Over at The Corner, the staff of the National Review seems unanimous in seeing Roy Moore’s defeat as an irresistible opportunity to say nasty and disrespectful things about Steve Bannon:
David French: Where do we go from here? The answers are obvious. Nominate conservatives with integrity. Retake the seat. Reject the vicious, malicious politics of men like Steve Bannon.
Jim Geraghty: There is no reason for any Republican to listen to Steve Bannon on any candidate selection ever again.
Kevin Williamson: So what have Steve Bannon and the rest of the half-bright moneyed dilettantes—and their talk-radio and cable-news cheerleaders—accomplished? …They didn’t even get Alabama!
Jonah Goldberg: The difference is that McConnell wanted nothing to do with Roy Moore for all the obvious reasons and Steve Bannon wanted to take credit for him! He wanted to take credit for Moore when it was clear Moore was a bigot, buffoon, and charlatan, and he wanted to take credit for Moore after Moore was credibly accused of being a child molester and jailbait fetishist. Bannon has an almost unblemished record of picking disastrous candidates on the theory that he knows what he’s doing. That theory is wrong.
Michael Brendan Dougherty: My own impressions are more modest. Alabama Republicans spared their party the shame of electing this creep to Congress. In backing Moore, Steve Bannon made a very reasonable bet—most of us expected Moore to win even after the revelations—but he lost this one.
Theodore Kupfer: [Bannon’s] mission is to find ridiculous candidates and convince voters they are legitimate; for years he has used his highly-trafficked site in an effort to do just that. Yet tonight, his ideal candidate lost a statewide election in Alabama. We already knew that a party made in Bannon’s image would be repulsive. Tonight we learned it is not even politically viable.
Fred Bauer: Supporting someone just because they inspire “librul tears” can be a counterproductive electoral strategy. It also might not be the best political strategy. The fact that someone is shocking doesn’t mean he can draft legislation, persuade the body politic, or forge a legislative coalition. And it certainly doesn’t mean he can win elections.
In general, these folks seem relieved that Roy Moore didn’t win, even if they’re unwilling to say one nice thing about Doug Jones. David French was willing to concede that Jones ran “a smart race,” but the rest of these pundits barely mentioned him, if at all. Their focus is one hundred percent on making sure that Bannon’s reputation takes a hit for getting involved in the race.
Of course, they would have also denied him any credit if Moore had retained the seat by pointing out that Bannon was late to the party and doesn’t have any juice in Alabama. The goal here isn’t to do any real autopsy of what went wrong in the special election. The goal is to get the upper hand in a civil war within the Republican Party. They don’t want Bannon to cannibalize the GOP’s congressional majority with a bunch of lunatics that praise Vladimir Putin and are a little too brazen about their white supremacy and hatred of gay people.
The only honest analysis they have actually contradicts their main argument. They feel like the Senate leadership erred by going after Rep. Mo Brooks in the primary and thereby lost the one candidate who could have beaten Moore in a two-man runoff. In other words, the people who are actually to blame for losing the Alabama seat are the people they’re defending and supporting, and the people Bannon is seeking to expel and replace.
None of them bothered to mention Trump, either, who certainly has more influence than Bannon. One after another, they submitted their “hot takes” on the election, and one after the other they completely failed to make any assessment of the president’s endorsements, his influence, or the repercussions for him now that he’s picked the wrong horse twice.
Attacking Bannon is also a way for them to avoid attacking Trump.
Moore lost because his voters didn’t turn out.
So the ONLY question is, would they have turned out for a different Republican?
If the answer to that question is “no”, then something has changed; we have put the first crack in the wall, and we have something to build upon. Virginia implies that this is the case.
If the answer is “yes”, then nothing (in terms of the larger picture) has changed, and we are still (as we must) banging on a brick wall with no cracks or chinks in it yet.
As I and many others have noted before, VA and AL aren’t really comparable. VA is really two states: urban/suburban and rural. Were it not for VA’s partisan gerrymandering, the legislative assembly would be mostly Democratic by now.
AL, by contrast, has deep and widespread voter suppression and has none of the characteristics of the New South. It is the deepest, red Dixie. The fact that Doug Jones won, however, is a testament to a slowly emerging generational change but I think the state is still very far away from even NC never mind VA.
According to the WaPo exit poll analysis Jones did best(by far) in cities with greater than 50,000 population.
Alabama is SO red that a part of his loss is definitely that Moore is uniquely bad. Another part is that Trump is a drag (favorability +1 in Alabama lol). Related to Trump’s unfavorability is the Republican party’s unfavorability (generic ballot is running about +10 D).
So yeah, a generic R almost definitely beats Jones. But that shouldn’t comfort Republicans or discourage Democrats. There’s both a real wave building and a powerful movement among R primary voters to select shitty nutjobs like Moore. And the extra seat gives Dems a real chance to retake both houses, which seemed very unlikely on election night 2016.
