ATLANTA — Karen Handel, a veteran Republican officeholder, overcame a deluge of liberal money to win a special House election in Georgia on Tuesday, bridging the divide in her own party between admirers of President Trump and those made uneasy by his turbulent new administration.
Handel, 55, fended off Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old Democrat and political newcomer who emerged from obscurity to raise $25 million from liberals across the country eager to express their anger at Trump. That fervor quickly elevated what would otherwise have been a sleepy local race into a high-stakes referendum on Trump and the most expensive House campaign in history.
Republicans also scored a victory in a special House election in South Carolina. Billionaire developer Ralph Norman narrowly defeated Democrat Archie Parnell to fill the South Carolina congressional seat vacated by Mick Mulvaney when he became the White House budget director.
‘‘We’re looking forward to getting to work in Washington,’’ Norman, who aligned himself with Trump, told the Associated Press.
Norman, who celebrated his 64th birthday on election night, had 51 percent of the vote, with 99 percent of precincts reporting. Parnell had roughly 48 percent of the vote. For Democrats, it was an unexpectedly strong showing in a heavily conservative district.
In Georgia, the victory for Handel, a former secretary of state there and Fulton County official, averted a humiliating upset for Republicans in an affluent, suburban Atlanta seat they have held for nearly 40 years. And it showed that Republicans skeptical of Trump remain comfortable supporting more conventional candidates from their party.
The apparent success of relentless Republican attacks linking Ossoff to the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, and her “San Francisco values’’ also reaffirmed the efficacy of tying Democratic candidates in conservative districts to their brethren in more liberal parts of the country.
Incomplete returns show Handel winning almost 53 percent of the vote.
For Democrats, the loss was disappointing after questionable “moral victories’’ in two earlier special election defeats, for House seats in conservative districts in Kansas and Montana. Ossoff appeared so close to victory that Democrats were allowing themselves to imagine a win that would spur a wave of Republican retirements, a recruitment bonanza, and a Democratic fund-raising windfall heading into the 2018 midterm elections.
Yet the Republican triumph came only after an extraordinary financial intervention by conservative groups and by the party’s leading figures, buoying Democrats’ hopes that they can still compete in the sort of wealthy, conservative-leaning districts they must win to recapture the House.
Both parties now confront the same question: What does such a hard-won victory in the Lululemon-and-loafer subdivisions of Dunwoody and Roswell, where Trump prevailed in November, augur for Republicans defending similarly competitive seats outside the South?
In the so-called jungle primary — the initial special election on April 18 — Ossoff, one of 18 candidates on the ballot, captured just over 48 percent of the vote, an unusually strong showing for a Democrat, but short of the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff. Handel came in a distant second with just under 20 percent, as Republicans divided their support among a number of credible conservative contenders.
But Republican leaders were optimistic that the party’s voters would rally behind Handel in a two-candidate showdown.
Questions also lingered about whether the grass-roots coalition backing Ossoff — fueled by highly motivated anti-Trump activists who were, in many cases, new to political activity and organizing — could improve on its April showing in a runoff set for the beginning of the summer vacation season, in a district where people have the means to escape to the beach.
Handel and her supporters portrayed Ossoff as far too liberal for a district that, covering somewhat different territory, was represented from 1979 to 1999 by Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker. They also criticized Ossoff for his youth and inexperience and assailed him for living outside the district, although he was raised in it.
Ossoff’s allies, for their part, paid for an advertising campaign deriding Handel, a former chairwoman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, as a profligate spender while in office. And Ossoff ran television ads that rehashed Handel’s resignation from the Susan G. Komen Foundation over her belief that the group, which raises money to fight breast cancer, should cut ties with Planned Parenthood.
While Ossoff’s supporters showed great passion, Republicans were presumed to have a heavy mathematical advantage in the district, which Tom Price, now Trump’s health secretary, won by 23 points in 2016. And it was unclear throughout the contest how the two campaigns would ultimately be buffeted by tempestuous events in Washington, including Trump’s handling of the investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election, the House’s passage of an unpopular health care overhaul, and the attack last week on a group of Republican lawmakers by an anti-Trump liberal.
