Special Election Recap: Alabama Shakes (Up the Senate)

Here are a few things we learned from the dramatic victory of Doug Jones over Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate special election last night:

1. Special election results are often over-interpreted as political harbingers, and this particular election would no doubt have turned out much differently if Republicans hadn't nominated Roy Moore. At the same time, it's fair to say that the outcome in Alabama constitutes one more data point indicating a major shift in the national partisan climate over the past year—when combined with the New Jersey and Virginia elections in November, the results of other scattered special elections elsewhere, and the increasingly pro-Democratic trend in the generic ballot and distribution of party identification in the population.

2. Moore really was one of the all-time worst candidates for major political office in a competitive race. Even before the sexual predation and assault accusations surfaced last month, he had almost lost an election for state supreme court in 2012 and was running ahead of Doug Jones by only about 10 points in a state Trump had won by 28 the year before. Moore raised very little money and barely campaigned in public, leaving the state entirely over the final weekend before the election. (He also demonstrated very little understanding of major issues that he would be voting on as a senator.)

3. Whether your post-election analysis of choice emphasizes the successful Democratic mobilization of the African-American vote on Jones's behalf or the defection from Moore of traditionally Republican well-to-do suburban whites, both developments represent major political stories (and both were critical to Jones's chances of victory in a normally safe Republican state). Moore was the kind of figure who not only provoked energetic opposition from the Democratic base but also failed to inspire unity (and similarly enthusiastic turnout rates) among the members of his own party. The biggest danger for national Republicans heading into 2018 is that Donald Trump shares these attributes as well.

4. It's hard to beat somebody with nobody in politics, and Democrats have nominated a lot of nobodies for office in red states lately. (The last time that this particular seat was up for election in 2014, in fact, the Democratic candidate was literally nobody.) The party was very fortunate to have a viable candidate on hand in Jones (who needed to jump in the race before knowing that Moore would wind up being the Republican nominee), demonstrating the importance of recruiting high-quality candidates even when most voters can be predicted to simply vote the party line. The pro-Democratic drift of well-educated, prosperous suburbanites is particularly key for Democratic chances in future elections, from Congress all the way down to the state and local level. Well-educated, prosperous people tend to be strong potential candidates for political office, and the suburbs tend to be electorally pivotal in most parts of the country. Democratic gains in the Virginia legislature last month, for example, mostly occurred in suburban districts that were already shifting Democratic in the presidential vote but where veteran Republican incumbent legislators were previously unused to facing serious challengers; a groundswell of attractive Democratic candidates is necessary for the party to take full advantage of the favorable national environment that it is likely to have in 2018.

5. The flipping of the Alabama seat will have only minor implications for the operation of the Senate over the next year; assuming that Republicans manage to push their tax reform bill through Congress before Jones is seated, any other legislative action will require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. But the prospect of a Democratic majority in the Senate after the 2018 election is now quite realistic, requiring a net gain of two seats (with Nevada and Arizona the most obvious targets) rather than the previous three. Jones's victory also increases the odds of a 50-50 Senate in 2019–2020 with Susan Collins of Maine serving as the pivotal vote—not as dramatic a shift as an outright Democratic majority would be, but still a very real complication for the Trump administration's legislative goals and executive/judicial appointment objectives heading into the 2020 election.

6. For this reason, it's pretty silly to argue that Republicans are better off with Moore losing the election. True, a Senator Moore would have been an extremely awkward presence in the Capitol, and dilemmas about how to handle the accusations against him would have created a lot of headaches for Moore's fellow Republican senators. But every seat is incalculably precious in our current partisan environment, and Mitch McConnell would presumably rather be a majority leader with Moore sniping at him from the back benches than risk losing control of the chamber entirely.