About 48-1/2% of Alabama voters last night thought that (1) it was a good idea to vote for the reanimated corpse of John C. Calhoun, and (2) Leviticus is the legal code of the United States of America. It’s sort of hard to be either complacent or hopeful about such circumstances.
And 3/4 of white males and almost that percentage of white females.
Much work remains to be done.
3/4 of evangelical females voted for Moore, but 3/4 of non-evangelical females voted for Jones. So the problem seems to be evangelicals.
Much work remains to be done?
Short of the natural run of mortality, what can be done about these people? They are obviously not going to change their minds, and they have a vote. They will be with us…admittedly in steadily decreasing numbers…for at least two more generations.
The only “work” that will help is revamping the Democratic Party, its national committee and its national message to aim at the middle, working and poverty-stricken classes of this country of all societal groups. Until then? We will have 40% or more of all eligible voters sitting out elections. Why? Because these non-voters…not all of them, not the lazy, stupid, strung-out fools but the more intelligent group within that segment (60%? 70%? More?)…do not believe the lies of either party and have pretty much given up on the corporate-captive media as well.
With damned good reason, as far as I am concerned.
These peple understand that a vote for either party is a vote for continued corporatist rule. As long as both parties continue to put up ciphers like their usual candidates…public position/private position/legislative voting position ciphers…it will only be the truly outrageously bad candidates who will be “unexpectedly” voted into office. And…as the Trump example so plainly illustrates…not even all of the bad ones will lose. Given a choice between another public/private/corporatist candidate with very little real political charisma or campaigning skill and a truly awful candidate who is at the very least entertainingly outrageous, guess what?
Trumpy wins again.
AG
Well, think this election shows that abortion and taxes are not the only issues for registered GOP in the south. Also, the issue of Civil War monuments what happened to that? Maybe abortion,taxes, and CW monuments are only the issues of DC GOP and not America.
Be careful. You are assigning a semantic to the passive act of not voting. Tempting as it is to reason back from effect to intention, I cannot think that it is logically sound. We’re never going to know exactly why the missing Moore voters sat home. Guesswork and hunches are not our friends, even when nothing else is available.
I don’t think that your last point necessarily follows. We obviously can’t tell for certain what the results would have been in a race with a less flawed Republican candidate. Even if Jones would have lost such a matchup, gains could still have been made.
Flawed logic. You are oversimplifying, and missing real change.
Moore lost for all the wrong reasons.
One thing is almost absolutely certain:
Had the allegation of pedophilia not come out, he most likely would have won.
So, sure, a decent Democratic eeking out a victory over a right-wing theocratic authoritarian is a win, but let’s not go congratulating less than a majority of Alabama voters as somehow turning some corner in being bigoted scumbuckets.
Add up the Moore votes and write-ins, and it’s also clear that Doug Jones is to Alabama what Donald Trump is to the US: an electoral accident.
“CONSERVATISM CANNOT FAIL, IT CAN ONLY BE FAILED”
It goes without saying that this zombie lie will live forever within their world.
Stop right there. These water carriers for the modern GOP have no honest analysis. None.
In that regard, they’re no different from Our Progressive Betters. They’re just spinning it from the right instead of the self-professed left.
Did any of these political pundits come even close to seeing a plausible win for Jones? That appears to be a big fat NO. Missing that (and the evidence for it was available), their Wednesday morning, armchair hypothecating is worthless. (And no, your Putin hobby horse had nothing to do with it either.)
At the end of the day, all general elections are between two candidates and their respective bases and those that don’t strictly identify with either party at a particular point in time. With an overwhelming party affiliation advantage, Moore is too well-known and too awful to make it over the finish line against an opponent that was able to energize his base and not offend and energize Republicans that couldn’t hold their noses long enough to show up and vote for Moore.
Jones and his team clearly know more about AL GOP voters than Trump, Bannon, and the armchair pundits.
Jones now has less than three years before he has to run again. Competing variables: incumbent Senators are favored in AL (the appointed Strange came very close to winning it all in the primary), Republicans have a +20 margin in AL, and 2020 is a presidential election year. A daunting task remains ahead for Jones in 2020 but he knows that and the tools he’ll need to pull it off.
the reference to Putin in this case is lifted from one of the essays I cited. It’s his hobby-horse here, not mine.
In fact quite a few national pundits had the race as up in the air.
NYT’s upshot. 538.
We both know you won’t, but you should really read outside of your bubble. It would spare you crowing about prediction a coin flip correctly as if it was an impressive feat.
Jones did well with independents, minorities and young people.
And with non-evangelical females.
