Carpetbagger (noun): A nonresident or new resident who seeks private gain from an area often by meddling in its business or politics. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

The recent special election in Georgia’s sixth congressional district saw Democrat Jon Ossoff lose to Republican Karen Handel despite polls showing the former up by seven points and left-wing groups and Hollywood celebrities pouring in over millions of dollars into his campaign – making it the most expensive congressional campaign in the history of the United States. In the wake of the defeat, many are looking at the fact that the Democratic candidate did not even live in the district he was seeking to represent.
The fact was even highlighted in a series of tweets by US President Donald Trump, pointing out, “Karen Handel’s opponent in #GA06 can’t even vote in the district he wants to represent… because he doesn’t live there!” Handel also used the issue as a campaign talking point, which Jeff Stein noted on the website Vox, “Handel’s attack is useful because it allows her to insinuate something else entirely – that Ossoff doesn’t belong to the traditional community of the area in a much more fundamental sense.”
To top off the “outsider” label being hurled at him, Ossoff also received the greater majority of campaign funding from outside Georgia. According to Ted Goodman at The Daily Caller, “Only about 3.5 percent of Ossoff’s $15 million reported fundraising total came from within Georgia.”
“More than 14 percent came from California and New York,” he added.
Goodman also quoted a line by Handel when she debated Ossoff on June 6, “You might live just five miles outside of the district, but your values are nearly 3,000 miles away in San Francisco.”
“That’s why so many of your contributions have come from liberals from California, New York, and Massachusetts,” she pointed out.
John Cassidy also characterized Ossoff in a piece for The New Yorker, saying, “The GOP high command depicted Ossoff as a puppet of Hollywood celebrities and Nancy Pelosi, who, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll, has a 91 percent disapproval rating among local Republicans.”
Celebrities, who also lent massive support for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in her campaign for the presidency in 2016, believed they would be able to pull Ossoff over the finish line, with Alyssa Milano personally driving voters to the polls; actors like Sally Field and Mark Ruffalo sending tweets to remind residents to go out and vote for the Democrat; and other actors like Rosie O’Donnell, Jane Fonda, and Jessica Lange donating money to his campaign – all resulting in a number of Hollywood elites expressing their despair after the final results came in.
Overall, the effort only made their candidate even more of an outsider, beyond his mailing address.
The argument against such carpetbaggers is a valid one.
In the same way, it was a relevant tool to use against Hillary Clinton when she ran for Senate in the state of New York, after growing up in Illinois and living in Arkansas when her husband Bill Clinton served as governor. In that case, however, partisanship runs very deep in the northeastern part of the country, where voters are willing to vote for anybody calling themselves a Democrat.
It also added to the already extraordinary election night in November 2016 when television announcers would call all three states the “home state” of the losing presidential candidate.
In the Philippines, there are a multitude of cases where politicians are elected to a jurisdiction and, after office hours, they drive back to where they really live, many times using the address of a relative in the area to prove their residency.
Especially in Negros Occidental, where many of the political elite can only find the luxuries they depend on in a city like Bacolod City, a good number of them run for office in a far-flung city or small municipality where they shake hands with locals and put on the façade of understanding during the election, many times, merely leaning on a last name, and, at the end of the day, they pack everything up and take the drive back to the “big city” and away from the constituency they claim to represent.
Is it as simple as the idea of a naïve electorate enamored by the idea of a political dynasty that a candidate’s actual residence becomes irrelevant? Personally, am not one to endorse political dynasties, especially in a country where political power almost always means a windfall of wealth. Why would anybody wish to see one family benefit when there are still so many living in poverty? Many in the political arena would like voters to believe the administration of former President Ferdinand Marcos and his family were the only people who committed such an act, but given how quickly many politicians go from rags to riches, it would be tough to say the practice is not a long-standing tradition – particularly, with residents continuing to let it happen by voting based on last name.
The elites like to keep the voters looking back in history because if voters were given the opportunity to look at the situation at hand, they would see the same last names are in office and, while poverty numbers remain high, the extravagant lives enjoyed by those with “prominent family names” continues to flourish.
However, as the past few decades have shown, it continues to be a never-ending cycle of politicians flashing a last name, voters captivated by a free t-shirt, and many ignoring the fact that most politicians do a lot of talking without much to back up their words – then recycle the same promises without having done anything about them when they first ran.
Regardless if the candidate’s purported address is where they actually live or where a cousin lives, a recognizable last name will continue to keep the power and money in the hands of the very few. If the voters in Georgia’s sixth congressional district were as shallow when it came to selecting somebody to represent them, perhaps Ossoff would have pulled off the mainstream media’s expected upset victory./WDJ