7. There's a lot of anger being directed against Steve Bannon by Washington Republicans today for supposedly saddling the party with Moore, and for vowing to help other similarly-styled candidates win Republican primaries next year. Not only does this line of argument exaggerate Bannon's personal influence over an Alabama primary election that Moore—already a well-known figure in the state—won by nearly 10 points, but it also ignores the fact that Republicans have been regularly nominating controversial if not toxic candidates for high office since the beginning of the Obama administration. The bigger problem, of which Bannon's rise is more symptom than cause, is that an ideologically-oriented party is particularly susceptible to popular appeals based on doctrinal purity and punch-the-left confrontationalism over other attributes such as electability, policy command, and general suitability for office. It's probably true that the conservative media bears a lot of responsibility for this trend, but blaming Bannon or Breitbart alone is overly simplistic—and convenient. After all, Roy Moore was a popular conservative hero back when Steve Bannon was still a Hollywood movie producer.

Today at the Washington Post: Roy Moore and the GOP

I have a new post up today on the Washington Post's Monkey Cage blog, kicking off the big election day in Alabama with an analysis of what Roy Moore's campaign can tell us about the distribution of power within the Republican Party.

What Matters for Moore Is the View from Alabama, Not Washington

The accelerating litany of serious accusations against U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama has prompted incumbent Republican senators to denounce and distance themselves from their party's embattled nominee over the past few days. Reactions within the chamber that Moore seeks to join next month have been uniformly harsh, ranging from the withdrawal of previous endorsements to calls for Moore to be immediately expelled from the Senate if he were to win the December 12 election.

Reporters are busy this week chasing down reluctant Republicans in Capitol hallways to put them on record about the Moore situation, revealing what appears to be a rough consensus that (a) Moore should drop out of the race and (b) a more suitable Republican candidate should mount a write-in campaign regardless of whether he does drop out.

This is all perfectly newsworthy, but not likely to matter too much in terms of what happens from here. Moore has no particular reason to listen to what Washington Republicans say. If he thought that he couldn't win despite their opposition, he might consider withdrawing to avoid a humiliating defeat—but why would he think that? After all, Moore defeated the appointed incumbent, Luther Strange, by nine points in the Republican primary runoff even though Strange enjoyed the backing of virtually all of the party's national elected leadership.

Of course, the most powerful Republican in Washington has yet to weigh in; a presidential denouncement would be more damaging to Moore than criticisms from the likes of Jeff Flake and Susan Collins. Even so, Trump inserting himself into the race seems like a necessary but hardly sufficient prerequisite for a Moore withdrawal or successful end-around of the official Republican nominee via write-in balloting.

And the president seems unlikely to devote himself to pushing Moore out once he returns to the White House from his trip overseas. Trump felt burned by the primary, when he campaigned for Strange only to see Alabama Republicans choose Moore instead, and will not be enthusiastic about taking on the risk of exhibiting political weakness a second time in the same election.  Plus, the specific nature of the accusations against Moore makes the whole issue a treacherous one for Trump to raise given his own personal record. He's in a poor position to adopt the this-is-not-what-the-Republican-Party-stands-for argument that George H. W. Bush made when disavowing David Duke's 1990 campaign against Louisiana senator Bennett Johnston, the closest parallel to the current situation in modern Senate history.

It's only natural for a press corps based in Washington to adopt a Washington-centric view of the race. But Alabama residents are more likely to be influenced by other Alabama residents. If Moore drops out (an unlikely development), if a write-in campaign gains traction, or if a critical mass of Republican voters skips the election or defects to Democratic nominee Doug Jones, it will reflect the political environment in Alabama and the behavior of party leaders, elected officials, and media outlets at the state level. And so far, the Moore revelations have been met with much less shock and outrage in the places where this election will actually be decided than in the Potomac-adjacent environs where Republican federal officeholders preside with waning influence over the untidy affairs of their party.