Perhaps my NR betters will forgive me, but I doubt Judge Jailbait needed American Nazi Bannon to tell him to run for the Littlest Confederate’s seat. He was dying to run and nothing was going to stop him. So one has to wonder how crucial Bannon was to anything.
The problem for Team NR is that, as a result of ever-increasing doses of (stronger and stronger) “conservative” sewage, the plurality of Repub voters are now irredeemable crackpots, wedded to violence, white supremacy, hatred and spite as the epitome of public policy. The hands of the NR pundits are plenty bloody in this effort, so bravo Team NR! Your endless “theoretical” shit about the illegitimacy of the Post-Civil War amendments, and kind words about the history of slavery, and braindead climate denial and “natural law” trumping legislative enactments etc, etc, is almost precisely the rancid shit Judge Jailbait vomited out to the rabid Repub mob, so it’s a little ungracious to call him somehow beyond the NR pale.
And no scolding whatever for the AL Repub primary voter? Where’s conservatism’s hallowed “personal responsibility” here? The Frankenstein monster the “conservative” movement created can’t conduct himself too well at the table? Too bad.
As for the effects of the imagined Repub civil war, I’d like to start seeing it in the voting behavior of our elected Repub majorities, who seem to be able to get all hands on deck for the social engineering tax cut bill about to be crammed through, and every rightwing Federalist Society crackpot put forward for a judgeship, and cover for every administrative law rollback Trumper undertakes. Not to mention the strengthening of one line of defense after another on RussiaGate. Seems like a pretty cold civil war.
According to the WaPo demographic analysis of their exit poll, 90% of white born again Christians went for Moore. Don’t these people even read the Gospels?
Many people who call themselves Evangelicals worship the Bible. They make an idol out of it, which is, of course, against the teachings of Christianity.
In fairness, I can say most of them “read” it, but really this is more a form of recitation – almost a chant. In most Evangelical mega-churches, there’s no serious study of the cultural and historical contexts which informed the development of the biblical canon.
Without this deep, academic level of understanding, congregations are easily influenced by one slick-talking preacher/politician after another.
There are serious scholars on the traditionalist end of the spectrum who are calling out the moral hypocrisy. Unfortunately, there are not enough of them.
However teenagers are great detectors of adult hypocrisy and bullshit. There is both statistical and anecdotal evidence that indicates that a large swath of young evangelicals are a) not interested in conservative politics, b) don’t care about gay marriage or most other social issues, with abortion being the notable exception, and c) are so tired of the hypocrisy and bullshit that they’re leaving organized religion entirely.
Tick, tick, tick. That’s the sound of the generational time bomb that’s going to blow apart the Religious Right. What will the Evangelical movement look like after the Baby Boomers are dead? Hard to say, but it will be a completely different animal. And the ripple effects of that will shake the Republican Party.
No.
They focus on the Old Testament, and pray to Mammon, all dressed up as Jesus.
On Moore, Trump waffled trying to dodge his own sexual assault issues.
When the Alabama GOP doubled down, Trump joined them and even held a rally in Pensecola (just over the tainted line) pumping up Moore.
Are people going to renew their call for Trump’s sexual assaults to be investigated?
But is was cute to see Jonah Goldberg whipping up on Bannon for “liberal fascism”.
What bothers me about all this (both from TNR and here) is that everyone’s focusing on last night’s vote — and its demographic breakdown — picking through the tea leaves analyzing what it all means about the GOP, as if the whole thing began and ended last night; as if candidate Moore just dropped from the sky and isn’t a representation of what the GOP is about and whom it represents.
I’m not just talking about the primary process (where, in the analysis I’m complaining about, the rôle of endorsements from outside the state may be exaggerated, too): I mean that Alabama voters didn’t just wake up yesterday and say, “Oh, look — Roy Moore; I will/won’t vote for him” as if the whole process and culture up to that point was some kind of mysterious phenomenon happening elsewhere that they have nothing to do with.
I mean, I tend to disregard local city politics (meaning, I pay attention to Washington and the world more than the complexities of New York City governance), but when a particular set of mayoral candidates are placed before me, I don’t pretend I’m not involved; that the choice doesn’t represent living, breathing factions of New Yorkers whose ideas and beliefs are representative of my city. It’s the same in Alabama — analysts who argue that Moore “doesn’t represent” the current GOP or Alabama Republicans, since he lost, are ignoring how he got to the ticket to begin with. It isn’t all star chambers and endorsements; it’s voters, and the culture of the
party, the state and the moment.
And people seem to be ignoring:
I.E. I wouldn’t extrapolate that the GOP has reached some turning point, or that Republican voters aren’t, en masse, still pig people who are all but lost.
Or: how Luther Strange would have wiped the fucking floor with Doug Jones.
Moore lost for all the wrong reasons. But, a victory is a victory is a victory. So, it’s ok to take a breath. For now.