The special election in the 6th District of Georgia was universally billed "a high-stakes referendum on Trump" in all the much hyped build-up coming from the left and its media allies.  Not a local election, not a fluke election.  A moment-of-truth Referendum on Trump.

After all, weren't President Trump's poll numbers down?  Didn't the "resistance" put on a mega-protest show and continue its tantrum in all the days-of-rage riots on college campuses?  Wasn't President Trump engulfed in scandal for colluding with the Russians to win the 2016 election that was rightfully Hillary Clinton's?  Weren't the leftists whispering: "President Pence"?

Rubbing their mousy hands together with glee, it's pretty clear that leftists thought they had a certain victory in the bag with that "narrative," along with a perfect post-election analysis, no matter what the Georgia voters thought about it.

Get a load of this now comical pompous pre-election analysis that ran earlier this week in the New York Times (emphasis mine):

The hard-fought battle for Mr. Price's seat in Atlanta's northern reaches has not only become a financial arms race – by far the most expensive House contest in history – it has evolved into one of the most consequential special elections in decades.

Republicans, weighed down by Mr. Trump's growing unpopularity, must demonstrate they can separate themselves from the president enough to hold suburban districts that only now are becoming battlegrounds.

And Democrats, facing a restive base hungry for victory after disappointing losses in Montana and Kansas, are under pressure to show they can notch something more than a moral victory in the sort of affluent seat they will need in order to take back the House majority.

An outright win in Georgia would serve as validation of the party's overall strategy.

Didn't turn out as they thought it would.

So it was a referendum on Trump?  Maybe so.  Lookee here: what were the locals saying when Karen Handel won the special election last night?  From the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Handel thanked President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans who supported her in the nationally watched runoff, leading to cheers of "Trump, Trump, Trump" from the crowd at the Hyatt Regency in Dunwoody.

Trump!  Trump!  Trump!  Guess it really was a referendum, but not with the "narrative" Ben Rhodes and all his fellow Democratic Party coevals and media toadies thought it would be.  Apparently, hating Trump is not sufficient to win elections these days.

The reality it shows is that Georgia voters and Americans in general are tired as heck of the left's kitchen-sink Energizer Bunny-style efforts to delegitimize President Trump – whether through tantrums, thuggery, lawsuits, special prosecutors, fake news, gobs and gobs of campaign cash, or "any means necessary."

Handel wasn't always riding high in the polls, but when it came down to brass tacks and the coinciding news was in all the disgusting efforts to stop President Trump and the agenda the people elected him to accomplish back in Washington, Handel's numbers crossed the victory threshold.

Democrats, of course, are horrified, though some are trying to put the best possible face on it, and others are vowing to double down on extremism.  To take two examples spotted on Twitter:

Dont lost your mind over GA-06. We have healthcare to fight for right now and 94 R held seats more favorable to Ds https://t.co/h2AoYt8j6m

— Jen Psaki (@jrpsaki) June 21, 2017

There'll be Democrats who feel as tho they lost b/c moderating message.
They'll want to go militant progressive for 2018.
They will be wrong pic.twitter.com/LWl7406X5Z

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZito) June 21, 2017

What they won't do is take an honest look at themselves and why voters chose Trump.

There are two things to observe about this.

One is an observation from Peggy Noonan, who pointed out a few months ago that Trump's support isn't likely to tank or fade for the simple reason that voters took a long time to make up their mind on whether to support Trump.  Making that mental "investment," they weren't about to scrap it over something small or stupid.

The other thing is that Democrats have yet to confront the problem as to why they are losing elections.  The big reason is that they have swung hard left on every single issue they once had moderates on – immigration, government spending, health care, law and order, terrorism.  In every single instance, it's a stance that benefits some special interest group and leaves the average voter with the bill.

What's more, it's a creepy kind of left-wingery – one that benefits corporate interests at the expense of Main Street.  Whenever some big-spending, freedom-ending intrusive Democrat program is rolled out "for the children," you can bet there is a plethora of corporate hipster crony capitalists slavering in the rafters over all the new contracts to come.  The backwash is massive speaking fees these corporate beneficiaries shovel out to Democrats once the programs are enacted.  This is not the party of the little guy.

And it's an inflexible, brittle stance as well.  Like Obama, the left finds it impossible change course when it goes too far.  It just keeps digging deeper and deeper into its left-wing party line, intensifying it and thrilling its special interest activists and Sorosian NGOs determined to "make a difference."

Voters can see that – and yet at election time, the Democrats don't run one of these new-style extremists emblematic of who they now are.  Such extremism is reserved for leftist representatives in safe and longtime seats such as Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.).  The Democrats run what they claim is a "moderate," figuring that voters won't notice how far the party has shifted left.  Figuring that the youth gambit would work in the States as it did in France and Canada, they ran a candidate who tried to capitalize on his youthfulness – in this case, the 30-year-old documentary filmmaker named Jon Ossoff, who didn't even live in the district he purported to represent.  He just said he hated Trump – and proposed a raft of tax hikes to prove he was a business-as-usual Democrat, not a new-style street extremist or Sorosian crony.

It doesn't work.

Now the Democrats are left with a steaming pile of $23 million in campaign debt, shelling out $200 per vote, all because they thought hating on Trump was a winning strategy that would thrill the voters.  And if that isn't clear enough a message, a similar race in the 5th District of South Carolina came out the same way.

The left wanted a referendum on Trump.  Today, they got it.