How Daily Kos helped make Jon Ossoff a household name and flip a dark red House seat

It's spring of 2017, and I'm walking down a street in New York City wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a congressional candidate running in a race 900 miles away. Not one but two different strangers stop me to say, "Nice shirt! Go Ossoff!"

I smiled both times, a mixture of delight and disbelief on my face, and I wondered to myself, How did something like this happen? How on earth did an utterly unknown guy like Jon Ossoff become a household name?

Well, it turns out Daily Kos had a little something to do with it, and it all goes back to election night 2016. We all have our stories about that horrible moment, but it's what we chose to do afterward that really matters.

The very next day, the Daily Kos Elections team—stunned and exhausted—made our way back to our keyboards and asked ourselves the key question: What do we do now? For us, fortunately, the answer was simple: We go right back to busting our asses as hard as we can to elect Democrats at every level in every corner of the country. And that's exactly what we did.

Since that grim election night in 2016, the Daily Kos community has risen to the occasion. We have grown and rallied to take on every battle we come up against. We need your help: We are $72,169 from hitting our May goal. Can you give $5 today?

We knew that the most important thing we could do in those dark days was analyze what had just happened so we'd know where and how to fight in the future. For us, that meant breaking down the results of the presidential election for all 435 congressional districts—a laborious process, but a crucial one for understanding how we might take back the House. So we got right to work.

Soon enough, we learned something very interesting. While it had been apparent before the election that Donald Trump was turning off once-loyal Republican voters who lived in well-educated, affluent suburbs, it was only once we began crunching the data that we could see the extent of the disgust Trump had engendered.

Just weeks after Election Day, we'd calculated the results for Georgia, which showed a dramatic collapse for the Republican Party in the conservative suburbs around Atlanta. One seat in particular stood out: the 6th Congressional District, represented at the time by GOP Rep. Tom Price.

from Daily Kos http://bit.ly/2QAh1Rg