much: Based on the campaign ads, this race has nothing to do with any of that. According to the ads, this race is between a candidate who endorses shooting members of Congress and a candidate who shows off in a Lexus and who tried to sabotage Planned Parenthood.

But the “New York Times” headline says, “High-Stakes Referendum on Trump Takes…” and Trump himself last night tweeted that this is a “big day.” Nate Silver, the famous election statistician, wrote on his blog, “Sometimes dumb things matter if everyone agrees that they matter.”

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Latest referendum is the equivalent of shoving a thermometer into a cooling turkey