It appears at this writing that Roy Moore narrowly lost the Alabama Senate special election to replace Jeff Sessions. Oh how we wish ol’ Jeff would have stayed as Senator, his performance as AG is just too conflicted and competent alternatives were readily available for the asking.
Granted, Moore was arguably problematic before the accusations of sexual misconduct (however weak on balance) but likely victorious before and with Republicans acting like they have their act together, after as well with a unified appeal to fair play, issues and exposing Democrat extremism. We preferred Mo Brooks in the primary leading up to the special election but regardless, Moore was vastly superior to Doug Jones on policy and practicality.
Had the accusations against Moore proved truthful and actionable he could be replaced by the Republican governor if it came to that. Until then and the questionable accusations voting for policy and for innocent until proven guilty is a moral choice.
Republicans who stayed home and did not vote for Moore because they were too namby-pamby to make a not very hard or sophisticated a choice are pathetic at best. Any who voted for Doug Jones are facilitating a horrendous agenda against Trump and values they supposedly subscribe to. Actually the stay-at-homes are also guilty of that in their fecklessness or pietism. So goes politics in America with much of the stupid party membership and a Republican establishment that is so self-centered as to work against interests of the country.
And by-the-way — no write-in candidate would have likely succeeded against the Democrat machine. That is proven by the results of last night. Republicans and Republican leaners so stupid as to stay home in a critical binary choice where one candidate represented a known evil — the Democrat Party candidate — would have been flummoxed over the choices and stayed home in pearl or TV remote clutching confusion.
Jordan Gehrke writing at The Federalist (disregard Tracinki’s article there) offers a been- there- on- the- ground in Alabama analysis of how:
Mitch McConnell Is The Reason Doug Jones Is A Senator (excerpts) with which we largely agree:
While Mitch McConnell and his allies will try to blame conservatives for nominating Roy Moore, it’s important to remember that McConnell is the main reason Roy Moore was nominated.
The moment it was clear there would be a Special Election to replace Jeff Sessions, McConnell and his PAC, Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) declared they would back Luther Strange and vowed to spend millions on his behalf.
Strange was a flawed candidate from the jump. The circumstances around his appointment by scandal-ridden Governor Robert Bentley were sketchy at best, and rightly or wrongly, voters just never trusted him.
Looking back, an establishment candidate like Strange, beset by issues surrounding his appointment was never going to win a runoff in an anti-establishment state like Alabama–certainly not in the year after Donald Trump was elected.
Judge Roy Moore soon entered the race, followed by Mo Brooks, a conservative congressman from northern Alabama with a very solid voting record. A member of the House Freedom Caucus in the mold of Jeff Sessions, Brooks resonated with conservative grassroots. As I have outlined before, my firm was retained by Brooks and helped a pro-Moore superPAC in the runoff against Strange. (We did no work for Moore in the General Election.)
Determined to keep a Freedom Caucus member out of the Senate, McConnell and SLF swung into action with a little over a month to go, spending over four million dollars carpet-bombing Mo Brooks. They told everyone who would listen that they were going to destroy Brooks. They even hired consultants for a potential primary challenger in his house seat, just to intimidate him.
Why did they do all this?
Because they decided early that it would be easy to beat Roy Moore in a runoff. Unfortunately for them, Alabama voters didn’t really like the meddling by DC. This, coupled with the fact that Strange was so unpopular, meant that despite the attacks on Brooks, the race was tied in the closing days of the campaign with Brooks surging.
In the end, McConnell and his team finally convinced President Trump to endorse Strange. Once Trump endorsed, there were a few more twists and turns, but it was enough to drag Strange across the finish line and give Big Luther a second place finish.
The Runoff was a nightmare for Luther Strange and McConnell. Yes, it was true that Moore had problems. But what McConnell and his team never understood was that by injecting themselves in such a ham-fisted way, they had made Mitch McConnell the issue, not Roy Moore.
McConnell’s meddling wasn’t just bad for Luther Strange, it was bad for Mitch McConnell. By jumping into the race in Alabama, McConnell had made himself the Nancy Pelosi of the Alabama primary and gave anti-establishment candidates a blueprint for how to defeat him in 2018.
Mitch McConnell did not hurt Roy Moore. He nominated Moore.
Once Mo Brooks endorsed Moore, the runoff went from what should have been a conversation about Roy Moore vs. Luther Strange to a simple, binary choice for voters: “Do you really want to reward McConnell with his millions of K Street cash, or do you want to send him a message to stop messing around in our state?”
Once the race was framed that way, the runoff was over. Luther never recovered.
While it’s true that nobody other than Roy Moore’s most hardcore supporters were excited about supporting him in the primary, it’s also true that voters wanted to send DC a message.
Read the entire Gehrke article for his critique/dissection of The Case for Establishment Intervention in Primaries
. . .
The GOP Senate majority is now in peril in 2018.
There are many lessons for Republicans heading into 2018, but a key one for establishment Republicans is that voters do not want to be dictated to by Washington, DC.
The desire to avoid bad candidates is an understandable goal. It’s shared by every wing of the GOP. But because of the toxicity of the GOP establishment brand today, meddling in primaries actually makes it more likely, not less likely that bad candidates will win primaries in the future. Instead of primaries being about the candidates and their flaws, going forward, they will be about Mitch McConnell and K Street as long as he publicly interferes.
The question now is: will McConnell learn this lesson? How many more seats do we have to lose?
Read the entire Gehrke article for his critique/dissection of The Case for Establishment Intervention in Primaries. Graphic not in original
