Georgia Sixth Congressional District Runoff Election: When Will It Be Held?

Jon Ossoff and Karen Handel will soon face off in a runoff election. (Twitter)

The Georgia Sixth Congressional District special election has come to an end.

No candidate received over 50 percent of the vote on Tuesday; this means that the top two candidates will go head to head in a runoff election. This runoff election will be held in two months, on June 20th, 2017.

These candidates will be Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel.

This upcoming runoff election will be a tight one. Republicans were divided between 11 candidates during the special election, but now, they can all coalesce around Karen Handel. Jon Ossoff, on the other hand, did not have much Democratic opposition in the race.

A recent poll from Fox 5 Atlanta showed that a race between Jon Ossoff and Karen Handel will be close. In this hypothetical matchup, 42 percent chose Ossoff, while 41 percent chose Handel. Another 17 percent, however, were undecided.

The runoff is looking to be a bit closer than it would have been had someone else been going up against Jon Ossoff. In a hypothetical matchup between Jon Ossoff and Bob Gray in that Fox 5 Atlanta poll, 44 percent chose Ossoff and 42 percent chose Gray.

Polling expert Nate Silver recently wrote for FiveThirtyEight that though Jon Ossoff has a lot of momentum right now, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s going to win the runoff election in June.

“The runoff often winds up being a lot different than what you might expect from the first round, as the dynamics of a multiway race and a two-way race aren’t that similar to one another. Uncertainty is inherently fairly high,” Silver said. “…[E]ven if Ossoff finishes just a point or two shy of 50 percent, and Democrats finish with more votes than Republicans overall, he won’t have any guarantees in the runoff given that it’s a Republican-leaning district and that the GOP will have a chance to regroup.”

This election is to replace Tom Price, who vacated his seat earlier this year when Donald Trump nominated him to be the new secretary of Health and Human Services. Ossoff’s success was seen by some as an example of the anti-Trump sentiment in the country, especially among young people, with the Ossoff vote being characterized by The Daily Beast as the start of “the resistance.”