A Republican with a reputation for consensus building instead of partisan trench warfare won a special election Tuesday for the House seat vacated by Rep. Newt Gingrich.
In the early vote counting, the only suspense for Johnny Isakson had been whether he would get a majority in the seven-way race and avoid a runoff.
The final unofficial ballot count showed Isakson with 51,548 votes, or 65 percent. His closest contender, Christina Jeffrey, won 20,116 votes, or 26 percent.
The race in the staunchly GOP district in the prosperous Atlanta suburbs had no experienced Democrats, possibly because party leaders see Isakson as a pleasant change from the combative Gingrich.
The former House speaker resigned after his party’s poor showing in the November elections.
Isakson, 54, a real estate millionaire, was a state lawmaker for 17 years. He is known for working with such Democrats as former Gov. Zell Miller, who once appointed Isakson to quell a conflict between the state’s first GOP superintendent of schools and the Democratic-appointed school board.
During Isakson’s failed Senate bid in 1996, he touted his abortion-rights views. He played down the issue in this race.
“I’ve always been one to build consensus,” he said Tuesday night after his victory. “I believe you make progress wherever you can find common ground, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
The only other well-known candidate was Jeffrey, 51, a Kennesaw State University professor who was hired and then fired by Gingrich in 1995 as House historian amid controversy over her review of a Nazi Holocaust course.
Isakson could be sworn in by House Speaker Dennis Hastert as early as Thursday. Chances are that he would move into the same offices in the Rayburn Building in Washington that Gingrich held before he was elected House speaker by his colleagues.
Voting appeared heaviest in Cobb County, which contains nearly half of the 6th District’s registered voters, and where Isakson had appeared on the ballot at least 10 times before.
Pocketbook issues were the focus of the campaign, which took place in the nation’s 23rd richest congressional district, out of 435. Isakson was armed with nearly $1 million in campaign donations, a fund that dwarfed those of his competitors.
Isakson promised to vote for a 10 percent tax cut in Congress, a position favored by the national GOP.
