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Donald Trump's campaign changed the political playbook in elections across the country. But if Republicans in greater Atlanta retain an imperiled House seat next Tuesday, it will be thanks in so small part to their having called a familiar play.

GOP candidate Karen Handel and a conservative super-PAC advertising against her Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff, have invoked House minority leader Nancy Pelosi to define Ossoff as out-of-touch with the district's voters. Handel said during a recent debate that Ossoff's values were "some 3,000 miles away in San Francisco." She called him a "liberal, Pelosi-like" Democrat in a recent interview. And the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super-PAC, has released multiple commercials linking the two. One that it pushed before the first round of voting on April 18 advised voters to "say no to Pelosi's yes man."

The demographics of the district, the Georgia 6th, indicate that such an approach should have legs. It has been reliably Republican for decades, and it remains favorable to the GOP despite recent redistricting that removed some of its reddest real estate. But it's also the sort of suburbia that wasn't gaga about the president in November; Trump won the district by fewer than two percentage points, the worst showing there by a GOP nominee in memory. So as Democrats try to use Trump's name to sink Handel"make Trump furious" was Ossoff's theme when he launched his bidRepublicans have come up with their reply.

According to the CLF, they're backed by sound data. As the Washington Examiner reported in April, "Tying Ossoff to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., proved especially effective. In an April poll the group conducted, respondents by a 62 percent to 26 percent margin said they preferred a candidate who would work with Ryan if elected to Congress, over one who would work with Pelosi." The CLF's aggressive last-minute intervention into the April runoff is credited with helping keep Ossoff below a 50-percent threshold that would have secured him the seat outright.

There's potentially a bigger-picture idea for Republicans in bringing up the former speaker: It's unifying. Handel has had the challenge of establishing her independence while not crossing Trump voters. "My job," she told me, "is to be an extension of the 6th district. It's not to be an extension of the White House, with due respect to the president." She otherwise has spoken favorably of Trump, though her casual support isn't a hallmark of her candidacy. While the GOP nationwide still mostly supports the president, the party cannot use him as a rallying cry and expect it to win purple districts, where soft Republicans and undecideds could turn elections.

But Pelosi? There's someone on whom the GOP will always be able to agree. Now let's see how effective she is as a motivating factor, more than six years since she last held the speaker's gavel.

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Republicans Needed Backup in the Georgia 6th. They Found It in Nancy Pelosi. - The Weekly Standard