Alabama Special Election Recap: A Bad Day for Republican Governance

Donald Trump interrupted his Friday campaign speech on behalf of Alabama senator Luther Strange to engage in a digression about the decline of football in general and the protests of Colin Kaepernick in particular, following up with a barrage of tweets on the subject over the following days that also rescinded a White House invitation to the NBA champion Golden State Warriors. As with many such developments, the initial news media response (to briefly paraphrase: "?!?!?!?") soon evolved into a discussion of whether or not Trump's attacks amounted to smart politics. Some observers judged the president's actions a mistake, while others argued that Trump's behavior reflected an effective strategy of harnessing racial tension and opposition to social change within the American public. "This kind of thing," wrote Rich Lowry of National Review, "is why he's president."

Because much of our punditry views politics primarily through an electoral frame, "smart politics" is generally defined as an action that helps one party win popular support at the expense of the other. It's quite possible that a majority of the voting population sides with Trump on the Kaepernick issue, especially if Trump's preferred interpretation of the protests—that players who demonstrate during the pregame national anthem performance are "disrespecting" the flag, the troops, and the nation—wins broad acceptance.

But politics is about more than winning elections, and the Republican Party's current problems have little to do with the party's relative strength compared to the Democrats. Today brought three significant developments in the world of Republican politics, all carrying relatively minimal implications for electoral competition between the parties—but with much more serious (negative) consequences for the GOP's deteriorating capacity to govern.

The first development was the Senate Republican conference's public acknowledgement that the Graham-Cassidy health care reform bill lacks sufficient support to win a vote on the floor. From a purely electoral calculation, congressional Republicans are probably better off abandoning their "repeal and replace" efforts than enacting a law that would result in millions of Americans losing health insurance coverage beginning in the 2018 election year. But the inability to pass legislation through Congress addressing the party's top domestic priority is not only a source of embarrassment for Republican leaders and exasperation for Republican activists, but also represents a significant sunk cost of time and energy over the past nine months that could have been devoted instead to taxes, infrastructure, or other more promising matters.

The second big news item of the day was Senator Bob Corker's announcement that he would not seek a third term in 2018. Corker's retirement does little to change the electoral math—Tennessee is decidedly inhospitable territory for Democratic candidates even without a popular incumbent on the ballot—but removes a capable, pragmatic, leadership-friendly senator from a Republican conference in need of legislative heft.

Third, former state supreme court justice Roy Moore easily defeated Strange, the appointed incumbent, in the Alabama Republican Senate primary. Thanks to Alabama's deep red partisan alignment, Moore is unlikely to jeopardize the Republican Party's hold on the seat in the December general election. But his future arrival in the Senate will create its own set of difficulties for the GOP. Moore ran as an open opponent of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, and his propensity for attention-getting stunts and remarks is likely to put his fellow Republican senators in an awkward position on a regular basis. Moore's demonstrated level of policy command also suggests that he will not turn out to be a legislative workhorse in Washington.

Moore's triumph over Strange will also further damage the already-faltering relationship between Trump and McConnell. Trump will be predictably furious at Strange's defeat after he endorsed, and campaigned for, the senator in part at McConnell's urging, and will seek to shift blame for this embarrassment onto a Senate leader whom he already holds responsible for failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act. An intensifying civil war within the Republican Party between its two most powerful leaders, or between "insider" and "outsider" factions of conservatives, bodes ill for the chances of productive, functional governance over the next 16 months.

Perhaps a public appeal increasingly centered on themes of cultural and nationalist nostalgia simultaneously helps a party win elections and renders it inherently ill-equipped for the process of governing. At the least, the results tonight confirm that the potency of popular rebellion from the right remains alive and well within the Republican Party in the post-2016 era. As I remarked to Jeff Stein of Vox, "You might have thought that a Trump presidency and having Republicans control Congress would relieve that pressure valve—that with Hillary and Obama off the scene, some of that anti-establishment, anti-Republican leadership sentiment would dissipate. What we're seeing in Alabama is that that's not the case." The next question is to what extent Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, throws his own lot in with the rebels.